Prometheus 6

Me, from my 2004 discussion of reparations

Based on the comment and that discussion, I feel I need to say something to white folks.

It ain't personal. The debt owed to Black Americans isn't owed by you, or your ancestors, even if they were slave owners. It is owed by the United States of America and the states that created the more detailed repressions like literacy tests for voting when you provide unequal education.

I understand the argument that reparations made (and I'm using the word "made" rather than "paid" because as I said at the outset I'm not looking for cash unless the right thing is rejected) by the government are ultimately made by the citizens of the nation. But (and this is where the comment fragment comes in) you know, if you buy shares of General Motors, you acquire its liabilities as well as its assets. Citizenship is much the same…if the government isn't doing the right thing then you are responsible for taking action somehow, even if its just voting the bastards out. That's a running theme here and in fact all over the left side of the BlogNet (see Bush, Dubya).

In [TS] But I Didn't Do It!, Stanley Fish makes the equivalent legal argument, and concludes with

Does that mean that Georgia should apologize, too? Not necessarily. The question is a political as well as a moral one, and it is not my intention here to answer it. All I am saying is that while there may be good reasons to resist apologizing, the “we didn’t personally do it and those it was done to are dead” reason isn’t one of them.

...which is good because that's not the reason they're resisting anyway. One needs be clear on the difference between reason

The reasoning behind the apology movement is straightforward: a great wrong was done for centuries to men and women who contributed in many ways to the prosperity of their country and were willing to die for it in battle; it’s long past time to say we’re sorry.

Resistance to the apology movement is also straightforward. There is the fear that because an apology is an admission of responsibility for a prior bad act, apologizing might establish a legal or quasi-legal basis for reparations. And there is also the objection that after so many years an apology would be merely ceremonial and would therefore be nothing more than a “feel good” gesture.

and justification.

But the objection most often voiced is that the wrong people would be apologizing to the wrong people. That was the point made by Tommie Williams, the Georgia Senate majority leader, when he said: “I personally believe apologies need to come from feelings that I’ve done wrong,” and “I just don’t feel like I did something wrong.”

Williams’s counterpart in the house, Speaker Glenn Richardson, made the same claim of innocence on behalf of his colleagues. “I’m not sure what we ought to be apologizing for,” given that “nobody here was in office.”