BrianGarst.com

The House is apparently about to apologize on behalf of dead men for a crime committed against dead men.

The House of Representatives was poised Tuesday to pass a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for slavery and the era of Jim Crow.

The nonbinding resolution, which is expected to pass, was introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, a white lawmaker who represents a majority black district in Memphis, Tennessee.

…By passing the resolution, the House would also acknowledge the “injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow.”

…”African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow — long after both systems were formally abolished — through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty, the frustration of careers and professional lives, and the long-term loss of income and opportunity,” the resolution states.

Certainly slavery was all of those things – an injustice, cruel, brutal and inhumane.  However, there is no denying (as the resolution attempts to do) that the descendants of slaves are much better off today than they otherwise would be, despite the abhorrent immorality of slavery itself.  Descendants of slavery, if there had been no such institution, would today be inhabiting a continent full of misery, civil war and genocide instead of a land of unparalleled opportunity.  This fact is by no means meant to mitigate the atrocities of slavery and certainly cannot be used to provide a post hoc moral justification for such a horrendous practice, but it is fact nonetheless.

If the House is interested in apologizing for things that have made today’s black community worse off, and not just those things that harmed it in the past, I suggest they start apologizing for The New Deal and Great Society disasters, both of which have done a magnificent job of decimating the black family – something even slavery could not accomplish.

race issues