Apology 2005

[Moses]

SORRY 2005
The Sentate In An Apologetic Mood

Monday night, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution formally apologizing for failing to make lynching a federal crime over the century from the end of the Civil War to the 1960's, during which the practice was regularly used without justification on thousands of black men throughout the U.S. South.

There is so much going on in this simple act that demands discussion that we hardly know where to begin. But let’s start here:

The vote was held late at night, all the better not to make it onto the evening news. Also all the better to avoid an actual roll call vote – where each senator would have to actually vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – since it is easy for senators to make themselves "unavailable" after-hours. Odd actions for a body allegedly expressing its regret to the nation, no?

It seems that as of Tuesday afternoon, something like 16 senators had failed to sign their names as co-sponsors of the resolution, which was introduced way back in February, or refused to support a roll-call vote, which would have forced the nay-sayers to identify themselves. Not surprisingly -- but disappointingly -- they represent such ultra-white states as New Hampshire, Utah, and Idaho, as well as the two most retrograde states with respect to their historic treatment of blacks: Mississippi and Alabama. (Notable among the list is Senator Trent Lott. Apparently, his ridiculous apology on BET for the Strom Thurmond incident a couple years back wasn't all that sincere. We're shocked! Shocked!)

It is worth noting that with one exception -- Kent Conrad of North Dakota -- all of the above-mentioned senators are Republicans.

And they have the nerve to get upset when we point out the racism that underpins their party.

This little stunt is but the latest in a wave a actions by the federal and some Southern state governments to "address" their race-based sins of the past. Varying in their degrees of symbolism, these events include:

* the 1988 apology and $20,000 reparations paid to Japanese-American victims of internment during World War II
* the ongoing contemplation of a Senate apology to Native Americans for the near obliteration of their peoples in the United States
* a series of spur-of-the-moment prosecutions for murders of civil rights activists and other blacks in the South during the 1950’s and ‘60’s, including Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, the four little girls in a Birmingham church, and starting just this week: Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner, they of the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."

If the Senate is looking for something to apologize to blacks for, how about sending judges to the federal bench who failed to enforce the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution for, oh, about a hundred years? Some folks may not have noticed, but during that period the ability of most blacks to advance through the standard institutions of property ownership, education, and career-development was systematically undercut throughout the nation by law and by practice.

How about apologizing for passing that mean-spirited tax cut for rich people a few years back, which will place a crushing debt on the backs of most Americans, but almost all black Americans, a few decades from now?!

And confirming Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court? What's up with that?!!! He was one of just three justices who just this week dissented in a ruling that a black death row convict in Texas was intentionally denied black jurors for no reason other than race. Y’all need to be apologizing for foisting his sorry behind on us!

The Senate can eat its apology, for all we care. If it wants to do something to assuage its guilt over its heinous racial past, it needs to bring the substance. It found a way to come up with cold cash for the Japanese-Americans, so substance is a possibility. We’re not saying that cash payments to African-Americans is necessarily the answer – or even feasible. However, it is within the power of the Congress to pass legislation that substantively attacks the crystallization of the secondary political/socio-economic status of African-Americans. In fact, it is not just within its power; we feel it is its obligation.

If the Senate wants to show true regret for its past failings, it should drop the talk, and get with the action. We are sure that what’s left of the Native American population would agree.

Knowledge Is Power

© 2003-2005 The Intelligence Squad

[Moses]

Issue 142 - June 16 2005



Why are some Black folks so happy to hear an apology from people who don’t mean it?

There are nearly a million African Americans in prison – one out of eight inmates on the planet – a gulag of monstrous proportions, clearly designed to perpetuate the social relations that began with slavery. We demand an end to those relations, not an insincere, risk-free “apology” that sets not one prisoner free.

It is appropriate that the great anti-lynching leader, Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), who documented the murder of nearly 5,000 Blacks at the hands of white mobs in the terror-filled years that followed the death of Reconstruction, be verbally honored by Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and Virginia Republican Senator George Allen. Yet both Senators supported laws that will impose draconian equivalents of post-Civil War “Black Codes” on inner city youth, who will now be designated as criminal conspirators if they congregate in groups of three or more.

No thank you, Senators Landrieu and Allen – the crime you committed against us in May vastly outweighs your weak apology in June. You have guaranteed that hundreds of thousands more young Black people will be interned in your gulag – a crime against humanity. And both of you are determined to commit more crimes. Should we ask for an apology in advance?

There can be no absolution for those who continue to profit from past crimes, and plot new ones. Lynch law was the effective law of the South – and, truth be told, the rest of the United States – and the “lawful” authorities sanctioned it by refusing to pass 200 anti-lynching bills. The terror of lynching created the social relationships that resulted in white households accumulating ten to twenty times as much wealth as Black households – our collective national inheritance. An apology will not do.

Is that what our movement has been about all of these generations – to get an apology from people who became rich on our backs? There is a method to this racist madness, an assumption that African Americans can be bought by a simple nod from a few white people. Some of these racists will not even give us a nod – the twelve or sixteen senators who did not join in the anti-lynching vote, all but one of them Republicans. The Republican Senate Leader made sure that no member would have to go on record against lynching. However, are we supposed to be grateful for a non-binding resolution that admits thousands of murders were committed with the complicity of the United States government, but that does not redress the wrongs in any way.

