The Living Consequences

We’ve just opened up an online discussion forum for Traces of the Trade, and I’d invite anyone reading this to come take a look and consider joining in.

In this forum, those of us involved with the film can answer questions and share what we’re doing in the way of public outreach, while visitors can engage us, and each other, in discussion about the film, about slavery and the slave trade, or about race in our society today.

Please bear in mind that the forum is brand-new, so we’re only just starting to participate in it ourselves.

This cartoon about reparations and the debt owed to blacks, by Stephanie McMillan of minimumsecurity.net, comes courtesy of The Black Sentinel:

There is a rumor going around that Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has scheduled a hearing next week on H.R. 40, the bill which would establish a commission to study reparations for slavery.

There is even a press release, apparently issued by N’COBRA, which has been e-mailed to interested persons and is currently making its way around the Internet. This press release gives a specific day, time, and location for the hearing.

However, the House Judiciary Committee has not scheduled a hearing on H.R. 40 for next week, and is not even scheduled to hold any hearings next week.

Whether Rep. Conyers will schedule a hearing on H.R. 40 for another date in the near future remains to be seen.

Update: The committee has now scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, December 18, at 10:00am on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. This is the hearing which was expected earlier in the month, and it should cover H.R. 40 among other bills.

The newly-elected prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, has pledged to apologize to the aborginal population of Australia for the historic wrongs committed against it.

Australia’s aborigines suffered official discrimination at the hands of Australia’s white settlers for centuries, and continue to fare much poorer than whites on a variety of social measures. Interestingly, a majority of Australians support an apology, which aboriginal leaders “regard more as a symbolic gesture than as a basis for launching huge compensation claims.”

Roger Kimball, at Pajamas Media, has an extended essay today arguing against affirmative action, hyphenated Americans, immigration, and multiculturalism.

Kimball’s essay, which draws heavily on arguments from Sam Huntington, offers many of the usual objections to the preceding elements of progressive politics, as well as to such related concepts as arguments by philosophers and social scientists against the use of nationalism as the basis of identity.

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One difficult aspect to discussions about race in our society is the fact that the concepts of race and racial oppression, despite their genuine social importance, can be overplayed or used inappropriately. This is an issue that no one wants to address, because claims like this can easily be taken too far and be abused by those who oppose confronting race in a serious way.

In this vein, Jim Hoagland has an op-ed in the Washington Post today arguing that Sudan has been playing the “race card” as part of its effort to prevent the outside world from resolving the conflict in Darfur. The government of Sudan, a largely Muslim country with a mixed population of Arabs and non-Arab Africans, has been shamelessly appealing to both African and Arab nations in a bid for “racial solidarity” against efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur.

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The New York Times has a feature article this morning on new empirical studies by economists, suggesting that the execution of criminals may have a deterrent effect after all.

This research, which purports to show that each execution prevents several violent deaths, is highly controversial, but it adds a new element to the legal and political debate over the merits of the death penalty.

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My distant cousin, Tom, has written a book, Inheriting the Trade, about the journey we undertook in Traces of the Trade and due out in January.

Tom has now started a blog on his web site. (My blogroll has linked there for some time now, but he’s actually started posting.) Based on his initial posts, Tom is going to be every bit as insightful a blogger as he is a book author.

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Traces of the Trade carries the message that the North was far more implicated in slavery, even in southern slavery, than we are commonly led to understand.

In this vein, Professor Steven Hahn, of the University of Pennsylvania, argues that for fugitive slaves in the 19th century, there was little distinction between the slave-owning South and the more progressive North, to the point where “the border itself was illusory.”

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I ran across an interesting post today, on the question of who might give or receive compensation for the history of their ancestors:

should the govt pay reparations to Irish families who lost loved ones during the civil war?

after all they are the only true victims, thousands of Irish got off the boat in New York, and were carrying a gun for the US, fighting to end a slavery cause they had nothing to do with. … not to say the slaves were a guilty party, but I think that if you give reparations to blacks, and reservations to native americans, you should give reparations to Irish descendent’s that honorably fought to end a slavery cause they had no part in making.

I think this position isn’t at all unusual among many whites in this country, and I believe it illustrates several important issues.

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