aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Should Georgia apologize for slavery?
Black legislative leaders said Thursday they will propose that Georgia apologize for the state’s role in slavery and segregation-era laws.
“It is time for Georgia, as one of the major stake-holders in slavery, as one of the major players in lynchings, to say it’s sorry,” said state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a Democrat. “Sorry for the fact that it was involved in slave trade, sorry for the fact that it was involved in Jim Crow laws.”
The measure comes on the heels of a Virginia resolution, passed unanimously in February, expressing regret over slavery.
RaisingPaine at DailyKos, speaking as a black man, is having none of it:
Requesting an apology from the state, without any stipulated action associated with it, smacks of an attempt to institutionalize white guilt. Formalizing the state’s regret is a double-edged sword which, while ostensibly seeking to heal old wounds in the black community, has the reverse effect in the white community—many of whom played no role whatsoever in creating or promoting Jim Crow laws, nor had any hand in the advancement of the ugliness of slavery.
There are blacks in Georgia and around the country that suffered under the yoke of government-backed segregation. But this practice was carried out with the tacit consent of the federal government, so seeking out apologies on a state-by-state basis seems painfully redundant. The wink-and-a-nod southern states received from the larger bureaucracy is what ultimately allowed the South to continue these abhorrent practices—the very same ones the federal government were a full party to until after WWII.
I would go one further and point to Democratic Party culpability; it was the Democratic Party running the Jim Crow South. It seems to me that as we demand apologies from southern states and newspapers, we might also turn one day and demand such an apology from the Democratic Party itself.
Probably not.
Paine quotes Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope*:
Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America; even the most fair-minded whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization - or race-specific claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.
What Obama’s describing is echoed in the “not responsible for the sins of our fathers” quotes from various Republican state legislators in the AP story. Paine proposes, instead, a national monument:
Those blacks who are first-hand survivors of the Jim Crow era have a rightful claim on a federal apology, but a national monument would bring a stamp of earnestness that words could never convey.
Such a landmark would not be about the resurrection of white guilt. Rather, it would be about allowing America as a nation to move past the notion of state-by-state apologies, whose roots owe more to political-correctness than any genuine sense of remorse by those rightfully resentful of being held accountable for their ancestors misdeeds. Through the powerful documentation of a federal national monument and its concommitant acknowlegement of a shameful passage in American history, perhaps we can better move forward simply as citizens.
The Viet Nam War memorial has succeeded far beyond what anyone envisioned. A national monument seems the least we could do. It won’t solve our problems, but then, neither will legislative battles over forced apologies.
* I’m bugged that Amazon’s Search Inside! feature is not enabled for this title. Google Book Search also came up with nothing. I had to use the index of my copy to find, confirm and expand the passage, from page 247.
