initially I mean -- it was a NY Times columnist
Apologize for Slavery
A WEEK of absurdity around a confused racial con artist, and a massacre in a black church brings us to this: Today is the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth, when the last of the American slaves were told they were free. Now, to put it to good use, at a time when a post-racial era seems very much out of reach.
The first black man to live in the White House, long hesitant about doing anything bold on the color divide, could make one of the most simple and dramatic moves of his presidency: apologize for the land of the free being, at one time, the largest slaveholding nation on earth.
The Confederate flag that still flies on the grounds of the Statehouse in South Carolina, cradle of the Civil War, is a reminder that the hatred behind the proclaimed right to own another human being has never left our shores.
An apology would not kill that hatred, but it would ripple, positively, in ways that may be felt for years.
Continue reading the main story
As the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother who died more than a century after slavery ended, Barack Obama has little ancestral baggage on this issue. Yet no man could make a stronger statement about America’s original sin than the first African-American president.
Conservatives would caw — they always do — and say, get over it, don’t play the race card. Liberals would complain that a simple apology did not go far enough, unless it entailed reparations for the descendants of slaves. But words of contrition — a formal acknowledgment of a grievous wrong by a great nation — have a power all their own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/opinion/an-apology-for-slavery.html
I don't see sweeping changes occurring because of the President apologizing for the institution. He has said no President has ever apologized for it -- don't understand the so necessary aspect of it meaning the effect a formal apology would have when it wasn't hard to find statements addressing the institution.
“Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened two to three hundred years prior,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/opinion/an-apology-for-slavery.html
He has condemn it numerous times.
Modern times -- slave labor remains a problem especially in the Arabian Peninsula countries which the oil companies & defense contractors exploit & abuse the imported labor which the gulf states' economies are built off the backs of (Qatar World Cup Workers is the recent example but somehow am a little bothered there wasn't this similar sort of investigative reporting into the conditions when KBR subcontractor was doing this for over a decade but I certainly appreciate the concern & coverage nonetheless but wish it extended far beyond the World Cup Construction workers/slaves). Cheney needs to apologize since it was his Halliburton/KBR using the slave labor. What matters is what we do going forward. I do realize the topic is about the American institution of slavery & that effected domestic relations, just adding a point about going forward.
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