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(I know it's been a while since my last post. Between traveling with my new book and a bout with one of the new marathon cold/flu
bugs, I've been up, down and all around. But I'm back. Let's see, what did I miss? Let's start with this:)
We're sorry for slavery.
Oh, and so are we.
And us, too.
Seems there's a lot of sorrying going on lately.
So far, one state, Virginia, has passed legislation apologizing for its role in the African slave trade; actually, Virginia's
phrase was "profound regret," which I guess one could accept as a weasely way of saying you're sorry. Seven other states are looking at doing so as well, and an apology resolution has been introduced in the U.S. Congress. For the record, the mayor of the City of London has also apologized for slavery, eloquently, in writing.
Apologizing for a horrible crime that you or your child or your state or your nation has committed is a good thing. I support
it. Few, except for those morally malleable types who register penitence only with permission from their favorite media bully,
would raise a big stink about a measly little apology for what was undeniably one of history's great atrocities. Remember
that we have officially apologized, rightly, for our political imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. And
Germany's mea culpas for the Holocaust were, without question, the very least that the Fatherland of the former Third
Reich could do.
But that is also the problem: Apologizing for slavery is literally the very least that Americans can do.
It is hard to argue against apologies, especially when they are sincere. What I challenge, though, is the use of apology,
whether consciously or unconsciously, as yet another sop to try to settle, on the cheap, the towering and still-outstanding
debt arising from the African slave trade and its aftermath.
The Atlantic slave trade was a mammoth international enterprise. Depending on the estimate, anywhere from 12 to 40 million
Africans were kidnapped and forcibly brought to the New World under the worst conditions imaginable -- if they survived the
trip. When slavery was at its most profitable in the mid-19th century, the price of a single slave often totaled more than
a typical American earned in a year; one shipload of slaves smuggled to Cuba in 1840 reportedly sold for $200,000, the equivalent of millions in today's dollars.
Without the stupendous revenues generated by slave labor on the massive plantations of the New World, there would have been
no subsequent Industrial Revolution, no explosively-expanding American factories shipping their wares nationwide on newly-laid
cross-continental rail lines, no fat and happy America tempting immigrants with mythical gold-bricked streets, no modern "consumer,"
no malls where you and I can now choose among a dozen clothing stores. Our nation's dirty secret is that slavery funded the
modern American economy. The chain of causation is inescapable. Every item you and I now buy at a corporate boutique might
as well be stamped "made possible by the African slave trade." (And some items are literally the products of contemporary
slavery, whether in hidden American workhouses or abroad.)
So, with regard to the 400-year history of the Atlantic slave trade, something more than an apology is called for.
I am not a big believer in reparations, in the sense of handing out large checks to all we descendants of American slaves.
It might be fair to do so (if we could solve the practical problems of establishing slave ancestry and working out the cash
math), but it wouldn't be effective. For one thing, some black American inheritors of the legacy of slavery, racism and disenfranchisement
deserve a lot more financial help than others. Further, this is about much more than handing out money. It is about rebuilding
communities shattered by the long habit of forcible racial abuse, economic neglect, and political scapegoating.
So go ahead and say you're sorry for slavery, America. That's a start. But then let's see you actually do something as a nation
that will tangibly make good on your purported sense of moral justice. Let's see you turn on a dime to put $400 billion worth
of resources into regenerating America's neediest communities -- and not just the black ones, I might add -- the way you have
poured those billions into the destruction of Iraq. Let's see you reclaim some of the trillions of dollars in unneeded tax
breaks that America's wealthiest 1 percent enjoy from the Bush Administration, and use them instead to invest in drug treatment
clinics in cash-strapped cities where addicts now wait 6 months to get into rehab, and to create jobs repairing crumbling
schools and rehabbing bombed-out neighborhoods and counseling shredded families and mentoring desperately angry kids who need
to learn that their lives and futures have value. Let's see you add units and courses about racism -- what it is, where it
came from, how to deal with it -- to the curricula of public elementary, middle and high schools across the country. Let's
see you make it a nationwide project to level the playing field by, well, actually leveling it: on the strength of the bountiful
human and material resources now at hand in the America of Halliburton and Blackwater.
Anything short of that is simply a sorry excuse.
(Posted 3/25/07 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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