Apology for slavery

A people can only see as far ahead as they can see behind. A future of a people is always to be found somewhere in the internalized image of its past. When the mirror is shattered or warped, when a race of people is stripped of a long-term story of itself, that races’ 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 Africans for more than 400 years. This is why America owes African-Americans an apology — and more…


During the Middle Passage alone more than 30 million Blacks were killed. Millions of families were destroyed… Over the brutal centuries, our people lost 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 the economic poverty we suffer as a result of slavery can be recovered from far more quickly than the psychological poverty resulting from the organized obliteration of our cultural memory.


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


One of every eight prisoners in the world today is an African-American. This is still another discrimination-driven consequence of slavery that threatens the very existence of Blacks in America. Few Blacks speak of this stunning fact — for we, as a people, are now all but wholly outer-directed…


Others less damaged — Jews and Japanese-Americans — who were abused over much shorter periods of time, and survived with their cultures intact, demanded and received the reparations they deserved. The case for reparations is infinitely stronger for African-Americans — heirs, as we are, to a past greatness we have been caused to remember little, if anything, about. – Randal Robinson, EBONY magazine excerpt August 2007