8/2/2019 Do We Need an Apology

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Do we need an: 'an apology for slavery isnot enough'by Randall Robinson

A people can only see as far ahead as they can see behind. The future of a people is always to be found somewherein the internalized image of its past. When the mirror is shattered or warped, when a race of people is stripped of along-term story of itself, that race's prospects for success over the long-term are damaged, if not crushed altogether.

This is what European and North American slaveholder societies did to millions of Afr icans for more than 400 years.This is why America owes African-Americans an apology--and more. Recently, Alabama joined Maryland, NorthCarolina and Virginia in apologizing for slavery. This is a good beginning, but it is not nearly enough.

During the Middle Passage alone, more than 30 million Blacks were killed. Millions of families were destroyed. Ourwomen were savagely raped. In places like South Carolina, our men were routinely severed of their sex organs. Overthe brutal centuries, our people lost not only the value of their labor and their lives, but, even more consequentially,they lost all historical memory--the psychological, health-sustaining apparatus of our ancient cultures: languages,religions, mores, names, our very identities as human beings.

History has shown that the economic poverty we suffer as a result of slavery can be recovered from far more quicklythan the psychological poverty resulting from the organized obliteration of our cultural memory. Slavery has left us to

this day, lost within ourselves. So wounded are we by the residual assaults of slavery and its aftermath that few of uscan identify the causes of our current dilemma. After four centuries, our jerrybuilt new cultures have stripped many ofus of any faculty to think critically--to remember anything very much about all that happened to us, as well as whowas, and who remains, responsible.

Had historians been polled in the year 1200 on where Africa, Asia, or Europe would place 800 years thence, not oneof them would likely have placed Europe first. Similarly, not one of them would have placed Africa last. For Europe, inthe year 1200, had long been the most backward of the three major world regions.

More than 500 years earlier, Africans in Timbuktu had built Sankore, the world's first university, where cataractsurgery was being pioneered by African surgeons. This was well before the Moors arrived in Spain from Africa tobuild Europe's first university at Salamanca after 711 AD.

Then descended the awful, memory-killing, culture-extinguishing night of slavery and the TransAtlantic slave trade.After that, we would no longer be able to remember the grand learning centers of Timbuktu and all the otherennobling glories of Africa in its golden antiquity.

The act of slavery has long since ended, yes, but its time-release social toxins are deep inside us now, killing ourunsheltered souls with greater lethality than ever before.

Today, coarse faux poets fabricate Black culture on the trendy fly, lacing it as they go with poisonous elements ofself-hate and misogyny. One of every eight prisoners in the world today is an African-American. This is still anotherdiscrimination-driven consequence of slavery that threatens the very existence of Blacks in America. Few Blacksspeak of this stunning fact--for we, as a people, are now all but wholly outer-directed.

If Black Americans fail to apprehend the gravity of our current condition, if we believe that we are due no apology--notto speak of reparations--if we are too confused to muster a simple liberating demand for them, it is only because weare too sick in our heads to understand what has been done to us incrementally, and so comprehensively, over thepast four centuries.

Others, less damaged--Jews and Japanese-Americans--who were abused over much shorter periods of time, andsurvived with their cultures intact, demanded and received the reparations they deserved. The case for reparations isinfinitely stronger for African-Americans--heirs, as we are, to a past greatness we have been caused to rememberlittle, if anything, about.