Where is the sense of justice in this apology? What do the descendants of the terrorized class expect? That wrongs be righted, or that those who have profited gain absolution?

Lynching was genocide

The United States Senate did not ratify the Convention on Genocide until 1988, 40 years after African Americans circulated the petition, “We Charge Genocide,” in an effort to make international law applicable to the U.S. By this time, most of the former Dixiecrats had become Republicans, and felt safe in blaming their former party for their own crimes. 



The United States, controlled by a Republican majority and feckless minority of white Democrats whose greatest fear is their Black constituents, is now engaged in a grand venture to export the ideology of white terror, planet-wide. They have not learned a thing. Having never practiced democracy on their own shores, they claim a copyright to the concept. The fact that nobody believes their claims does not phase them, because they are marching to the tune of Manifest Destiny – the white man’s right to rule. It is that belief that drew tens of thousands of whites to the lynching fields of Georgia and Indiana, for the sport of Negro-killing. Now they are in Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming moral authority.

The march of civilization goes on, leaving the United States behind. The bubble of news communication fools only those inside. The rest of the globe sees its own interests, and recognizes white arrogance, intuitively.

This intuitive knowledge, born of gruesome experience, also informs Black Americans. Although surrounded by the same bubble of misinformation as the rest of Americans, Blacks smell the lie. The vast bulk of us see the “apology” for what it is – a scam, with no substantial benefits, and less good faith. But there is a class that is paid to say “Yes sir,” on command. Most of us pay them no attention.

Lynch law was no law at all. It was pure white power – the right to declare oneself a higher form of being, and reduce the “other” to charcoal. The current rulers of the United States are spreading lynch law to the far reaches of the planet. They claim the right to “pre-emptive” warfare, and reject all other people’s rights to live under collectively accepted rules. They wage war against the concept of international law, just as they violated every law that did not enshrine white privilege.

Nothing has changed, except the world.  We will not tolerate such criminality, anymore. In fact, we have collectively called the behavior that white folks in the United States routinely engaged in, criminal. It’s far too late for the U.S. Senate to pass a non-binding resolution announcing some vague objection to lynching, when they pass legislation that makes it a crime to be Black and a youth, vote billions to fund a military machine that seeks to enslave the planet, and rejects the authority of the World Criminal Court. In doing so, they have made themselves outlaws.

We will not forgive, or accept an apology that does not come with a change in power relationships. And we will reject any so-called Black leadership that makes its own deal.

---

BlackCommentator.com Co-Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a book on Barack Obama and the Crisis of Black Political Leadership.

[Moses]

Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005; 8:12 AM

I called a senior Republican official in Washington and was initially given the party line: The bill passed unanimously by voice vote. There was no opposition. Any senator who opposed it could have moved to take it off the unanimous consent calendar.

Then this person called back, insisting on anonymity, to say, "Yes, in reality, this sort of thing does make it difficult for us. There is some frustration, yes."

Whatever reasons some senators had for not signing the resolution, this official asked rhetorically, was it really worth the frustration. It's just a non-controversial resolution, after all.

At least one longtime black Republican activist, who thinks all Republicans should have signed on, is not afraid to put his name on the record.

Harold Doley Jr., who became the first African American to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange 32 years ago, fired off an angry e-mail to the RNC this week. He told me that Frist personally called him on Wednesday to assure him that support for the resolution was unanimous and that the party was committed to diversity.

"I would have liked it if all of these senators had sponsored the bill," said Doley, from New York, where he runs Doley Securities, one of the nation's oldest black-owned investment banks. "But that's not the case, and I understand it's not the case for various reasons."

Doley said he was already upset that after meeting with House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay a few years ago about increasing black personnel in key RNC and congressional staff positions, little has been done in that regard, even after he personally forwarded top Republican officials dozens of potential candidates at their requests.

"My party needs to be reaching out to the African American community as America becomes browner and blacker," said Doley, who considers himself a moderate. "The party needs to build constituencies. Some of the right-wingers have told me, 'Well if I'm not happy I should change my party.' No, I'm not going to change parties. I'm going to change my party from within to try to expand its base."

[Moses]

Power of Symbols

Symbolic politics is the most powerful. Symbolic politics is about messaging. It's about code words. It's how a politician sends subtle cues about priorities and whose interests he or she is there to protect.

Symbolic politics is Ronald Reagan launching his presidential re-election campaign by extolling the virtues of states rights in Philadelphia, Miss., where Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen killed three civil rights workers in 1964.

Symbolic politics is the "white hands" ad that former senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) ran against African American opponent Harvey Gantt in 1990. Symbolic politics is George W. Bush going to speak at Bob Jones University in the 2000 presidential election campaign.

From those symbolic events, black people ask, if you can't respect my history how can you protect my interest in Washington?

Frist has said repeatedly that none of his colleagues asked him to schedule a roll call vote. But in news reports, aides to Landrieu and Allen contradicted him.