A few years ago, Cheryl Benedict, an education administrator and historian from Virginia and my first cousin, discovered on Ancestry.com that our great-great-great-grandfather, a Texas farmer named Augustus Foscue, had owned 41 slaves.
I was saddened, not surprised. Although I grew up in Brussels, the child of American musicians who did not inherit great wealth, my family is white and middle class, with branches rooted among the pre-revolutionary English immigrants who accepted slave-holding as a way of life.
My first thought was that I should research our family history more—and then write about it. My ancestors had done something wrong. It had not been known. Now it was. Shining a light on the truth, followed by some sort of atonement, seemed the right thing to do, especially at a time of rising and relegitimized white supremacy in the United States. Truth-telling as atonement.
It would also be an education. Growing up, I attended Belgium’s écoles communales. In school, I did not learn about U.S. history. For me, as a kid, America was more cultural and commercial than political or historical: baseball and Mark Twain, musicals and McDonald’s.
My mistake, typical of white Americans, was treating slavery as if it were a mystery buried in the past.
My attitude was naïve and ill-considered. As editors rejected draft after draft, it became clear that I was getting something important wrong.
My mistake, typical of white Americans, was treating slavery as if it were a mystery buried in the past. I had not known about my ancestor Augustus. My family had not talked about slavery. Now we did.
But confession is not atonement. And as one African-American historian or economist after another pointed out to me, slavery is not a mystery, and it is not past. What white Americans treat as a historical curiosity—something to investigate if we choose to—is to black Americans a cruel, unavoidable ghost that haunts this nation’s cities, schools, hospitals and prisons.
There is a small but growing group of descendants of slave-owners conducting private efforts at atonement.
This lack of understanding about slavery’s immanence is why white acts of private atonement are considered “conscience salves that do little to close the black-white gap,” William Darity, an economist at Duke University, told me. He calls symbolic actions “laissez-faire reparations” and argues that people who discover they have slave-owning ancestors are morally obliged to campaign for national reparations.
Because slavery was a societal institution, enshrined in the Constitution, and had societal consequences that have not been fixed, its reparation must be societal.
Still, with the internet revolution unveiling more family histories and efforts at a federal reparations movement stalled, there is a small but growing group of descendants of slave-owners conducting private efforts at atonement.
People I talked to are funding scholarships for black youths, putting up plaques in honor of people their families enslaved and engaging in dialogue aimed at promoting racial healing. They are writing books and making movies and documenting how the devastating inequalities set up by slavery were maintained during Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow laws and the post-civil rights era. Universities, banks and other institutions are owning up to their past involvement with slavery.
People I talked to are funding scholarships for black youths, putting up plaques in honor of people their families enslaved and engaging in dialogue aimed at promoting racial healing.
What to make of their efforts? Are they really useless? Isn’t something better than nothing? Do good intentions count for anything?
Guy Mount Emerson, an African-American historian who is part of the scholarly team that recently uncovered the University of Chicago’s historical ties to slavery, says that “symbolic action, even if it’s symbolic, may have the potential to heal current relationships.”
But Mr. Emerson, who has lectured on reparations at the University of Chicago, says that according to reparations theory, it is up to the people who were harmed to determine what might constitute sufficient restorative action. “It’s up to black folks to say when this is enough,” says Mr. Emerson. “It’s a very hard question: How do you forgive the unforgivable? How do you repair the irreparable?”
Under President Trump, white interest in private reparation efforts has been on the rise, says Tom DeWolf, a director at Coming to the Table, a non-profit based at Eastern Mennonite University that brings together the descendants of slave-owners and enslaved people. Since the 2016 election, the number of monthly visitors to the organization’s website has increased from 3,000 a month to over 13,000. The number of affiliated working groups has multiplied. They aim to inject more awareness into the public space about links between slavery and current inequalities.
