[R-G] Bush's African Visit Sidesteps Apology for Slavery

[usman majeed]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16353
Bush's African Visit Sidesteps Apology for Slavery

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet
July 9, 2003

During his extended Africa visit in 1998, President 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 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 non-white immigrants did come to America after
the Civil War they were not subjected to the 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, prone to
crime and violence, irresponsible, and sexual predators 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/AID 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 non-whites.
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 1930's 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 is an author and political analyst. Visit his news and
opinion website: www.thehutchinsonreport.com He is the author of "The Crisis
in Black and Black" (Middle Passage Press).

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing
the ground. They want rain without thunder and   lightning. They want the
ocean without the awful roar of its waters."  (Frederick Douglass)