When I first read about the Dred Scott decision from 1857, I didn’t see it as something dead and buried in a textbook. I saw it as something I still live with. Not legally, but spiritually. Systemically. It didn’t feel like history. It felt like a mirror.
The Supreme Court said Black people could never be citizens of this country. Never. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Later, the 13th and 14th Amendments came and technically overturned that decision. In reality, it never felt like the system flipped the script. It just changed the cover.
The 13th Amendment ended slavery, unless you’re convicted of a crime. That little exception is the loophole that built the prison system as we know it. The 14th Amendment gave us citizenship, but citizenship to what? A country that had just declared we were never meant to belong? A country that still finds new ways to remind us we don’t run the show?
See, I’m not saying Dred Scott is still the law on paper. I know how the Constitution works. I know that amendments override Supreme Court decisions. But that’s not the point. The point is that the logic behind The Dred Scott Decision never left. The mindset that created that ruling didn’t die in 1857. It evolved. It moved. It dressed itself up in new language.
That’s why I still feel Dred Scott when I see how police can kill us with no consequences. When prisons are full of people who look like me. When schools are more like pipelines than places to grow. When we are constantly over-policed and underprotected. We are left to figure out survival in a country that profits from our struggle.
We weren’t rehumanized. We were rebranded. Told we were free, but watched the system reinvent control. It went from chains to charges. From auction blocks to prison beds. From slave patrols to “law enforcement.” This country knows how to repackage oppression and keep it moving.
So when I say Dred Scott still matters, I’m not talking about a court case sitting on a shelf. I’m talking about the residue. The mindset. The cold structure underneath the so-called progress. That ruling might be legally dead, but what it represented is still coded into how this system moves.
This ain’t about being emotional. It’s about being honest. This is what we were born into. And until we name it, we can’t even begin to move past it.
Dred Scott isn’t alive in the law. He’s alive in the logic. In the legacy. In the loopholes. And until that changes, we’re still living in the shadow of a decision that told the world exactly how this system was built to see us. This is me speaking from what I know, what I see, and what I live. I’m not here to play smart. I’m here to tell the truth.
That’s BlaqKharma.
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