This year, Coming to the Table released a 21-page guide on how to atone privately for slavery. It has over 100 suggestions, including donating to the United Negro College Fund, hiring African-American lawyers and doctors and contributing family archives to genealogy websites like Our Black Ancestry and AfriGeneas. African-American genealogies are often incomplete because enslaved peoples generally were not named in census documents until 1870.
“We suggest that before acting, European Americans should take their cues from African Americans as to when and how to approach and implement reparations,” the guide suggests. “African Americans may wish to engage in some of these activities so as to ensure that trust, healing and true reparations of the harms are achieved.”
The reparations guide also recommends supporting H.R. 40, a bill for which former Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, campaigned since the 1980s. The bill, named after the 40 acres of land that newly emancipated African-Americans were promised and never given after the Civil War, would establish a commission to study the impact of slavery and suggest remedies.
Mr. DeWolf, who has written two books on the subject, is a descendant of a Rhode Island family that once controlled one of the country’s biggest slave-trading enterprises. Since the DeWolfs shipped 10,000 people from West Africa, they shaped the ancestries of as many as 500,000 African-Americans. In 2008, a DeWolf family member named Katrina Browne released “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” a riveting documentary that highlights slavery in Northern states and chronicles members of the family traveling to New England, Ghana and Cuba and their anguished debates over privilege, legacy and reparations.
“If somebody said I’ve been cheating the whole game and now I’m going to stop cheating, wouldn’t you want your money back?”
“White people should think of reparations as a poker game where somebody has been cheating,” says Ms. Browne. “If somebody said I’ve been cheating the whole game and now I’m going to stop cheating, wouldn’t you want your money back?”
Whether your family owned slaves is “a question that anybody with Southern roots should probably ask themselves,” says Christa Cowan, who has researched slavery for Ancestry.com. The 1850 and 1860 censuses, available online, are valuable because they include so-called “Slave Schedules” that list the numbers, genders and ages of enslaved people. “Even if your family wasn’t wealthy, it’s worth checking,” says Ms. Cowan, who is white and discovered her own slave-owning ancestry and black cousins through census records. It is also a question for Americans from Northern states: In the 17th and 18th centuries, millions of Northerners owned slaves.
To be sure, even if the truth is available, many white Americans still do not like to confront slavery—and, when they do, they do not feel guilty about it. “Everybody likes to talk about how their ancestors fought in the Confederacy, but nobody likes to talk about how they owned slaves,” Bruce Levine, the author of The Fall of the House of Dixie, a history of the 19th-century South, tells me. “You can’t have one without the other.” A survey in 2016 by political scientists found that 72.4 percent of white Americans questioned felt “not guilty at all” about “the privileges and benefits” they “received as white Americans.”
Growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, Phoebe Kilby never heard about her slave-owning ancestors. A decade ago, she found documents online that proved that her family had owned enslaved peoples. Further research led her to meeting several descendants of people her family had owned as slaves, including people to whom she was genetically related. She has befriended her black relatives, helped obtain funding for a Virginia State historical highway sign that honors civil rights activists in the family and endowed scholarships for their grandchildren. “We could wait for Congress, or we can listen to the expressed desires of our African-American cousins and respond directly ourselves,” she says.
The African-American writer Betty Kilby, one of Phoebe’s relatives and a plaintiff in a school desegregation case in Virginia in the 1950s, says she had “mixed emotions” when Phoebe contacted her, “but I had promised to fight against hate, so I had to meet her.” They are now close friends and speak together at churches, colleges and community groups. Ms. Kilby says she supports national economic reparations and says private initiatives could offer a template for a wider political initiative. “What Phoebe has done is provide scholarships for the descendants of the people her family enslaved, that is restitution,” she says. “Maybe that’s the model nationally.”
Some black thinkers say symbolic gestures are meaningless if not accompanied by a demand for political and economic reparations.
“It’s not a matter of personal guilt, it’s a matter of national responsibility,” says Mr. Darity, the Duke University economist. The persistent structural inequality in the United States is why even white Americans not descended from slave-owners should support reparations, because they have benefitted, says Mr. Darity. Reparations, he says, “should go to anybody who has an ancestor who was enslaved and anybody who has identified as black for 10 years or more.”
