Chicago rapper, activist, and Harvard-educated debater Vic Mensa sat down with The Conscious Lee for one of the most intellectually rigorous reparations conversations in this entire series. The central argument is one line that should stop your breath: “Reparations cannot be a serious conversation while slavery is still happening — because under the 13th Amendment, it is still absolutely legal.” This is not metaphor. This is constitutional law.
Second: the buried history of Imperial Sugar in Sugar Land, Texas — where 95 Black bodies were unearthed in 2018, evidence of a convict leasing operation that ran from 1878 to 1911 on a company that sold for $203 million in 2012. Together, these pieces answer every standard objection to reparations with receipts.
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The reparations ledger is clear — every group except Africans has been paid. Confederate slave owners were paid reparations for their “lost property” in 1862. Francophone West Africa still pays France through the CFA franc, their money held in French banks. Israel received Holocaust reparations. Japanese Americans received internment reparations. The $14 trillion commonly cited as owed to Black Americans is just for unpaid labor — before you add missed opportunity and opportunity cost. The refusal to put Africans on that ledger “exposes the firm, deeply held belief sitting at the bottom of this: that the African is an inferior human being who doesn’t deserve the same treatment.” — Derrick Bell’s permanence of racism in plain sight.
In the words of The Conscious Lee:
They’re out here floating reparations for January 6th — a “slush fund” they’re rebranding as anti-weaponization money — while the commonly cited figure for what’s owed to Black Americans is around $14 trillion, and that’s just for unpaid labor, before you even add missed opportunity and opportunity cost. Then go down the list of who has actually received reparations. Confederate slave owners got reparations for their lost “property.” Francophone West Africa is still effectively paying France through the CFA franc, their money held in French banks. Israel received reparations after the Holocaust. Japanese Americans received reparations after the internment camps. Everybody on the ledger — except the African. And that exposes the firm, deeply held belief sitting at the bottom of this: that the African is an inferior human being who doesn’t deserve the same treatment. That’s the permanence of racism Derrick Bell tried to warn us about.
Reparations cannot be a serious conversation while slavery is still happening, because under the 13th Amendment it is still absolutely legal. Vic’s brother just came home after 29 years for a murder he didn’t commit — someone else did it — and the whole time he was producing capital for the prison. In Mississippi you can substantiate billions of dollars off prison labor and the men aren’t getting paid a thing. In Texas TDCJ you don’t get paid at all. You get three hots and a cot. That’s straight-up slavery.
Watch how the social construct of time bends: an undocumented person is disqualified from manhood in America for going against the law, while a man with 34 felony convictions is the President of the United States. If your register comes up $100 short, that’s an honest mistake. If you take $100 out the till, you’re going to jail. Same dollar. Different bodies. Different verdicts. That’s the whole game.
— The Conscious Lee
The Sugar Land 95: Forensic Evidence of What That Clause Produced
In April 2018, a backhoe in Sugar Land, Texas struck something it wasn’t supposed to hit. By the time archaeologists finished, they had counted 95 bodies — all African American, ages 14 to 70, buried in pine boxes between 1878 and 1911 on what had been the Imperial Sugar plantation. A Black man named Reginald Moore had been warning Texas authorities for nineteen years those graves were there. They ignored him. They barred him from the site when the bones came up. He passed in 2020 without seeing justice.
Imperial Sugar was founded in 1843 — the oldest continuously operating business in Texas. In 1878, Confederate veterans Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ambrose Ellis signed a contract with the State of Texas to lease the entire state prison population to their sugar plantation. The operation became known as “the Hell Hole of the Brazos.” Annual mortality rate: 3%. The Sugar Land 95 are those casualties.
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The plantation never ended — it got institutionalized. Imperial Sugar sold the 5,200-acre farm to the State of Texas in 1914. Texas continued growing sugar on the same land using prison labor. The Central Unit prison farm operated on that site until 2011. The Houston Museum of Natural Science Sugar Land now sits inside the main unit of that former prison.
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The brand was sold for $203 million in 2012, then again in 2022. Imperial Sugar was acquired by Louis Dreyfus Commodities for $203 million in 2012 and sold again to U.S. Sugar Corporation in 2022 — one of the largest sugarcane producers in America with over 180,000 acres of Florida farmland and ~$1.25 billion in annual revenue. Each sale included a premium for the company’s “oldest business in Texas” lineage. That lineage was purchased by convict labor. The brand equity is built on 95 bodies and every body not yet found