by Richard Cohen
hy should I,
as some in Congress propose, apologize for slavery? After all, during that
era my ancestors- were all in Europe, living with very few civil rights
themselves. The ones who remained all perished in the Holocaust, and the
ones who emigrated to America all arrived poor and went to work in sweatshops.
No apology from me, but that's not the same as saying I'm not sorry.
This seemingly innocuous proposal has suddenly become a hot topic. President Clinton said this week he would consider it and seems inclined to favor the idea: "I think it has to be dealt with. There's still some unfinished business out there."
On the other hand, Jesse Jackson seems to oppose an apology. He called it "a meaningless gesture with no meaningful commitment to deal with the impact of something so serious as slavery." Maybe Jackson also feels that once an apology is offered, he will hear the self-satisfied smack of the hands and the smug announcement that, at last, we have disposed of this matter of race.
To a degree, I share his concern. The Japanese government from time to time apologizes for some World War II atrocity but does so, it seems, just to put the matter behind it. This is the sort of apology we are taught in school -- say you're sorry (when you're not and neither is the other guy), just to get on with things. These are lies, uttered to please others.
In the case of African Americans, an apology for their enslavement has an absurd, ritualistic, and empty quality to it. None of the slaves is still alive; neither, I would guess, are their children. The slave owners are gone, too, and so are their children.
One problem with the apology proposed by Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio) is that the persons enslaved are all gone. When President Clinton rightly apologized for the Tuskegee experiment, he was speaking to the surviving victims and to their families.
Another problem with an apology is that it suggests that African Americans are, in some way, a people apart. They are not aliens, however, extraneous to this country, but part of it --these shores before most of our ancestors. Who am I or you or we to apologize to them or us -- and what should we give Tiger Woods? Half an apology?
Still, for one generation of Americans to say they are sorry for the crimes of another generation of Americans is not an entirely worthless suggestion. It has, in fact, the merit of acknowledging continuity. Slavery was followed by decade after decade of oppression, injustice, and humiliation.
I have heard Jackson himself talk about how his stepfather was treated, and if, sometimes, I detect the glow of anger within him, I have to remember the story he once told me and then wonder, as you would too, why African Americans are not even angrier than some of them are.
I think -- no, I know --white Americans think that slavery happened back then --period both ancient and irrelevant -- and it was followed by something else of which they know little, but that too is over. Yet there are black cab-drivers in this town who can tell you from which hotel cab-stands they were once barred, and there is a professor at Howard University who can tell you how, as a kid in the South, he was forbidden from trying on shoes in a shoe store. He had to put his foot next to the shoe and guess if it fit.
So if Hall and others want us all to understand what went before and how we have all been affected by it --of us victims, some of us beneficiaries -- he is onto something. The past is not dry history, an academic subject taken for credit, but the real experiences of real people -- parents and grandparents and the parents of them -- and some of them were grievously injured. To feel sorry about that only makes us human. To apologize for what we ourselves did not do makes us into something else as well -- phonies.