A growing body of academic research has firmed up the links between slavery and current inequalities. A lot of racism in the United States “developed after slavery,” says Sven Beckert, the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History and a professor at Harvard. African-Americans “were free, but they faced harsh discrimination in labor, property and education markets, among other things.” Mr. Beckert compares the slow and still unfilled reckoning of American whites with slavery to that of Germany’s resolution of its guilt over Nazism after World War II.
The difference, says Mr. Darity, is that “the U.S. is not a defeated nation in the aftermath of a great war seeking to restore its legitimacy in the international community.”
In a recent paper, “Slavery, Education, and Inequality,” two European academics, Graziella Bertocchi and Arcangelo Dimico, studied the influence of slavery across U.S. counties.
They found that counties that once had rates of high slave ownership are not always poorer, but that they consistently had unequal rates of educational attainment. Current inequality, they wrote, “is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal education attainment of blacks and whites.”
Over time, Ms. Bertocchi tells me, “even after accounting for many other factors, slavery remains a persistent determinant of today’s inequality. ”
There is no mystery: Our wrong is present.
Clarification, Nov, 30: This article updated to note that John Conyers is a former congressman.
Wrong.
Totally and absolutely wrong.
Karl Marx and his disciples did not give us the good news, Jesus Christ and His disciples did that. They did not even give us an economic theory which matched reality as numerous field tests have demonstrated.
You quite obviously did not consult the best "African-American" economist ever produced in the US, Thomas Sowell - he has a wealth of pertinent data to refute your thesis.
Almost all cultures for almost all history have consisted of collectives of individuals with UNEQUAL gifts, age, intelligence, beauty, strength, skills, size and sex.
Human efforts to change the above reality have been tried and punished - they are the equivalent of the Tower of Babel project.
Let us put slavery in historical context: the origin of the very word you use is revealing.
It derives from the ethnic origin of the people most commonly taken as possession by the abominable Mohammedanism many centuries ago - the Slavic peoples. Young, beautiful, white virgins were especially demanded by the Caliph.
Now, if we "whites" followed the perspective of your essay, we should be moaning and complaining and blaming and self-pitying as an underclass in the whole world and demanding that all the dark people atone for their sin and hand out reparation to us.
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"Almost all cultures for almost all history have consisted of collectives of individuals with UNEQUAL gifts, age, intelligence, beauty, strength, skills, size and sex." Wow! Your deep seated racism starts here and gets worse and worse. Seems like you're already moaning and complaining. About what I'm not sure given your privileged position and continuing assertion of privilege and oppression.
I do not now, and never have, had anything to do with the North American continent nor had any sort of relations with any of the people who live there or come from there.
I hold, insofar as my expert knowledge of biology is concerned that the scientific concept race - when applied to people - there is but one, single, solitary human race Homo sapiens sapiens.
There are no human races, plural.
Are there people who have large differences in appearance as to size, skin colour and facial characteristics? Any fool can agree with that.
So, I will take it for granted that you mean to use race as is apparently modern American custom, not mine, to label people by their skin colour and place from which they migrated and talk of Irish-American, African American and so on.
Now, produce evidence that any part of what I wrote offends against justice, mercy and love or repent of you back-biting, calumny and detraction.
"Almost all cultures for almost all history have consisted of collectives of individuals with UNEQUAL gifts, age, intelligence, beauty, strength, skills, size and sex." Wow! Your deep seated racism starts here and gets worse and worse. Seems like you're already moaning and complaining. About what I'm not sure given your privileged position and continuing assertion of privilege and oppression.
Marx gave us tools for analyzing the culture of capitalism. He did not leave a programme for his followers for what to do when the revolution happened (and most revolutionaries used the elevator speech to rule, not detailed marxian analysis). Marx assumed that socialists would act democratically in their own interests, so he left no clues. Modern Marxian thinkers, myself included, have or are developing more detailed plans and linking up with the cooperative movement stared in America in the late 19th Century by my great grandfather, Silas Locke Allen, and his fellows. Ever hear of Land O Lakes and the National Farm Bureau Federation?
