What to make of their efforts? Are they really useless? Isn’t something better than nothing? Do good intentions count for anything? People I talked to are funding scholarships for black youths, putting up plaques in honor of people their families enslaved and engaging in dialogue aimed at promoting racial healing. Universities, banks and other institutions are owning up to their past involvement with slavery. They are writing books and making movies and documenting how the devastating inequalities set up by slavery were maintained during Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow laws and the post-civil rights era. Still, with the internet revolution unveiling more family histories and efforts at a federal reparations movement stalled, there is a small but growing group of descendants of slave-owners conducting private efforts at atonement. He calls symbolic actions “laissez-faire reparations” and argues that people who discover they have slave-owning ancestors are morally obliged to campaign for national reparations.īecause slavery was a societal institution, enshrined in the Constitution, and had societal consequences that have not been fixed, its reparation must be societal. This lack of understanding about slavery’s immanence is why white acts of private atonement are considered “conscience salves that do little to close the black-white gap,” William Darity, an economist at Duke University, told me. There is a small but growing group of descendants of slave-owners conducting private efforts at atonement. What white Americans treat as a historical curiosity-something to investigate if we choose to-is to black Americans a cruel, unavoidable ghost that haunts this nation’s cities, schools, hospitals and prisons. And as one African-American historian or economist after another pointed out to me, slavery is not a mystery, and it is not past. Now we did.īut confession is not atonement. I had not known about my ancestor Augustus. My mistake, typical of white Americans, was treating slavery as if it were a mystery buried in the past. As editors rejected draft after draft, it became clear that I was getting something important wrong. My attitude was naïve and ill-considered. For me, as a kid, America was more cultural and commercial than political or historical: baseball and Mark Twain, musicals and McDonald’s. Growing up, I attended Belgium’s écoles communales. Shining a light on the truth, followed by some sort of atonement, seemed the right thing to do, especially at a time of rising and relegitimized white supremacy in the United States. My first thought was that I should research our family history more-and then write about it. Although I grew up in Brussels, the child of American musicians who did not inherit great wealth, my family is white and middle class, with branches rooted among the pre-revolutionary English immigrants who accepted slave-holding as a way of life. A few years ago, Cheryl Benedict, an education administrator and historian from Virginia and my first cousin, discovered on that our great-great-great-grandfather, a Texas farmer named Augustus Foscue, had owned 41 slaves.
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