Now, on to the piece I came prepared to share:

Excerpts from:The New York Times Magazine
3.18.07 p.15-17
The Way We Live Now

A Slow Emancipation
In Africa as in America,
slavery's legacy continues to unfold
across the generations.
By Kwame Anthony Appiah

Once, when I was a child in Kumasi, Ghana, I asked my father, in a room full of people, if one of the women there was really my aunt. She lived in one of the family houses, and I'd always called her auntie. In memory, I see her lowering her eyes as my father brushed the question aside, angrily. Later, when we were alone, he told me that one must never inquire after people's ancestry in public. There are many Ashanti proverbs about this. One says simply, Too much revealing of origins spoils a town. And here's why my father changed the subject: my "auntie" was, as everyone else in the room would have known, the descendant of a family slave.

My father was trying to avoid embarrassing her, although I don't think he regarded her ancestry as an embarrassment himself. Undlike her ancestors, she could not be sold; she could not be separated against her will from her children; she was free to work wherever she could. Yet in the eyes of the community - and in her own eyes - she was of lower status than the rest of us. If she could not find a husband to provide for her (and a prosperous husband was unlikely to marry a woman of her status), the safest place for her was with the family to which her ancestors had belonged. So she stayed.

(Then the article goes into the history of that country's slavery and more of the writer's recollections. The last two paragraphs are where I had my epiphany.)

But the politics of abolition and redemption, now as then, go only so far. You can legislate against the peshgi (my insertion: a debt that must be worked off) system, pass laws regulating working conditions and, in a dozen ways, deny legal recognition to the slaveholder's claim to manage the lives of his slaves. You cannot thereby command respect for them or grant them self-respect, because these things are not within the power of the market or legislature. Nor can you guarantee that someone who has experienced only slavery will be prepared to manage a life alone, even if he had the money to do so. There's no neat toggle switch between slave and free.

The woman I asked my father about is not a slave. but she carries on something crucial to the enslavement of her ancestors. Beyond the possibility of being sold away and the impossibility of making your own decisions, slavery meant that certain people were hereditarily inferior. You can abandon the slave markets and demand that all who work are paid for their labor and free to leave it, but even if you succeed, the stigma and the status won't give way so easily. That's why I haven't told you her name. Emancipation is only the beginning of freedom.

I'm not sure if some will get the connection between these paragraphs I've excerpted, but if you substitute poverty for the word slavery, perhaps, the light will glimmer in your mind, too. I thought this might help some who don't seem to get the subject in its entirety. If a society views its poor as if it were their fault they are poor, instead of taking responsibility for the social structures that keep them "in their place" and refuses to acknowledge the way society has actually caused the poverty to grow rather than be reduced, then the poor, even equipped with the tools to get them out, probably won't be able to abandon the life and communities in which they've lived their entire lives. Of course, there are exceptions...there always are, but when even some of the very people, who are there to help them, make them "feel their place" through each encounter, well, how can they escape? And, if even the workers make that feeling felt, how do you think the ones in society that are actively trying to make sure they never leave their situation treat them when they try?