I used to have a great analogy that I used in Graduate School about the current perception of racial politics versus the reality of it to younger generations. I forget the details, but the analogy had to do with likening the use of racial politics to riding a bike and Al Sharpton (among others in the older generations) constantly riding this bike while everyone below a certain age had figured out that there is a better, more effective way to travel if you just stop hanging on to ideas that are almost half a century old, etc. I forget the details, but I think yesterday’s victory of a black man in a 95% white state (carried on the shoulders of young, white people) tells the same point even better.

In other words, if my white skin puts me at some type of fault for slavery that took place before my people arrived in this country, then my ancestors’ red hair on one side of the family and heavy Italian accents on the other side of the family need to be taken into account. There are still parts of this country where if your last name ends in a vowel and you like pasta or if you have a “Mc” or an “O” beginning your last name, you get a snide look (thankfully, though, not so much in the Northeast any more).

But you raise excellent points regarding the institutional racism that black folks faced after being freed. Yet there was institutional racism that effected many other foreign peoples with descendants in living in American today, too. And there were other people (most notably the Irish and Chinese), who were forced into slavery and brought to this country against their will during the last few hundred years.

What would be best, I think, is for any slavery apology to be inclusive of all ethnic groups who were discriminated against in the form of slavery/forced labor.

And your central question seems dead-on to me: “I do wonder, however, the relevancy of such an apology given that it’s 2008 and the slaves were freed in 1863…145 years ago.”

But I don’t believe that the answer to that question is what you think it is. Those who were enslaved in N.J. and elsewhere for generations were eventually freed. But that simply meant they were dumped out into society with nothing, and certainly not any of the things they had in their homelands (family structure, culture, religion, values, as well as land, a living, and material goods).

The freed slaves, and their descendants, then endured another century of official discrimination and dreadful treatment (from lynchings down to the lack of equal access to jobs). I think it’s little wonder that their descendants today have not yet caught up with the rest of society, and feel that our country hasn’t fully acknowledged what happened, or how it left the survivors.

Our immigrant ancestors, by contrast, arrived here of their own choice, and while many had little money, they generally had family, culture, and religion, and usually had some education, or at least strong values, to guide them. And they usually had white skin, which until the 1960s meant that they weren’t held back by the legal discrimination and open racism of much of the country. Even today, of course, blacks often face unofficial discrimination or prejudice that the descendants of other immigrants often do not.

So I think it’s hard to argue that the legacy of slavery isn’t with us today.

Thanks,

James