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Apedemak
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Posted: Monday March 19th, 2007 12:25 |
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The heavy burden of human cargo
[url=javascript:dl('http://67.18.35.242/-http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-oppay045116342mar04,0,1408495.column?coll=ny-news-columnists',1);]http://67.18.35.242/-http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-oppay045116342mar04,0,1408495.column?coll=ny-news-columnists[/url]
by Les Payne
March 4, 2007
U.S. slavery was the toy the media chewed on during the last week of
Black History Month. This curious piece of cynicism was aided and abetted by
three African-American descendants of those victimized by the nation's
unpardonable crime against humanity.
A black Daily News reporter linked the Rev. Al Sharpton's forebears to
the slave-owning family of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). The
revelation could not have pleased Armstrong Williams, the GOP propagandist
posing as a "journalist." Williams has long prided himself as the black
darling of Thurmond, one of most notorious race haters of the past century.
With the tabloids giddy over the preacher and his slave master,
cynicism yielded to farce, but perhaps the less said about Sharpton the
better. Suffice it to say that the protest impresario will doubtlessly
conjure a profit from his link to the unspeakable Thurmond, who finally died
in '03 at 100.
Another antebellum blob oozed onto the pages of respectable
newspapers. Two members of the Virginia General Assembly co-authored and got
approved a resolution expressing "profound regret" for the commonwealth's
role in slavery.
The state-sanctioned institution, the resolution said, "ranks as the
most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our
founding ideals in our nation's history, and the abolition of slavery was
followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other
insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent
that were rooted in racism, racial bias and racial misunderstanding."
The symbolic gesture in the former seat of the Confederacy has no
force of law. The irony here is that these public words of "regret" for 400
years of heinous evil committed against "Americans of African descent" were
written by two black men, Delegate Donald McEachin and state Sen. Henry
Marsh II.
The duo intended to wring a genuine "apology" from the Assembly, but
the white folks' cynicism stopped them short of even using the word. Such an
expression, they feared, might commit Virginia to something other than an
empty gesture - namely, compensation. God forbid that the descendants of
slave owners and other white apartheid profiteers be asked to do something
by way of satisfying the slave debt.
Heated discussion reportedly broke out over suggestions by Marsh, an
attorney, that the resolution contain the word "atonement." The white folks
smelled the possibility of redress for 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow and
its current practice of de facto desegregation. They also rejected
"contrition" as too strong, insisting instead on dead-end, weasel words.
Marsh was quoted in USA Today as saying that "the possibility of
reparations" would have killed the resolution. "This is as close as we can
get to an apology in Virginia." It wasn't close enough for sins that foul
the very nostrils of God. Indeed, Marsh should have dropped the resolution
instead of allowing white opponents to plea bargain the high, state crimes
of slavery to mere violations.
Virginia's "profound regret" - hailed now as a model for state remorse
over slavery - is a mockery. Black legislators shuffled the hollow
resolution past white folks who voted for it with crossed fingers and a
smirk. The entire charade exposed the limits of the compromise art of
politics in facing the terms of atonement.
Lest we forget, it was at Jamestown in 1619, in what is now Virginia,
that slavery got started as legitimate commerce for white Christians on
these shores. Dutch seamen traded 20 African slaves to English settlers for
dry goods. Later, under the lash of tens of thousands of slave owners,
including Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, Virginia sweated and
bled black men, women and children to an early grave. Leading all other
states in this enterprise at the dawn of the Civil War, Virginia held some
500,000 African slaves in chattel bondage.
They were ill-served last week by the black legislators whose
compromise resolution afforded the descendants of slave owners a sigh of
relief. Still, from unmarked, ancestral graves the unrelieved anguish of
America's slaves continues to fall on the deaf ears and cold hearts of an
arrogant nation unwilling to reckon squarely with its Great Sin against
humanity.
The clock ticks inexorably on - toward justice.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
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