( A REVISED VERSION OF THIS PIECE APPEARED ON THE NEW REPUBLIC ONLINE ON APRIL 9, 2007)
When Virginia legislators voted unanimously last month to express “profound regret” over the Old Dominion’s role in promoting slavery and Jim Crow they seemed to have unloosed a flood of demands for expressions of white contrition. Maryland recently followed Virginia’s lead and similar action is also being debated not only in Georgia but in several other states, stretching from Missouri all the way to Vermont. Tennessee Democratic congressman Steve Cohen has also introduced a House resolution calling for a national apology. Virginia state senator Henry L. Marsh III, a black Democrat who played a key role in getting the apology resolution through a majority Republican legislature, explained that he foresaw no “ true progress in this country until we get a reconciliation and an honest dialogue about race and slavery." Meanwhile, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorialized that while an apology “will not change Georgia’s past, ” it would “confirm that Georgia is committed to a better future for all its citizens.”
This pretty much sums up the consensus among proponents of such apologies, but whether such gestures actually represent benchmarks of progress for blacks and harbingers of greater progress to come is certainly subject to debate. In fact, a closer look at the causes and potential consequences of the great apology push suggests some fairly ominous political ramifications and implications for many African Americans. Apology advocates insist that a simple “acknowledgment that a wrong took place” is long overdue and argue that such an acknowledgment will lead to a better understanding of the enduring disparities in education and income between blacks and whites. Ironically, however, it is those African Americans whose circumstances most reflect those disparities who may have the most to lose here. During a severe fiscal crisis that threatened state services in 2003, the Georgia legislature spent a whole session arguing about the appearance of the state flag, a debate that 70 percent of those polled thought either divisive or trivial. Four years later, with funding for cash-strapped PeachCare, a health insurance program for children of the working poor, hanging in the balance, I’m inclined to doubt that the 41 percent of black families in Georgia earning less than $25,000 per year really wanted to see their lawmakers butting heads over whether to apologize for slavery.
. Some think that the NAACP’s insistence on pushing for action that is both politically polarizing and largely symbolic in any event reveals an organization out of sync with contemporary realities and thus, as African American columnist Leonard Pitts put it, “stagnant, static and marginal to today’s struggle.” No one could possibly calculate the value of the NAACP’s contributions to ending the most blatant forms of racial discrimination and making equal opportunity more than a slogan for millions of African Americans. Paradoxically, however, the more successful the NAACP and other activist groups have been in bringing progress, the greater their challenge to demonstrate their continuing relevance and importance. Differences over how best to accomplish this led to the resignation earlier this month of NAACP president Bruce S. Gordon. Gordon stepped down after just nineteenth months when his efforts to get the organization more involved in self-help initiatives such as pregnancy counseling and various mentoring programs met stiff resistance from a board of directors intent on restricting the group to its traditional role of aggressive social advocacy in behalf of African Americans victimized by racial discrimination..
The central question here, it seems, is not whether African-Americans are due an apology but what that apology will actually indicate or achieve. In Virginia, one of the Republican state senators who voted for the official apology apparently had a dramatic change of heart after suggesting a few weeks earlier that black Virginians should simply “get over” slavery. In Georgia, state senate president pro-tem Eric Johnson, a white Republican, initially found the NAACP's demand for an apology "rather silly," but agreed to go along with the proposal so long as the word "apology" itself was not used. "An apology is from someone who did wrong to someone who was wronged," Johnson explained. "That's not going to happen." More than anything, Johnson admitted, he just wanted to " get it over with." His Republican colleague, state senator Jeff Mullis, went a step further in demonstrating just how meaningless the whole business was to him when he reportedly offered to attach the slavery apology resolution to his oft-submitted bill calling for April to be designated “Confederate History and Heritage Month” in Georgia.
Suffice it to say, none of these examples suggest the kind of sincere, remorseful acknowledgment envisioned by Georgia NAACP leader Edward O. Dubose—that “whites benefited from slavery and the inhumane treatment of African Americans.” It is almost beside the point that well under a third of Georgia’s white male population in 1860 owned slaves, for there is little hard evidence that most whites feel any real responsibility for the actions of their ancestors, much less for the actions of someone else’s.
The idea of an apology for slavery doubtless has considerable emotional appeal to many African Americans, but the politics of symbolism can never be isolated from the politics of substance. What, in practical terms, would a formal apology for slavery really accomplish? Would it, as some opponents charge, lay the groundwork for a renewed call for reparations, and if so, would it really lend any more credibility to what seems nothing more than a politically divisive pipe dream? The aim here may well be nothing more than an honest dialogue on the historical roots of contemporary racial problems, but the only dialogue I’ve seen so far is taking place in the back rooms where white leaders huddle with black leaders to come up with language that white conservatives deem acceptable. On the other hand, what if, as I suspect, politically savvy white conservatives are beginning to see apologies for slavery and Jim Crow not as a stepping stone toward further discussion of the obligations of the present to the past, but as just the opposite, a quick and relatively painless means of achieving cloture on a debate whose end should not otherwise be anywhere in sight? Such apologies may well, as advocates like Senator Marsh contend, give us a chance to “move ahead,” but they don’t necessarily assure that we all intend to go in the same direction.