Marx used the neo-Platonic nonsense that was touted by Hegel as sound philosophy and produced a nonsensical alternative explanation for the continuance of mankind's inhumanity to fellow men in a regressive revolt against the already well-developed Judeo-Christian understanding of the fallen nature of mankind as described in Genesis.
All derivative philosophies share the absurdity of the original.
We know that in the real world, the native innocence of humankind untainted by capital was demonstrated to be a fairy tale when the expected uprising of the oppressed to overthrow the oppressors did not happen.
We know that instead of accepting that a theory predicted an outcome, the outcome did not confirm the theory and so true believers rather than accept it was falsified, concocted even more fanciful ideas.
We know that the Frankfurt School translocated to the US and continued their absurd dreamweaving to produce the current spawn of feminism, critical theory, political correctness and the like.
Just as you and the generations in between inherited the education, wealth and property built upon the backs of these slaves and their families, their ancestors inherited struggle, poverty, inequity in wealth and education and oppression through generations. The very least you owe them is acknowledgement of this fact and the truth of the multi generational impact slavery and continuing economic slavery and economic slavery and cultural oppression continues to have on the descendants of these people.
Dionys - what if you just arrived in America? Should we ask each person coming in to pay an atonement tax for their race?
Dionys - what if you just arrived in America? Should we ask each person coming in to pay an atonement tax for their race?
Each one's responsibility to restorative justice is legion: to women who have been denied equal opportunity by our ancestors; to native Americans whose lives have been taken and land been ravished; to the environment which we have polluted; etc, etc. Working to restore the evil done usually has to be done indirectly. We need to take care of ourselves so that we do not become a burden on society now or in the future; we need to be alert to legislation that will remove unjust structures; we need to educate our children to be responsible Christian citizens; etc. All these things need to be done according to our gifts and circumstances. Regarding African Americans, a crucial area of work is nurturing black families which were devastated by the institution of slavery. Any help in that area will be golden.
Reparations is a political non-starter and not workable (and will not, as an article in Jacobin pointed out, address class inequality). Apologies and public acknowledgements have some value but there's a cynicism that has developed around these expressions that don't cost anything. If an individual or institution can locate descendants of enslaved people, as Ms. Kilby has done, that's terrific. There are so many generations gone, however, that this is quite difficult.
What to do? Continue to develop history curricula that reveals the labor of enslaved, indentured, and exploited workers in America. Pass living wage laws and labor reform measures for the working poor now. Economic justice is the solution.
What is one meant to do if they are descended from a long line of Protestant fundamentalistic abolitionist foes of slavery? Or if they are part Cherokee, whose ancestors were caused to be transported, by the slave-holding President at the time, Jackson, to new quarters in Oklahoma before assimilating some three generations later? This navel-gazing at one's genealogy does little good and could lead one to find that many branches end/(or is that) begin in debauchery, sin, righteousness, slavery, or whatever. How then does your author balance out the good, the bad, the righteousness, or iniquity of his forebear's many branches? As a methodology for determining the advisability of reparations, it is laughable. Please, if people need help in the present then let us help them and call it charity, not reparations. Personally, if my ancestors were abolitionists or slavers, it matters little. I never knew them, and I can not have been responsible for their behavior. I refuse to be made accountable for their sins in such a ridiculous and anti-historical manner.
Good insight, Malcolm! Add to our Cherokee that said person is a woman who's ancestors were totally dedicated to green energy and were Quakers. Would they be exempt from obligations to contemporaries suffering from injustices more or less connected with social injustices from the past? Makes you wonder.
There is no black or white person truthful enough to talk about reparations because the war on poverty gave multi billions since the seventies to the black community and because blacks are sinners like whites are sinners...billions were wasted on the welfare lifestyle which increased the illegitimacy rates of black children from 25% in the 1960’s to c.66% now.
