The Living Consequences

Will Moredock, in an opinion piece in the Charleston City Paper this week, revisits the effort of the South Carolina State Ports Authority to systematically remove all references to slavery and blacks from its maritime history of Charleston and South Carolina.

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I have very mixed feelings about the designation of February as “Black History Month,” despite the opportunities it presents for those of us who regularly make public appearances to discuss our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination and its impact on our society today.

I always appreciate the opportunity to speak about the story of the DeWolf family and the legacy of our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination. Spreading the message of this blog (and of Traces of the Trade) is important to me, and Black History Month programs generally offer a positive context in which to bring this message to the middle school, high school, and college students who are usually my favorite audiences.

In short, I strongly support efforts to teach our children the full history of the United States, including the role of black Americans and such related topics as slavery and discrimination, and to encourage children to explore the meaning of this history for our society today.

However, I tend to side with those who believe that “Black History Month” usually results in limited exposure to a speaker or two, or to a brief unit on isolated topics in black history, rather than to a comprehensive curriculum about the African-American experience. What I find particularly damaging, moreover, is the pigeon-holing of “black history” into a single month and its treatment as a specialized topic, rather than as an integral part of American history.

As I often tell audiences, especially of younger people, the history of American slavery and discrimination isn’t black history, and it can’t be considered apart from the rest of the American story.

In other words, this is our shared history.

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A new study by researchers at the Harvard Business School finds that consumers who highly desire a pair of jeans or sneakers are significantly less likely to be concerned about sweatshop labor or other moral issues involved in their manufacture.

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John Bell of Ebb Pod Productions has created a map of the United States, showing the locations of selected past and future screenings of Traces of the Trade:

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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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Politico.com is reporting this morning that the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to consider an apology for slavery and discrimination next week.

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Florida’s legislature passed a non-binding resolution yesterday expressing its “profound regret for Florida’s role in sanctioning and perpetuating involuntary servitude upon generations of African slaves.”

Florida thus joins six other states, from Alabama to New Jersey, which have passed such resolutions since early last year.

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The U.S. Senate will consider an apology for slavery and the subsequent history of legalized discrimination, under a plan announced by senators Sam Brownback and Tom Harkin and covered in an article made available by USA Today this evening.

Harkin and Brownback have already lined up 14 co-sponsors, including presidential candidates Clinton and Obama, for their proposed apology, which they plan to introduce in the Senate as early as March.

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The Providence Journal, which has frequently covered Traces of the Trade and other stories relating to the history of Rhode Island and the slave trade, has a review in Sunday’s edition of Tom DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History.

The book review is a companion to a feature story about the film leading the Sunday arts section, but the review is available online now. The review is not kind, but I think the reviewer’s reasoning is highly instructive about Tom’s intended audience.

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