Dante was pulled over again this week. He was driving our new Tesla, a car we received at the end of July, shipped to us from out of state. We’ve been waiting for the plates to be delivered, as I confirmed with the shipping company when they told us they would take time. Yet, despite explaining this, Dante was pulled over for no reason other than the officer wanting to “ensure the vehicle wasn’t stolen.”

While I’m writing this, I’m reminded of why we had to buy a new vehicle in the first place. Deep sigh. At the very beginning of the summer, Dante was hit by a driver who ran a red light. The impact was bad, but what hurt more was what happened after. The other driver lied and said he didn’t hit our vehicle. When we tried to get the police report, I called around until I finally got ahold of an investigator. But as soon as I told him where the accident had occurred, he hung up on me. It turns out the man who hit Dante is a pilot and a member of the Air Force.

What haunts me most is that I was on the phone with Dante immediately after the accident. He told me only one person passing by stopped to ask if he was okay, but everyone in the area ran to the other driver—the man who had hit him. The inequality of concern, of care, was so blatant and so painful.

These experiences don’t happen in a vacuum. They are part of a larger pattern, one that reminds us that while some people are afforded the benefit of the doubt, others—especially Black men like Dante—are automatically assumed to be in the wrong. Whether it’s being pulled over because an officer “suspects” the car is stolen or being denied justice after a car accident, the underlying issue is the same: the devaluation of Black lives.

This constant surveillance, this need to “prove” ourselves in situations where white people wouldn’t even be questioned, is exhausting. It’s as if freedom is conditional, always subject to suspicion. And it reminds me of something much deeper—something that has roots in the very foundation of this country.

When the slaves were freed after the Civil War, white society wasn’t ready to let go of its hold on Black bodies. The system may have changed in name, but the goals remained the same: to keep Black people subjugated and controlled. It’s why shortly after Emancipation, laws were passed that criminalized the most minor offenses, things white people wouldn’t be arrested for. These laws, known as Black Codes, made it easy to arrest newly freed slaves for things like vagrancy, loitering, or even not having proof of employment.

Once arrested, these individuals were sent to prison, and just like that, the system found a new way to send Black people back to the plantations. This time, instead of being called slaves, they were called convicts, but the result was the same. They were forced to work for free or minimal wages, often on the very same plantations they had just been freed from.

The 13th Amendment may have abolished slavery, but it left a loophole: slavery was still legal as punishment for a crime. This loophole became the foundation for what we now call the prison-industrial complex. After Emancipation, prisons became a way to re-enslave Black people, and it’s a system that continues to target Black and brown communities today.

When Dante gets pulled over for a minor issue that white drivers wouldn’t even be questioned for, it’s part of this same legacy. The system wasn’t designed to protect him—it was designed to criminalize him. It’s the same logic that fueled the Black Codes: create reasons to arrest Black people, imprison them, and make them work. This isn’t about public safety; it’s about maintaining control.

The Modern-Day Plantation

We see it in mass incarceration today. Black men are incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than white men, often for minor offenses or crimes that are overlooked when committed by their white counterparts. Once inside, they become part of a prison system that forces them to work for little to no pay, echoing the days of slavery.

Prisons today are the new plantations. They extract labor from Black bodies, disenfranchise Black men and women, and keep communities trapped in a cycle of poverty and criminalization. The system is working exactly as it was designed to.

The Fight for True Freedom

We need to be honest about what’s happening. Dante isn’t just being pulled over because of a broken taillight or a routine stop. He’s being targeted because of the color of his skin, because the system still views him—and all Black men—as a threat. It’s the same system that saw freed slaves as a threat to the social order, a system that couldn’t let go of its desire to control Black lives.

To truly be free, we need to dismantle this system. It’s not enough to reform it, because it was built to oppress from the very beginning. We need to rethink policing, abolish the prison-industrial complex, and build a society where Black people are not criminalized for existing.

Until then, every time Dante gets profiled, we are reminded that the legacy of slavery is still very much alive, and we cannot stop fighting until we are truly free.