But the fatherlessness it produced with their sinfulness....produced the black on black violence that has made large sections of many cities as dangerous as Guatemala.
I took care of a tough black girl for three years...tutoring her four nights a week on a heroin block in Newark, sending her to Catholic school, taking her and her cousins on trips to museums, beaches, parks. I didn’t do it for reparations ...did it for love...and never will give reparations until a great economist deducts the tax payer money blacks wasted on sin.....billions...from the reparations bill. Never will that calculation be made honestly until Elijah returns...and gets a degree in economics.
The comment thread reveals how the tensions remain 154 years after the Civil War. The author makes positive suggestions about how individuals can make money donations to educational and social institutions that assist the African-American community to gain an equal opportunity footing. That is good because it may help, but more so, it reflects a personal awareness of one’s own presuppositions about inequality. The problem is that we don’t understand the forces that perpetuate inequality, and what we do not see, we cannot change. It is easy but mistaken to say African Americans are responsible for not achieving economic and social equality. Deeply entrenched economic and educational barriers have persisted across generations. We are making progress. We have not made enough progress however. Can we listen to one another? Listening is the essential first skill to making real progress for the next generation. Listening will allow understanding if it is true unjudgmental and unbiased listening that does not react. And listening is not easy. It means suspending our fears, our old ideas, and our self-image. The listening I’m referring to is one on one, as well as community to community, but in the end, each individual must cross a barrier of unconscious bias to engage with a fellow human being, see the world through the prism of their beliefs, and perhaps, just perhaps, be in some degree persuaded to change his or her own perception. Then right action will follow.
Deuteronomy 24:16
“Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.
Ezekiel 18:19-20
“Yet you say, ‘Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?’ When the son has done what is just and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live. The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
Ezekiel 18:1-32
The word of the Lord came to me: “What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge’? As I live, declares the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die. “If a man is righteous and does what is just and right— ...
And there are some verses that seem to indicate the opposite. Shouldn't that be the basis of discussion rather than someone's opinion that seems to be motivated by wanting to attract attention to himself?
Jim - thanks for the Scripture. I would add to that what Jesus said about the blind man in John 9. There seems to be a great need on the left to invent new sins (the phobias, the reparations, dead-naming, GMO, some environmental positioning, etc.) while they deny the more obvious ones they commit themselves. I think the two are connected. Lady Macbeth "Come out, damned spot! Out, I command you! One, two. OK, it’s time to do it now.—Hell is murky!—Nonsense, my lord, nonsense! You are a soldier, and yet you are afraid? Why should we be scared, when no one can lay the guilt upon us?"
If you did not benefit or inherit wealth from your ancestor, the only thing you owe is not to be a Racist.
Nothing. You did not own the slaves and you are only responsible for your actions.
Good for John W. Miller! My ancestors never owned anyone. This is almost embarrassing in its lack of current relevance. So, in the "Mea Culpa Wars" the score is John 41- vs. Chris 0. Enjoy your new, or newly, found celebrity status while wearing sackcloth and ashes in front of the congregation. We, and our ancestors, have all sinned. To make a spectacle out of repentance is most insincere. The Jesuits of Georgetown are a model for this type of behavior.
Exactly right, Chris. I know of no crimes like this among my ancestors either but I bet I have some Viking in me and they have never given back to the Church what they stole from the monasteries. Like Elizabeth Warren, I have no native American in me either, but what if I found I had Iroquois blood at the 1/32nd. Would I need some atonement for all the violent acts they inflicted on other tribes. They ruled with an iron hand. Or, should the slave reparations extend to the descendants of the Hispanic or Arab traders or even the African tribes who first captured the slaves and then sold them to the traders. The reparations movement has a similarity to the abuse of indulgences in the 16th century, except that it is atonement for inherited sin rather than personal sin. In the 3 centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, 12 million Africans were shipped to the new world, only 4% to the modern US lands. Another 12 million went to the Muslim world. And the Muslims captured Europeans for over 12 centuries for their slaves. The fodder for reparation accounting is near endless. No surer way to perpetuate racial and tribal discord.
