A special committee of the Missouri House met yesterday in the historic Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis to hear testimony on a resolution which would have the State of Missouri officially apologize for allowing the enslavement of blacks for over a century.
The resolution (H.C.R. 26) is sponsored by State Rep. T.D. El-Amin.
“I think what’s bigger than an apology is the opportunity to open a dialogue about the disparities that exist,” El-Amin told PubDef.net. “There’s a direct connection between those disparities and slavery.”
No.
And that’s unfortunate, because we demand exactly the same sort of apology from other countries, like Turkey, Germany, and Japan, where few living participated in the atrocious policies of the state. And we rightfully expect such an apology, because it’s important to officially recognize the harm done in the past and the connection to conditions in the present.
In my home state of Louisiana, all too often whites believe that slavery was an essentially benign institution that would have eventually been abandoned as economically outmoded, rather than a cruel immoral construct that would have remained an injustice even if it had been economically viable. And people there often use that mindset to justify nonwhites as not quite human and not deserving of better jobs, homes, city services, and political offices.