For Generations, Black People In This Country Were Paid In Wine

winery
Via Wikimedia Commons
Briona Lamback
November 29, 2022

While Jim Crow inflicted pain on Black Americans, the apartheid regime tortured Black South Africans. Formerly enslaved people essentially worked as sharecroppers, doing back-breaking farm work for whites.

They were getting paid in wine. The Dop System operated for centuries, legally allowing vineyard owners to pay portions of agricultural workers' salaries in wine. This system lead to heavy alcohol consumption and abuse among workers, and many were  poisoned after consuming wine contaminated with pesticides.

Used as a form of social control, dop was a low-paying cycle that kept our people trapped. It caused generations of alcoholism in Black farming communities that continue to cause harm today.

Even when the system was outlawed in 1961, wine farmers still paid workers with wine until it was officially made illegal in 2003. Anti-blackness is greedy and would rather profit than care about our people's health and livelihoods.

Our people everywhere continue to be affected by the legacies of colonialism and enslavement. We must keep challenging systemic racism in all the ways it affects our lives.

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