The warm humid breeze of rural Oklahoma reminds me of the shock to my body two months ago when I joined the walk in northwestern Alabama, near Florence. Skin covered in moisture, either exuding from inside as sweat during the day or condensing as dew at night. My body is now fairly adapted to this environment, or at least I have habitually gotten used to it and it no longer attracts my attention.

Soon after arriving in Alabama, as we fingerpadded around Google Maps on a phone for the next night’s campsite, we identified a green space that seemed promising: the Cane Creek public boat launch on the Tennessee River. Ben and Chauncey arrived there before I did and were waiting at the dock. I brought over chips and salsa, and swam out to rescue a floating piece of garbage.

As Ben and I cooked dinner out of the trunk of the car, Chauncey got caught up talking to someone — a local, an older White guy. This was not uncommon, as we stick out as travelers, and people, especially in rural places, frequently approach us to see what we’re up to. We love it, as we’re here to connect with locals on their own terms.

When Chauncey made it back to us, he recounted that the man had inquired as to why Black fathers are not around to raise their kids. Chauncey had replied that his father was around, the importance of avoiding blanket assumptions, and that it wasn’t a matter of Blackness as such so much as the social and economic circumstances in which this phenomenon predominates: typically poor communities that are overpoliced, where young men wind up in prison. Before long, Chauncey’s interlocutor drove across the lot to engage all three of us, and a long and vulnerable conversation ensued.

Initially, he asked me and Ben if our “Black friend” had told us about him, and if we think he’s racist. This human had lived in rural Alabama most of his life, but his self-conception struck me as being influenced by the national culture war dynamic: he had already pre-judged himself on our behalf, based on the way that southern folks are typically (mis)characterized by liberal elites in the media, on the internet, and casually in conversation as backwards racists. In a strange way, it felt as though he sought an affirmation from us — especially Chauncey — that he was racist. Chauncey replied that he didn’t have any reason to think that this man was racist, and that he didn’t even think that people could be racist, definitionally. People can hold racist views or commit racist acts, but as individuals, we each have the capacity to change or challenge these within ourselves. This is not to discount the real ways in which past racist decisions continue to affect people’s lives and options due to the inertia caused by legal structures that defend property ownership — it is merely to draw the distinction between individual and systemic issues.

When we began discussing the history of enslavement in the United States, and the ways in which racial prejudice are woven into our social fabric, the differences in our views became starker. His counterpoint to the blight of slavery was that “masters treated their slaves well, better than factory workers were treated.” He himself was a factory worker for most of his life, and he worked alongside poor Black folks and poor White folks, all in the same boat of low-wage labor, and he didn’t fully understand the justification for highlighting Black Lives as Mattering, when in his experience, it was all the poor people working the machinery who were oppressed. There is an element of truth to his point: wage-labor is a form of enslavement, poor people coerced to work to meet the bare necessities of existence. There is also the historical hypocrisy of northern factory owners who made massive profits off of the labor of their workers, who were transforming the raw materials grown in the south into consumer products. Yet, there is an essential difference, which Chauncey raised: if an enslaved person didn’t want to work at a job any more, they could be beaten or murdered by their master, who owned them as property, whereas a factory owner owns only your labor-power (though, in many ways, this is hardly offered “freely” due to the coercive deterrent of houselessness).

Through this prolonged, and at times tense, conversation, we were able to understand each other better. A point of solidarity became clear to me: through both experiences of oppression (racial discrimination and the legacy of chattel slavery, and exploitative factory wage-labor), each side can see itself in the other, and can agree squarely that both forms of exploitation should be opposed. Today in the United States, low-wage exploitation continues for fast food workers and Amazon delivery people — many of whom have been unable to escape intergenerational poverty that is the legacy of enslavement, but all of whom suffer from the effective eradication of “social mobility” in recent decades. But the main point here is that in this struggle, we have more in common than in difference, and when we remain divided, it only serves the interests those in charge.

We parted ways amicably with this new friend, after he donated us $20, and the three of us settled into the woods by the river to shoot our short film. In many ways, the film explores enslavement as its central concept, seeking to explore the phenomenon in broader and more ambiguous terms. You can watch it for yourself and see what you think.

In what ways, beyond literal chattel slavery, is each of us still enslaved? By whom, or what?