Slavery: "Get over it"
A state legislator said black people "should get over" slavery and questioned whether Jews should apologize "for killing Christ," drawing denunciations Tuesday from stunned colleagues.The paper further reports that fellow lawmakers "gasped and groaned" when Hargrove told an outraged Jewish colleague "I think your skin is a little too thin."
Delegate Frank D. Hargrove, who is white and Christian, made his remarks in opposition to a measure that would apologize on the state's behalf to the descendants of slaves.
In an interview published Tuesday in The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Hargrove, 79, said slavery ended nearly 140 years ago with the Civil War and added that "our black citizens should get over it."
The newspaper also quoted him as saying, "are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"
The question now is whether Hargrove will be "rehabilitated," and how fast. Fellow Virginian Sen. George Allen suffered defeat last November in part for his "macaca" moment, but fellow senator Trent Lott of Mississippi appears to be on the rise after being caught waxing nostalgic for Jim Crow a few years back.
An even bigger question: why do the media and political leaders "gasp and groan" over such slips, but barely bat an eyelash when, for example, 13 U.S. Senators tell African Americans to "get over" lynching, as shown by their refusal in 2005 to support a resolution condemning the practice?
And what about Katrina? As Randall Robinson, the Harvard scholar and author of "The Debt" reminds us, the tragedy of the Gulf Coast is a reminder that slavery's legacy is still with us:
Nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, the descendents of slaves, whose cruelly coerced exertions made America a wealthy and powerful nation, are told that “slavery and Jim Crow were long ago and we must now move on”.What was it that William Faulkner reminded us about the past never being dead and buried, and that indeed it is not even past? Yet, White America recoils at the mere suggestion that the time has come for an honest appraisal of the ongoing impact of America’s past on the painful racial realities that confront us today.
Having been here since 1619, African-Americans can only arguably be said to have been “granted” full citizenship in America with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
How many Americans understand the differential economic and psychological implications of this for all Americans – black and white?
There are millions and millions of blacks who lead, today in America, lives marked by the grinding, dehumanizing poverty that Katrina exposed in New Orleans. They are the living, awful harvest of American slavery and the Jim Crow century that followed it. They are the bruised fruit of centuries of government-enforced exclusion based on race that lasted until 1965. They mirror America’s death of conscience. And this is America’s disgrace.
4 Comments:
African-Americans are always told to move on and not dwell upon the past when the subject of slavery comes up. Why is it that no one tells the Jewish people not to be mindful of the Nazi Holocaust? Books are written, movies made and days of remembrance set aside for the Jews. 6 million people died during WWII, whereas tens of millions of Africans suffered and perished at the hands of the White American slave-masters, who were perhaps the cruelest people in the annals of human history. At least 10 million Africans died in the Atlantic crossing alone. But in fairness, African-Americans are not conscious of their history and do not have the finances, nor exert the influence over the media that Jewish people do so there are no "Never Again" slogans, nor any talk of payment of reparations to the progeny of the enslaved Africans. White America does not have the moral rectitude to apologize for slavery. Until a formal U.S. government apology is made and reparations paid, African-Americans will be forever sitting at the dinner table of America waiting for justice to be served.
Perhaps, you should address these questions to Robert Byrd. As a past, and "the past never being dead and buried", KKK member, he should have some special insight.
Why apologize for something we didn't do? Why not ask the Africans who sold their own into slavery to apologize. Why don't you apologize for something someone else did.
Get over it is right. Its about time.
This is not racist. And I'm oh so sick of hearing that too. I'd have the same advice for anyone who bellyached so much.
You were never enslaved, I never enslaved you. I can't apologize for something I didn't do. You shouldn't get an apology for something you never went through. Jews get apologies because there are many alive today that went through that. It would be good if everyone could move beyond something that ended 150 years ago and that nobody alive today actually experienced. It's a sad part of history, let's move on...
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