If I thought it would help I'd send it in an instant. But as a Brit I don't think it will have much sway, I do wish you all the best with it though.

Regards and respect as always, Kev.

 

I see that the House of Represntatives passed a resolution for the apology today.


http://afp. google. com/article/ALeqM5jSl-HUek9Cb0duBfjjuRCrlF7kAA
 

Wow, that is touching. I hadnt heard that Ms Morrison did that.

 

I disagree about this not doing any good. This is a part of our history we cannot tolerate forgetting, smoothing over etc. The pain we caused is viserally embedded within each African-American. Until we fully acknowledge the atrosities, we cannot even BEGIN to put ourselves in their shoes.

All this uproar about Obama's minister is the tip of the iceberg that most of us want to ignore or write off as militant. And, as much as any of us could possibly empathize...we will never know the impact of the pain, humiliation, or degragation emposed upon a people. Not apologizing is "status quo," like the elephant sitting in the living room, everyone walking around it, refusing to show the courage to admit the horror of what it caused.

As a white woman, I often wondered how so-called religious white women in the days of slavery tolerated their spouses abusing black women or breaking up families. I cannot even imagine the horror. Several years ago I read a book by Bell Hooks (Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism) that helped me to understand the role and complicity these white women.

Good luck and count me in!
 

We used to vacation down at Isle of Palms and would visit Sullivan's Island. The tourist literature was full of Civil War information, but surprisingly, no mention of the slaves who had walked on the same ground. I guess '12-15 million souls bought and sold here' wasn't a snappy headline for the brochure.


Dolores
 

Mr.
Douglas, what inspired you to begin this quest for an apology?
 

I totally applaud your efforts.
Keep up the fight!
 

I would like to get involved. I believe it is long over due as well.
What can I do to help?

Brenda Boyd
cboyd53818@aol.com
 

The message behind this movement is to blame people who have done no wrong for something that someone else did. No amount of politicially correct symbolic gesturing will reinvent history. What happened has happened, and while I don't live in Ms. Morrison's head, it seems as though she feels that since she can't get at the perpetrators of slavery, she will make sure that someone must take the blame.


I would remind those who think like her that hundreds of thousands of soldiers (and many civilians) died in the Civil War so that slaves could be freed. Her movement makes a mockery out of all those people--of *all* races--who died in the war.


No, I will *not* apologize for something that I did *not* do. Furthermore, asking me to apologize is an insult to me because from the very first time I read about slavery as a child, I was horrified by its practice.
Should I also apologize for The Holocaust, the mass murders, in Rwanda, the purges of Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot's "year zero" campaign?

This is all about sending the message that anyone who is not of African descent is somehow morally inferior, and at its core it is racist. Yes, it makes a lot of White liberals feel good, but if these people actually thought about its message, what it is really saying is "apologize to me and that will get the slaveowners off the hook".


No Ms. Morrison, *nothing* will atone for the henious atrocity of slavery. None of these symbolic self-loathing gestures will justify the horrors perpetrated on those subjected to what happened until 1865.


A *lot* of people of all races have put themselves in danger for the freedoms we have today--including the freedom of a Black person to get elected (by a clear majority I might add) president of the United States by a predominantly White electorate.
So should our president-elect apologize as well? What guilt does *he* have in this?
 

Well, let's see if the European & African nations will take the lead in this apology since they started slavery long before the USA. No one seems to remember those facts. America gets all the blame.

 

While I applaude your good intensions, I feel ALL the folks so appologetic about the slavery in this nation conveniently FORGET that that condition was rampant worldwide at that time, and indeed, Americans did NOT venture into the interior of the countries of Africa and capture these unfortunate victims.


The various tribes in Africa routinely captured members of other tribes in wars, and were probably MUCH less considerate of them than the whites who considered them as valuable "livestock". The middle east, Asia, and many other civilizations ALL had "slaves", no matter what the names were: I.E. serf, indentured, debtor, concubine, or just POOR.


In that sense we STILL have "slaves", only now we call them "low income".


Let's get real about this, and use the past to correct the CURRENT discrepancies. Those folks are long gone, and those now living need all the help available just to survive in our horrible economy. If you relly NEED someone to give "reparations" to, let's take better care of OUR seniors of all races, so they can have medicine, food, utilities, and MAYBE a little left for some small entertainment occasions.
These folks kept us free from Nazis, Imperialism, etc, and we owe THEM!!!

Surely you, Mr Douglas can relate to this inequity ....