During Bill Clinton's tour of Africa, our President flirted with offering an apology for the Atlantic slave trade. "It is as well not to dwell too much on the past, but I think it is worth pointing out that the United States has not always done the right thing by Africa," he said. "Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade, and we were wrong in that."
I can't fault the passive language, the halting admission of what everyone in the world already knows (with the possible exception of certain areas in Africa and the Middle East, particularly Sudan, Ghana and Mauritania, where a slave can still be purchased). Political realities make a full admission of America's culpability impossible. Clinton and his party still need the good wishes and votes of the angry white voter. So, instead of issuing a full apology, Clinton spoke about misjudgements and regrets.
An apology for slavery would also mean telling white America that they haven't earned what they have, that the accumulated wealth of European-Americans was gathered on the back of black America. And it would mean addressing the cutting edge of the civil rights movement Ñ reparations.
What kind of money are we talking about? According to The Wealth
of Races, the net value of black slave labor during the slavery years was somewhere between $1.4 trillion and $4.7 trillion.
The dominant (white) view of the debate is that the Civil War decided the issue, ending a southern feudal system that was as inefficient as it was unjust. The slaves and slaveholders that were affected are all dead and gone.
A reparations proposal in Michigan, for example, was criticized by State Senator Dave Jaye, R-Macomb County, who said, "This racist proposal
will force people who didn't own slaves to subsidize people who weren't slaves."
Republicans have nothing to offer black America beyond the message, "help yourself." Unfortunately, that is the same prescription, delivered with a smirk and a wink Ñ the one that white America offered back in the Jim Crow days. Why on Earth would the black community imagine that the joke's over?
The fact is, damage has been done, and it can be quantified. As of 1992, more than half Ñ 54 percent Ñ of all black children live with their mothers, with the father absent. More than half of all black adults have never been married, compared with 21 percent of all adult whites. Of 190,000 black children living with teenaged parents, only 5,000 had the benefit of both parents.
The consequences of children having children are self-evident. Lacking the wisdom, maturity, and discipline to affect positive economic change in their own lives, teenage parents can hardly be expected to pass those virtues on to their children. Before issuing reparations, though, and initiating a new income redistribution plan, one ought to ask if slavery was the cause of these woes, or if there is even a simple correlation.
A hundred years ago, a single generation out of slavery, the census data showed that the percentage of adult blacks that were married was higher than the percentage of adult whites. This pattern held all the way through 1940. A decline in the percentage of adult married black Americans appeared in the 1960 census and accelerated thereafter.
The percentage of families with both the father and mother present was nearly the same for black families as white families in the 1950s an equivalence that has disintegrated over the last 40 years.
Reparations may be called for, but not for slavery. Instead, this country ought to be apologizing for 40 years of social policies that systematically dismantled minority families.
The original goal of these programs, part of the "War on Poverty," was to reduce the dependency of the poor on government assistance. The absence of
the father, made possible, even necessary by these programs, virtually guaranteed the failure of that original goal. Today, the failure of these policies is widely disputed, and the burden of proof falls on those who make a cause-and-effect claim about policies and results. Similar demands for proof are not a part of slavery-reparations discourse.
I won't apologize for slavery, because I can't apologize for something I didn't do. There's something smarmy and self-satisfied about the kind of
person who would apologize for someone else, thus establishing a "superior sensibility." Such apologies simply call attention to the apology, and so detract from the issue.
Worse, an apology for slavery, offered as an end in itself, would just be more words, at a time when action is demanded. White Americans have an
unfair advantage, and should admit what the programs of the power elite have done, and then act on that admission.
As for a solution, I won't offer one. I don't apologize for that either. The black community doesn't need another white boy telling them how to solve their problems. If the solution involves a
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