Very bad racially-motivated atrocities are perpetrated today. Characterizing that as "slavery never ended in the US" is trivializing a much, much worse past regime.
It is both technically (because of the penal exception in the 13th Amendment) and substantively (mass incarceration and penal slavery were adopted as policy directly and almost immediately as a replacement for chattel slavery, and have spread from their original geographic domain since) accurate, it doesn’t trivialize anything.
One of the great opportunities to improve politics in this country would be to increase our moral dynamic range, to be able to hold in our heads that slavery was very bad, for profit prisons are very bad, and slavery was much worse.