Consider: “A lot of racism in the United States ‘developed after slavery,’ says Sven Beckert, the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History and a professor at Harvard. African-Americans ‘were free, but they faced harsh discrimination in labor, property and education markets, among other things.’”
Because blacks lacked opportunities to learn and invest and work, the United States is much poorer than it would have been otherwise. My ancestors came to the United States from Europe after slavery. Jim Crow caused them and me to suffer deprivations of all the goods that blacks were prevented from contributing to this society. I too want compensation from descendants of those who enforced Jim Crow.
By the way, some of my more distant ancestors were Border Reivers. For many generations, my family preyed on the English. If the author’s English ancestors immigrated to America from the Middle Shires, I may be conscience-bound to make atonement. Would Mr Miller be content with my creating a plaque in their honor?
As the prominent African American economist Thomas Sowell has noted, the enslaved suffered a horrible fate. Quite different, on the whole, has been the fate of their descendants today, whether measured by wealth, health, or political freedom and opportunity. Had they remained in Africa, they would typically be greatly disadvantaged by all these measures. A tragedy for the enslaved, it became, in fact, an economic and political good fortune for their future descendants..
The ever-so-'umble writer postures as being deeply Christian, penitent, dedicated to social justice, and intent on righting wrongs for which he shares responsibility. I suggest he take a reality check, and face up to the fact that his article is actually not nice, but deeply ugly and cryptically servile to injustice. It is servile to injustice because it is written in unspoken support of a toxically dishonest, irrational, and overwhelmingly White left-liberal power-cult in its endless quest to extend its power by forever expanding the "victimhood" industry which it controls and exploits.
Here's a question for the author. Recently I discovered that I'm the third-cousin of a famous Australian-born U.S. serial rapist-murderer, the so-called "Beauty Queen Killer", killed in a gunfight with police in New Hampshire in 1984. We have the same Irish-born ancestor, an honest man and devout Catholic who emigrated to Australia in the mid-1800s. Because I share relatively recent DNA with the evil predator, do I have a moral obligation to give material and emotional compensation to those of his victims who still live, and the relatives of those who don't?
Good point, Colin. You certainly do not carry any guilt for the relation to the killer or virtue for your relation to the good honest Irishman. But, I expect the author of this piece or his supporting bloggers don't really care about this, since they won't see a racial angle in it, and they are so very desperate to see everything in racist terms.
I think leftists should pay every penny they own into the first reparation fund they can find and write pieces like this. But if ya don't mind, could you leave your broad brush "white people" think and do this, that and the other that is evil out? I take NO responsibility for the sins of others. And while we're at at, if ya want to blame whites who had nothing to do with slavery, why not blame blacks as well? Yes, many Africans sold their own people into slavery as we all know. So make sure to bad mouth blacks, too!
Amen brotha!
I am responsible for only one person and one soul--my own.
Well said "Cous".
This is a Catholic magazine, right?
Has anyone heard of a quote from the Bible about the sins of the father? There are MANY which refer to this issue. One can only figure that the sins of the great-great-great-grandfather are of even less importance to those people living today.
If the writer wants to show how much virtue he possesses, fine; but to take direction from black economists and historians is silly. Taking the word of some European academics if of even less import. Perhaps a psychiatrist might be of more value because to think a 21st century person is in any way responsible for a great-great-great grandfather's actions and should now atone for that ancestor is insane in my opinion.
There is nothing about which Mr. Miller should feel guilt. His ancestor did nothing wrong, either - slavery was not illegal and at the time it was not immoral.
Throughout history all groups have done things we might find abhorrent today: until about 1970, France beheaded criminals; well into the 20th century, America had public hangings of criminals which were attended by people who acted as if they were gong to a picnic; child labor was a part of everyday life in England, etc., etc. Should we all beat ourselves with chains because of what happened in the past? NO.
