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Being
Bush Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
During his extended Africa visit in 1998, President Bill Clinton’s
kind of, sort of, apology for slavery satisfied no one. Though
it was not a formal apology, conservatives said it went too
far. Though it was the first time a sitting American president
forthrightly acknowledged the colossal and continuing damage
of slavery, black activists said he didn’t go far enough.
Now it was President George W. Bush’s turn. In his visit to
the old slave fort on Goree Island off Africa’s west coast,
he called slavery “one of the greatest crimes in history.”
But we already knew that. Bush refused to do what Clinton
did and express his personal sense of shame and disgust over
slavery. Worse, he refused to formally apologize for slavery.
A Bush apology and a call for Congress to fund education programs
to study slavery’s effects, establish a national slavery museum,
and most importantly, set up a commission to study the feasibility
of reparations, would have forced many Americans to face bitter
truths about slavery and its hideous legacy.
The U.S. government, business, and the majority of whites,
not just a handful of Southern planters, profited and benefited
from slavery. The U.S. government encoded slavery in the Constitution,
and protected and nourished it for a century. Traders, insurance
companies, bankers, shippers and landowners made billions
off of it. Their ill-gotten profits fueled America’s industrial
might.
Meanwhile, for decades after slavery, white labor groups excluded
blacks from unions and the trades and confined them to the
dirtiest, poorest-paying jobs. While many whites and nonwhite
immigrants did come to America after the Civil War, they were
not subjected to decades of relentless racial terror and legal
segregation, as were blacks. Through the decades of slavery
and Jim Crow segregation, African-Americans were transformed
into the poster group for racial dysfunctionality. The image
of blacks as lazy, crime- and violence-prone, irresponsible,
and sexually predatory has stoked white fears and hostility
and has served as the standard rationale for lynchings, racial
assaults, hate crimes and police violence.
The fact that some blacks earn more and live better than ever
today, and have gotten boosts from welfare, social and education
programs, civil-rights legislation and affirmative-action
programs, does not mean that America has shaken the gruesome
legacy of slavery. Countless polls, surveys and reports on
race relations during the past decade have found that blacks
are still overwhelmingly the victims of racial discrimination,
and that young blacks are far likelier than whites to be imprisoned,
to have the highest or near-highest rates of poverty and infant
mortality, to be victims of violence, and to suffer HIV/AIDs
affliction than any other group in America.
They are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods,
be refused business loans, and attend decrepit, failed public
schools than other nonwhites. The police beatings of black
motorists Rodney King and Donavon Jackson, the shooting of
Amadou Diallo, and unarmed young blacks in Cincinnati and
other cities, the torture of Abner Louima, and the racial
profiling of young black males by the police are ample proof
that blacks are still at mortal risk from police violence.
Bush also almost certainly knows that there is nothing new
about state and federal governments issuing apologies and
payments for past wrongs committed against African-Americans.
In 1997 the U.S. government admitted it was legally liable
to the survivors and family members of the two-decade-long
syphilis experiment, begun in the 1930s by the U.S. Public
Health Service, that turned black patients into human guinea
pigs. The victims of a blatant medical atrocity conducted
with the full knowledge and approval of the U.S. government,
they received $10 million from the government and an apology
from Clinton.
The state legislature in Florida in 1994 agreed to make payments
to the survivors and relatives of those who lost their lives
and property when a white mob destroyed the all-black town
of Rosewood in 1923. This was a specific act of mob carnage
that was tacitly condoned by some public officials and law-enforcement
officers. Florida was liable for the violence and was duty
bound to pay and apologize. The Oklahoma state legislature
is now considering reparations payments to the survivors of
the Tulsa massacre of 1921. And city councils in several cities
including Chicago and Dallas have backed a congressional bill
by Michigan Congressman John Conyers to bankroll a commission
to study the feasibility of paying reparations for slavery.
The brutal reality is that America’s great curse continues
to be its enduring mistreatment of blacks. This can be directly
traced to the monstrous legacy of slavery. A Bush apology
would not have erased that legacy. But it would have formally
acknowledged the U.S. government’s responsibility for creating
and perpetuating it.
—Earl
Ofari Hutchinson
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