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"Oooh! -- Sorry About that Slavery Thing!"
By Mumia Abu Jamal at Aug 16, 2008 |
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Several days ago, a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives approved a resolution apologizing for slavery. The Senate has not yet moved on such a measure, and probably has no intention to do so.
That it comes today, some 143 years after slavery was prohibited in the Constitution (notice I said 'prohibited', and not stopped, for historians and scholars have uncovered that the trade continued long thereafter, as an underground one, kind of like drugs today), gives us some idea of how deeply slavery still resides in American consciousness, and how empty such an apology is in light of all that has intervened in the century and a half since the cessation of the Civil War.
It's like robbing someone, growing fat and rich on stolen wealth, and then passing that person on the street, who is now homeless, destitute and starving-and tossing him a nickel. (Except, of course, in the case of the U.S. House resolution, there isn't even a nickel!).
As the great Black historian, J. A. Rogers taught us (especially in his Africa's Gift to
Centuries of slavery, the intentional destruction of families, tribes, and nations; ripping people asunder from their religions, their clans, their spouses, children, lands and all that they knew and loved-for centuries-to build and enrich a nation of strangers-who enforced the practices of slavery for a hundred years after it's supposed abolition; only to consign the grandchildren of these people to the bitter half-lives of sub-par education, poor housing, second rate health care, under/employment, the cruelties of mass incarceration and a cynical judicial and political system that endlessly engages in white supremacy (without the labels)....
Yeah, a political apology should just about cover that.
Don\'t Worry, We\'ll Give You Cookies.\"
By Hildebrandt, Sandy at Aug 19, 2008 23:26 PM
I have a feeling that the fact that this apology came after Australia\'s apology to the Aborigines is not a coincidence. The Australian Prime Minister\'s apology was eloquent and powerful; it had a lot of Aborigines in tears. Much of that was simply because they had seen themselves as invisible for so long, and the Government finally acknowledged that it had indeed committed horrifying crimes against them.
The US Government\'s half-assed reiteration of Australia\'s ground-breaking apology is an example of how truly sad they are. First of all, they did not apologise to the Indigenous Peoples of the US - I suppose that\'s partially because there aren\'t many of them left to apologise to. No, the US has committed so many crimes against so many different peoples that it chose to apologise to one specific minority. This is while they continue to pass laws and implement policies that keep many of the descendents of slaves from rising above the poverty line.
Australia is commencing a change in policy to hopefully begin helping the Aboriginal People. The US\'s apology was completely empty. They might as well have said, "But it\'s all good. We\'ll give you cookies."
Perhaps the US should first publicly acknowledge the fact that there exist Third World regions within its borders - that the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world cannot even take care of its own, let alone be trusted to be a leader on a global scale.
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