The Living Consequences

There’s a thoughtful review of Traces of the Trade up at the critical blog Harlem Writer.

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Walter Olson, a conservative opponent of the U.S. legal system, has an opinion piece out today in the fall issue of City Journal, in which he argues that the slavery reparations movement has “completely disappeared from the national agenda.”

This is, of course, a puzzling argument on the surface, given that the last two years have seen an unprecedented outpouring of state and federal apologies for slavery, often seen as a precursor to reparations, and federal reparations legislation pending for twenty years finally advanced to the hearing stage during the current Congress.

Could Olson be right, though, or at least have an important argument to make about the reparations movement?

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In another sign of the nation’s hyper-sensitivity around the issue of reparations for slavery, the architect of the forthcoming national memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. revealed this week that King’s memorial will be censored to remove a key passage which has been used rhetorically in support of reparations.

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The U.N. General Assembly, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, has approved a resolution calling for the erection of a permanent memorial in New York to commemorate the slave trade and its legacy.

The resolution stresses the importance of raising awareness of the history and “lasting consequences” of the slave trade, and calls on all member nations to develop school curricula and other educational programs to teach “the lessons, history and consequences of slavery and the slave trade.”

Representatives at the debate on the resolution also raised the issue of an apology, called for reparations for slavery and the slave trade, and stated explicitly that the foundation of much of the world’s wealth and poverty lies in the history of slavery.

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There has finally been a preliminary settlement in the case of the Mexican braceros denied wages earned as guest workers in the U.S. in World War II. Surviving workers, and heirs of the deceased, living in the U.S. will now be eligible to collect $3,500 each.

The braceros case has served for many years as a prominent example of the struggle to obtain justice for old wrongs, and there are strong parallels to the fight for reparations for slavery.

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Jerry Large of the Seattle Times has an insightful column today about the annual Seattle Race Conference held on Saturday. This year’s conference, marking the 20th anniversary of reparations to Japanese-Americans held in U.S. concentration camps in World War II, was devoted to reparations and other forms of redress and racial healing.

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Long before being implemented, the $700 billion financial bailout package agreed to by Congress and President Bush late last month has already had dramatic effects on world markets and the global economy, not to mention the U.S. presidential campaign.

(This was true even before the bailout package morphed from a scheme to purchase distressed mortgage-backed securities into a plan centered on pumping money directly into banks by investing $250 billion in ownership interests, which is what many economists have been recommending, often since the start of the crisis. All of this, however, has raised the potential cost of the bailout to taxpayers to $2.25 trillion.)

One interesting result of all this has been complaints from bloggers and others that Congress appears to be willing to offer Wall Street a $700 billion handout, while politicians insist that there would be no money available to pay reparations for slavery.

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Since last year, there has been a series of legislative developments, at the state and national levels, related to the legacy of slavery and the slave trade. I’ve blogged about each of these efforts separately in the past, but in this entry, I want to offer a quick overview of the various legislative proposals and their current status.

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The Nation has just posted an article, “Tracing Slavery’s Past,” which is centered around Traces of the Trade.

The story (web-only) is by Te-Ping Chen, who, as I’ve noted before, has previously written about Traces in the Providence Phoenix.

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In this post, I want to discuss, and link to, the various reviews of Traces of the Trade which have come out during the Sundance Film Festival. I intend to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to offer a thought or two in response to the reviewers.

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