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“ON behalf of the government of the United States of America, I want to apologize for the role my country played in the African slave trade”. According to DeWayne Wickham, a USA TODAY columnist, President George Bush should have instructed his low-level diplomat, a deputy assistant secretary of state, to say on his behalf at a Conference on World Racism that took place in Durban, South Africa on August of 2001. The President decided against dispatching former Secretary of State Colin Powell to the conference, whose members undoubtedly raised the issue of reparations for the descendants of 15 million Africans who were enslaved in the Americas. President Bush wanted no part of this conversation. The President did, however, travel to Dakar, Senegal on the first leg of a five-nation African tour. His intention: to hail Senegal, a “fledging democracy” with a Muslim majority, as an ally in the fight against international terror. The President hoped to improve his nation’s image on the world stage that has worsened since the Iraq war. “There was a kind of an attachment to the word ‘America’ with ‘war’”, Bush said in an interview with African journalists. “If there’s a constant effort to describe America as a non-caring country, then people are going to have a bad attitude about us”. There he touted a five-year, $15 billion initiative to help combat and treat AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean; and, by promoting the proposal in Africa, Bush hopes to boost awareness of the disease in America. “It’s important for our fellow citizens to realize that while we live a relatively luxurious life throughout our society, there’s a pandemic that’s destroying a lot of people, ruining families”. Had George Bush, the President of the United States of America, made a heart-felt apology for his nation’s participation in the buying and selling of millions of souls, his efforts would have elevated this nation to a moral high ground by acknowledging its foundational financial link to chattel slavery.
In March of 2007 Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, remarked that the UK’s role in the Trans Atlantic slave trade was a matter of “deep sorrow and regret”. His remarks followed after commemorating the 200th anniversary of his nation’s key legislation abolishing the slave trade.
A casual observer of history who chooses to gauge lingering physical and psychological effects of the Trans Atlantic slave trade, a “peculiar institution” that spanned more than four centuries throughout Africa and the Caribbean, enslaved millions of black Africans like cattle to be bought and sold, and whose inferior social status were cemented by a myriad of federal and state laws here in America, may say that no legacy of chattel slavery exists in American society today, that no measurable traces exist. Serious historians, however, beg to differ. There is a legacy.
Eric Williams, the first elected Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago whose exhaustive researches into the mercantilist dalliances of the then world powers – among them Great Britain, France, Portugal and, yes, America – earned him a much-deserved Oxford University doctorate thesis entitled The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the British West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery, in which he mentions that the profits gained by buying and selling slaves and sugar led to the growth of three great seaport towns in Great Britain: Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool. One local analyst of the time noted this: “There is not…a brick in the city [Bristol] but what is cemented with the blood of a slave”. Steve Martin, a noted historian of black history in Great Britain, mentions the English county home called Harewood House in Yorkshire and the Georgian Queen Square in Bristol as physical reminders of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. Both physical landmarks are permanent physical reminders of slavery.Many serious-minded liberal social scientists chronicle the psychological effects of chattel slavery, viewing themselves as champions of a viewpoint discounted by their conservative counterparts.
Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist and currently John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, wonders why conservative social scientists are so allergic to cultural explanations for a “tragic disconnection” of millions of black youth from the American mainstream, black poverty, black male unemployment, poor schooling, inferior housing and inferior health-care. He links black male self-destructiveness, for example, not to an “immediate” connection between attitudes and behavior, but to their brutalized past. “It is impossible”, says Patterson, “…to understand the predatory sexuality and irresponsible fathering behavior of young black men with going back deep into their collective past”. Pure socio-economic factors, he asserts, are of “limited explanatory power” and he refutes the idea that cultural explanations for social issues affecting African-Americans casts them as a victims. “Modern students of culture have long shown that while it partly determines behavior, it also enables people to change behavior. People use their culture as a frame for understanding their world”.
The legacy of chattel slavery is somewhat like a “disease” whose social psychological consequences cemented such a dehumanizing socio-political effect on African-and Native-Americans that many U.S. black activists today propose that its legacy is partly, if now wholly, responsible for the current level of HIV/AIDS within these communities. Recent polls by the Leadership on Civil Rights found that Blacks continue to have the highest or nearest highest rates of poverty, victims of violence, and HIV/AIDS affliction than any other group in America. Throughout the decades of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, African-Americans became the poster group for racial dysfunction. The image of Blacks as lazy, crime and violence prone, irresponsible, and sexual predators stoked white fears and hostility and served as an irresistible rationale for lynchings, racial assaults, hate crimes and police violence during the latter part of the 20th century; this is because the white majority that held tremendous power within the U.S. government in business during the hey-day of racial segregation – most of whom were Southern planters - profited financially from chattel slavery. The U.S. government encoded slavery in the Constitution, and protected it and nourished it for a century. To date, no American president has ever issued a former apology for U.S. complicity in the African slave trade.
New York University historian Robin D.G. Kelly points out that the European Enlightenment idea of freedom, which had been transplanted to America and its governmental institutions, led to the ideology of white supremacy: “The problem that they had to figure out is how can we promote liberty, freedom, democracy on the one hand, and a system of slavery and exploitation of people who are non-white on the other”, propagating an idea of racial hierarchy of white supremacy that had become conventional wisdom. Yet the conventional wisdom of white supremacy that engulfed Enlightenment thought dehumanized non-white peoples worldwide. The French thinker Rousseau, who held Europe to account for educating all its citizens, stressed societal morals over brute science, thereby challenging Europe to look into itself. Through chattel slavery, European morality and its political institutions suffered greatly; European science and industry tipped the scales of moral and political equality in favor of whites. Christianity, touted by unenlightened European missionaries as the antidote for upgrading the moral sentiments of Africans, demoralized them still further; instead, it was associated with the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery.William Brown Hodgson (1801-1871), a linguist who took a keen interest in Africa and Islam, wrote that the Muslim faith, unlike Catholicism, requires, as a fundamental principle, the free and universal reading and the study of their sacred book; instead of withholding it from the people under penalties of death and perdition, Muslim missionaries established schools for class primarily to teach its language and doctrines. Many Muslim slaves came to the Americas with a literary tradition that was based in the Qur’an and in Islamic mystical, philosophical and juridical traditions. One specific goal relating to slave literacy was the belief that literacy was more than a path to individual freedom; it was a communal act, a political demonstration for the Black community. Other, more liberal-minded Whites believed that literacy was an essential component of human progress; thus they taught slaves in the conviction that all people should learn to read.
By apologizing for America’s immoral conduct, President Bush would have reminded American whites about U.S. complicity in the African slave trade. The president could have used his historic trip to Senegal with a speech on racial issues in America, Africa and the rest of the world. Then-president Bill Clinton came close when, five years ago, on a visit to Africa, declared: “Before we were even a nation, European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade, and we were wrong in that”.
The writer is a recent revert to Islam and can be reached at: drummondhugh@verizon.net
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