We are only responsible for our own actions - period. If Mr. Miller chooses to be a philanthropist, great. However, to act as if it is his duty because of what someone who is related did two centuries ago is foolish, not admirable.
My ancestors had done something wrong."
Can anyone join in? My father bombed German women and children in Dresden. Boo hoo; what shall I do?
Your ancestors did something that we now think is wrong, which isn't quite the same thing; and I wonder if the slaves' (possibly by now very numerous) descendants, if you can find them - which you probably can't - will really want you to come and weep over them? Let the past go; you can't change it, and this kind of virtue-signalling is self-indulgent at best.
The best way to repay any unfairness is to treat everyone with love and charity. Descendents of slave owners to black people, all Americans to Native Americans, and to Mexican laborers, and so on and so on. What is not right is to live your life like none of this ever happened, and as though you are entitled to everything your white privilege gains for you. I'm a pretty poor person, but I'm equally obliged to try to reduce pain and discrimination where it happens. No amount of money or anything else can make up for lives taken away from others who were forced to live in slavery.
The Talmud states: Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
Lynne I applaud your response.
Lynne - I know you mean well and you are right that the best antidote to racism is "to treat everyone with love and charity" - as long as you really do mean everyone. But, I feel your own "white privilege" is showing, in that you can only see obligations flowing from whites to everyone else, as if like a stream all non-whites were downstream to whites, and never the reverse. That is the essence of a white supremacist mentality, the same prejudice that motivated Rudyard Kipling to coin the term "the White Man's Burden." Racism will only end when we can think and act according to the principle expounded by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "I have a dream" speech - judge everyone by the content of their character and never by the color of their skin.
This is ridiculous.... it's not your fault what your ancestors did it's not our fault we are not our ancestors and I don't feel like we own anything ...what we should do is not continue the hate and learn to love each other
Healing is a process and complete healing takes time. No one can tell how much and how long.
My great grandparents operated an UNDERGROUND RAILWAY stop in Pennsylvania. They suffered for .My great grandfathers alsao fought for the Union.And Suffered due to the experience. Should my family be compensated for it? Neither collective guilt or virtue exist and the CONSTITUTION is the first legal western official government document to END the slave trade .It did not enshrine it.
You always see ancestry dot com commercials where the speaker says "Oh, I found out my great great grandfather invented sliced bread". You never hear "Oh, I found out my great great grandfather raped slaves and mutilated captured escapees". Born in sin, come on in.
This opinion is literally too black and white. What about the large number of Americans whose ancestors were mixed race? If they have fair skin, that has it’s benefits, yes. But not all had “old money” passed along. Not all were part of the upper class. Further; how is it that one is responsible for the choices his grandparents made?
I read America Magazine and readers comments’. So many responses shock me. This is a perfect example of a discussion that completely leaves Christ out of it. There are thoughtful and genuinely Christ-inspired responses, but many don’t even look at the problem past a legal view point. Ex. My parents weren’t even in this country at the time. My ancesters fought for the north. What about other countries who benefited from the slave trade should they pay for this. Etc.,etc., etc. Pretend that each of these arguments were presented to Christ. What would His response be. Ex., I have been working in the field all day. Why are the late comers getting to same reward? We are fortunate to live in this country. We benefit from the wisdom and labor of people that came before us. But our country is not gifted to us problem and sin free. As Americans we thank God for our privilege and accept the challenge continuing the journey toward a more just and less sinful community. Yes we owe the black people in this country. How that would happen I have no idea, but if we can put people on the moon, we can do it. What about a day of celebration for the black contributions. I know MLK day is sort of it. I’d like a more 4th of July day or St Pat’s. The Native Americans have also been robbed. America is not finished. It’s ongoing. Start now and fix it. This country is in a crisis. Isn’t anyone else worried? Sorry for the rant. Your thoughts.
And, oh by the way, can we identify the African Americans whose ancestors were African American owners of slaves for them to pay reparations also?
