Better Enlightenment Than Apology
Apologies are less exciting to me than seeing America inform itself about slavery.
What the nation should do about the legacy of slavery was the cover story in Newsweek last week. And the movie “Amistad” is opening just now. There have been stories of school teachers who try to communicate the pain of the Middle Passage by making students lie down, crunched together on gymnasium floors.
Education is the apology. An America who would dare to understand the horror that was perpetrated under the banner of democracy is an America who can make serious progress on racism.
Americans need to be reminded that slavery was not merely the brutal treatment of dark-skinned people, although that is evil enough. Slavery was merely the most horrific example of a white superiority that has ebbed and flowed, but has never been broken.
It is helpful to remember that slavery on a mass scale could come only after Indians were written off as savages and wiped out by the white settlers. In one decisive battle, at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, the United States took over more than half the land in what is now Alabama, including land belonging to Indian tribes that had joined with the U.S. in hopes of benevolent treatment.
Soon after, the Cherokees, Chickasaws and Seminoles were driven west of the Mississippi River. In 1816, most of the cotton picked by slaves came from South Carolina and Georgia. By 1840, the bulk of it came from Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
While “Amistad,” a movie that depicts a slave mutiny and the exoneration of the slaves before the U.S. Supreme Court, covers an important event, it was but a momentary victory. It is ironic that John Quincy Adams, who would later argue the case of the slaves before the court in 1841, was ousted from the presidency by the pro-slavery Andrew Jackson in 1829. It was under Jackson’s presidency (to 1837) that the volume of cotton produced by slavery’s hand grew six times what it had been in 1816.
It was Jackson who had led the U.S. forces at Horseshoe Bend.
After slavery, white superiority hit Chinese immigrants in the face. In the 1880s, 28 Chinese coal miners were shot or burned to death by rampaging white Americans in Wyoming. Though some people will say the issue was only one of class, a clear legacy of slavery in the Industrial Revolution was the acceptance of a hierarchal structure of labor, with African-Americans, Asians, and Mexicans at the bottom, poor white Americans or the newest Europeans barely above them in the mills, mines and farms, and the more established Europeans at the top.
At times, labor unions attempted to unite poor white and black workers, but general uproar over such alliances almost always undermined the attempts. While elite white industrialists raked in profits and built ornate summer mansions in Newport, R.I., shafted white workers were left with the consolation that they were still better than black folks.
Unwilling or unable to claw at the mansions, many white Americans commenced 60 years of lynching and segregation. In the North, African-Americans might have had the vote, but the white working class reminded black folks of their place with anti-black rampages in New York City in 1900, Springfield, Ill., in 1908, East St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919 and Detroit in 1941.
Millions of white Americans are genuine victims of the new economy, with widening gaps in wealth and far less job security. But instead of focusing on that or universal health care, or runaway college tuitions, a huge chunk of energy has been diverted to welfare and crime, issues that several studies confirm have unfairly been given a black face.
Studies show that white Americans are more harsh on social policy when the presumed recipient is black. While corporate America fires thousands of white folks every month, these victims, with few unions left to vent for them, instead scream for the death penalty, damn low-income women, lock the doors against black and brown immigration, and blast affirmative action.
White folks need to study slavery to see that they are in the same trap as in the 1800s. The best apology is to keep the movies, the magazine articles and the scholarship coming. You cannot undo nearly four centuries of white superiority with a 40-minute speech. It is far more important for white leaders to understand how four centuries of that superiority still makes remedies like affirmative action so vital to the notion of equal opportunity.
Many white Americans roll they eyes upon hearing the word “slavery” because they never owned any slaves. But they still own a lot. They own the option of whether to criticize those in the highest places or condemn those in the lowest. They own the key to the second Emancipation, which would be freedom from the enslaved white mind.