COMPLETE TEXT OF ALABAMA'S SLAVERY APOLOGY May 25, 2007 The complete text of the slavery apology resolution approved by the Alabama Legislature on Thursday: WHEREAS, slavery has been documented as a worldwide practice since antiquity, dating back to 3500 B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia; and WHEREAS, during the course of the infamous Atlantic Slave Trade, millions of Africans became involuntary immigrants to the New World, and millions more died during passage; the first African slaves in »
WRITING IN ESSENCE MAGAZINE, ""AMISTAD'' midwife Debbie Allen described the Joseph Cinque saga as ""a little drop in a big bucket of blood memory we need to share with the world.'' Allen's implicit assumption is that ""Amistad'' is not enough, that we need to reach deeper into that bucket if we are to understand America. S. Allen Counter, neurophysiologist, Harvard University professor and head of the Harvard Foundation, believes that nothing less than a national »
THERE IS a simple reason American presidents will not apologize for slavery. An apology for the past means asking white Americans to take responsibility for the present. One hundred and forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that remains a task too heavy for presidents to perform. The truth remains too terrible for Americans to bear. Twice in five years a president has gone to Africa. Both said how terrible slavery was. In 1998, Bill Clinton »
For nations, like people, distant memory of trauma can be submerged and repressed but never extinguished. It surfaces in words, in politics and sometimes in the movies. In the middle of Steven Spielberg's new film, ""Amistad,'' which opens next week, comes ""the Middle Passage''--the journey of Africans to the New World. Like the Nazi rampage through the Jewish ghetto in ""Schindler's List,'' these spare scenes are among the most wrenching ever put on film. They »
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama opposes offering reparations to the descendants of slaves, putting him at odds with some black groups and leaders. The man with a serious chance to become the nation's first black president argues that government should instead combat the legacy of slavery by improving schools, health care and the economy for all. "I have said in the past _ and I'll repeat again _ that the best reparations »
Reparations for American blacks was a sideline issue for most African Americans until the publication of Randall Robinson's The Debt. The book helped bring the reparations debate to a larger audience, introducing the wider black community and general American population to a notion long discussed at black nationalist meetings. Others began taking action. Deadria Farmer-Paelmman, a legal activist, conducted extensive research finding that Aetna issued policies on slaves in the 1850s; she has since filed »
For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help. * White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family »
Don't Call This Country "America" How the name was hijacked and why it matters today by Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, courtesy of Z Magazine If ever there was a time to break the habit of calling this country “America,” as if no other nations existed in this hemisphere, it is in the current era of Permanent War and arrogant empire-building. If ever there was a time for people in this white-dominated super-power to reject its racist »
One evening last month a wholesome-looking college student with long, straight hair took the floor of the UC-Berkeley Student Senate and began speaking as if she were delivering a sixth-grade book report. She had been researching one of her fellow students, David Cash, for two whole weeks, and it was finally time to present the facts to the student senate and answer any questions posed to her. Her descriptions were, at times, speculative, recounted as »
A few years ago, I sat down to read Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950’s New York, by the novelist Anne Bernays and her husband, the biographer Justin Kaplan. I was cruising along, as calmly as you please, when I came to an eye-opening passage about the once-famous New York lunch-counter chain, “Chock full o’ Nuts.’’ The passage read: “The owner of Chock full o’ Nuts, a white man named William Black, advertised in »