The practice was wrong and evil, but it's stupid for Missouri to consider issuing an "apology" for slavery as proposed by State Representative Talibdin El-Amin, a Democrat.
JEFFERSON CITY | Missouri would be one of the first states to apologize for a history of slavery under a resolution introduced by a St. Louis lawmaker.The resolution details more than 140 years of slavery and says “an apology for centuries of brutal dehumanization and injustices cannot ease the past, but confession of the wrongs can speed racial healing and reconciliation.â€
An acknowledgment of the wrongness of slavery is certainly not out of place, but that acknowledgment has already been written into our Constitution with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers. What better "apology" can be made now, when both the perpetrators and the victims of slavery are long since dead?
It's utter nonsense until you realize that this call for an apology is really just the opening salvo in the legal battle for "reparations". (Sorry for putting quotes around everything, but it's hard to take the ridiculous vocabulary seriously.) Those who advocate taking money from white Americans and giving it to black Americans as some sort of payment for slavery handily ignore a myriad of facts: there are no living ex-slaves; there are no living ex-slave-owners; many American whites' ancestors had no involvement with slavery or even fought to end it; many American blacks' ancestors had no involvement with slavery or even sold slaves to the slave traders. If you overlook those critical points, the proposed reparation equation is:
(1) reparations = (average white American wealth) - (average black American wealth)
But that equation is ridiculous on its face! Why should the ancestors of slaves compare their wealth to the wealth of white Americans, when without slavery they would never have left Africa? Why isn't the proper equation:
(2) reparations = (average black African wealth) - (average black American wealth)
Under equation (2), the reparations would be negative. That's right: as horrible as slavery was, those who have benefited most from it are modern black Americans. This doesn't mean that slavery was a good thing, but it does illustrate that calls for "apologies" and "reparations" are foolish and reflect a complete ignorance of history.
