Acting White: Apologizing For Slavery

Once again, slavery and reparations talk is in the air. Last week the US Senate formally passed a resolution apologizing for the enslavement and segregation of Africans in America. The resolution now moves to consideration in the House, but not without controversy. PC apologies are one thing, cash payment for the past is quite the other.

In order to get the votes for the apology, Senate proponents, including Tom Harkin (Iowa), had to include a disclaimer for the payment of reparations to the ancestors of slaves or former slaves. There is reasonable concern that this resolution might become part of the on-going call for reparations by some black politicians and groups.

The thing that continues to bite me in this debate is how black proponents insist on the specious, non-hunting, argument that the request and payment to blacks is analogous to payments made to Native Americans and WWII Japanese Internees (here). Yes, all three treatments were abominable, but the abuse of Native peoples and Japanese citizens violated US laws on the books at the time, and this was not true of slavery.

Enduring Native American organizations (tribes) were paid reparations because the US government violated signed treaties, back by the laws of the day. Japanese-American citizens were denied their rights, including loss of employment and properties, and were forced into internment camps against their will. Slaves, alternately, were captured, sold, transported and forced into slave labor, supported by the laws of the day. To many this difference seems trivial, but the evolution of the rule of law represents a time line that cannot be revised at will.

When a right is granted and ignored, our laws provide for remedy. At the time of the Atlantic slave trade countries were just beginning to consider that slavery was inhumane, to the point of making it illegal, and the US trailed this awakening. The call for reparations seems unperturbed by the revisionist thinking required in the light of legal enactments of the time. It would be more reasonable to argue that freed slaves were damaged by the subsequent denial of full rights provided for at the time of the emancipation proclamation, up to the time when Jim Crow statutes were enacted. And then there is the statute of limitations with which to contend.

Do not expect this wrenching to go away any time soon.

James C. Collier

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