Thank you John for publishing the article. More importantly thank you for recognizing that a LOT is owed to those who are now being called African-Americans. And WE will and should make the decision of what restoration is. I find it very interesting in the comments below of those that admit they are immigrants do not want to take any ownership of the benefits they reaped on a SLAVERY, WAR RIDDEN SYSTEM!!! The very land you stand on today is STOLEN through BLOOD. The empire that the 'forefathers' claim they built was on the backs of SLAVERY and FREE LAND. There is countless documentation on the many wars that occurred on these lands so YOU could benefit. Not to mention some of those supposed immigrants were also brought over as INDENTURE SERVANTS, a nice way of saying white slavery. Who by the way worked the fields side by side with the African Slaves and tawny Indingenous Indians also BLACK (very few Africans were brought over because it was cheaper to bring in indenture servants from the old world, and to enslave the EXISTING Indingenous People on the land. Who knew how to work the land) So while you state your flawed arguement of why you feel you DO NOT owe anyone anything, as you stand on STOLEN LAND; You might want to look CLOSELY at your ancestory. Were you decendents of White Slavery? (If so, you are OWED AS WELL!!!) Did your ancestors own slaves? Or did you come later and benefited from a system of theft and slavery? Do your research and know where you truly stand with your BLOODLINE. Or just keep your head buried in the sand that it doesn't apply to you. The choice is yours, but know what is currently known as the United States WILL NOT continue to STAND until all TRUTHS are TOLD and JUSTICE is served.
Just a little point of history for you where Benjamin Franklin (an Immigrant) had a very tell all on Immigration into the new land. You take a look at the admission of the black tawny's across this planet, including the Americas and how he wanted America to remain White and Red (Red representing a mixture which is NOW known as the Native Americans)
Excerpt: Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Compexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy-germans/48324/?fbclid=IwAR30oJIinhHXRgUvdSWH0NiHKc4kMfXjoyTHqW4vWf5uzkFyFYeqekL2he0
Respectfully, a re-classified Indigenous American decendent of slaves
Help me Rhonda - in your system of reparations, how much do African-Americans owe those European immigrants who died in the civil war to make them free? If we follow your logic, wealthy African-Americans should seek out the descendants of those who lost family members in the Union army and atone for their loss. More money might be sought for slave descendants from descendants of some Africans who became very wealthy capturing slaves and selling them to the Europeans. The BBC did a report (link below). “In the early 18th century, Kings of Dahomey (known today as Benin) became big players in the slave trade, waging a bitter war on their neighbours, resulting in the capture of 10,000, including another important slave trader, the King of Whydah. King Tegbesu made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750. King Gezo said in the 1840's he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade: ‘The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…’”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9chapter2.shtml
What can you do? Be respectful to everyone equally...rich, poor, nicely dressed, badly dressed, whatever. There are many more slaves alive today than in the South before the Civil War. These slaves have no holidays and no time off after the harvest. Often they aren't allowed to go to church or even prayer groups. Many are in prisons on plea bargains for things they never actually did. Perhaps, to keep this personal, like you want to do, you could check the labels in your clothes and the origins of your electronics and Christmas toys. Then, since you care so deeply, use self restraint in buying anything from sweatshops or slaves. Keep it minimal or fair trade. You asked!
In 2017 Baltimore had the worst rate of homicide in its history, the previous worst was 2015 and the intervening year saw a slight DECREASE in deaths but accompanied by an INCREASE in shootings. Evidently Baltimore doctors are becoming expert at treating gunshot wounds - as in war zones - and the higher the number of casualties the greater the proportion they can save.
Nearly all of these are Black on Black killings. Should we blame the legacy of slavery? What about trying Catholic social teaching on the importance of marriage, the family and personal responsibility? Wasn't Baltimore the first Catholic diocese in what is now the USA?
Before the Baltimore Sun became unavailable in Ireland (due to EU Data Protection rules) I read several mock-surprised comments by - presumably white - readers along the lines: "But we removed the Confederate monuments!" Their sarcasm was perfectly justified and articles like this only serve to justify their cynicism.