On empty apologizing and vacuous legislative rhetoric

Naked bids by politicians to hold onto power compel them to do bizarre things. Sometimes the actions seem so much out of turn and extraordinary that it makes one reflect on our opportunistic tendencies. A latest example of this was the successful effort by Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee based house member in the United States Congress, (a white individual who represents a majority-black district in Memphis) spurring and passing a bill in the Congress that apologized to black Americans for "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow" segregation.

Oh, by the way, he faces re-election seven days from today.

The apology seems to have come about 140 years after slavery was abolished.

A fashion trend that seems to be overtaking the legislatures around the world is apologizing for atrocities so egregious that detailing some of the incidents might induce the throwing up of ones last meal. It seems to me that telling the descendants of peoples long after they were subjugated, appropriated, abused and taken advantage of economically, socially and culturally serves only to reopen sore and healing wounds and nothing else. If however, the politicians had told us that along with the apology came a grant that served to open up a number of hospitals, public schools and recreation centers in economically blighted areas with appropriate rehabilitation programs, it might have come with some meaning. Of course, then, the government would be labeled communists and pandering to socialist ideals. Either way, an empty apology is not going to wake anyone up and would do little to help the downward slide perpetuated by racial policies from long ago.

In related news, Canada delivered an apology to indigenous people who as children were ripped from their families and sent to boarding schools, where many were abused as part of official government policy to "kill the Indian in the child."

Also, the Australians apologized to the "Stolen Generations" i.e. aboriginal children taken from their parents to be raised by white families in order to enforce the following policy: "Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the race and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white..."

On June 15, 1920, Duluth, MN police arrested several young black men accused of raping a white woman. That evening, three of them – Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie – are taken from jail by a mob and lynched. As was common, a postcard was made to commemorate the event. (Picture ripped from here)

Lyrics from a recent song ‘Beer for my Horses’ by superstar country singer Toby Keith

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he'd done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see


STRANGE FRUIT – a poem by Lewis Allan
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Slavery: Modern day effects

Could there be a direct link that can be proven and backed by numbers about the correlation between African countries most ravaged by slavery and those that are the most underdeveloped today?

Even if there were one, can it be verifiably measured?

Assistant Professor of economics at Harvard University, Nathan Nunn believes that the African countries with the biggest slave exports are by and large the countries with the lowest incomes now.

That relationship, according to him, is not a coincidence - one actually helped to cause the other.

It's a sweeping, ambitious recasting of slavery's horrific commerce. It is also a work of risky estimates and serious statistical gymnastics. Somehow, Nunn had to account for some 17 million slaves by their ethnic origins - a task some historians say can't accurately be done, but that Nunn nonetheless undertook, mining slavery data compiled over decades by other scholars. He also had to prove that his findings of cause and effect weren't polluted by a long list of variables that seem likely to have affected Africa's economies in the last 600 years. Nunn, a 33-year-old assistant professor, didn't shy away from this either, devising ways to control for everything from climate to natural resources to geography to Islamic influence to a country's particular brand of colonialism.

For the moment, Nunn said, he can't say what the implications of his research might be. But his first, tentative steps in that direction are intriguing. Meshing his numbers with those of other scholars, Nunn has found that the countries he identified as having the most slaves taken are also the countries that have the most ethnic fractionalization today. It may well be that the ethnic fault lines driving Africa's worst conflicts have powerful roots in slavery, which required Africans to turn on one another in order to capture one another, severely weakening communal ties and preventing the spread of services like education, health facilities, and access to water across a large population.

The Boston Globe explains the otherwise hard to read mathematical paper with a great degree of clarity. For those numerically and statistically inclined, here is a pdf link to the 32 page paper.

SignandSight puts it right when it made the following comment on this effort:

For one, it seems to support arguments long held in some development camps that the best use of foreign aid dollars lies not in conventional relief efforts - the food drops and water wells and antimalarial nets - but in long-term investments to rebuild economic and political institutions.

Image from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Description (from source above): Two slaves against a backdrop of sugar fields. Woman, on right, is seated under a tree, with basket filled with fruits and vegetables; she wears bead bracelets, armlets, earrings, and a large bead necklace. The man, wearing a loin cloth, holds a spade in one hand and a cutlass or knife in the other, with a bunch of sugar cane under his arm. Letters A-D, very briefly identify the images in this scene. As translated: A, Negro; B, Negress; C, Sugar Cane; D, A "pagaal," or basket for carrying produce

Like Cattle

Divia (28, Indian) is a former domestic slave.

Slavery is alive and well, only in more sophisticated forms. Recently England celebrated the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slave trade. An exhibition currently on in England tracks the hard reality of human trafficking and contrary to what people might think, the slave business is flourishing and very well at that. These haunting photographs tell us a great deal and leave out a lot.

The photographs, by Panos photographers Karen Robinson and David Rose, represent a rare and intimate insight into the mechanics of this fastest growing form of modern day slavery and explore the devastating impact it has on people's lives. The exhibition seeks to expose the reality of trafficking in the UK and the action needed to tackle it. The participating agencies are lobbying the UK Government to make good on its recent promise to sign and ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings in order to guarantee minimum standards of protection and support for trafficked people.