I think you miss the way that apologies for past behaviour have the effect of excusing discrimination in the present. Everyone can nod sagely about how awful slavery was, because challenging slavery in no sense challenges contemporary race discrimination.
Take an example from the British Empire. It was built upon slavery, but in the first half of the nineteenth century abolished it (because it was no longer an aid to capital accumulation). Like zealous converts the British not only abolished slavery in Britain, but set about abolishing it in Africa too. And, in the name of abolishing slavery colonised the Sudan and Egypt. 'Fighting slavery' proved to be a convenient pretext for colonising Africa.
Today there are no defenders of slavery. Everyone agrees it was a bad thing. Even Republicans can look like anti-racists by tut-tutting at past misdemeanours.
I have no argument with pointing out the origins of capital in the slave trade (recently I was caught in a controversy in the letters page of the Guardian newspaper for pointing out that Barclays' Bank was founded on slave profits). But I do think that the political campaign for reparations must tend to have the effect of projecting racial discrimination back into the past. And that is a convenient apologetic for racism today.
In message <s7ebce7b.080 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
>OK, so IS history over ? Is presentism the correct mentality ? What is the
>significance of history if it does not in some sense determine the present ?
>When we say humans are social animals, don't we mean that much of their present
>existence is based on their social connection to past generations ? Isn't much
>of what people do, outside of being racist, shaped by the traditions and culture
>of past generations ? Take speaking English , for example ? Can't we say, but
>for slavery and racism in the past, today's generation of whites would be devoid
>of racism ?
>
>Men (people) make their own history, but not just as they please. This is
>because people are born into a society that is an enormous complex of social
>institutions built up through history, and these institutions are not instantly
>dissoluable at the will of the living generation. If that were possible or
>common, we would not be much different from other species. Our unique species
>characteristic is our culture and history. Not all of that history and culure is
>something we want to keep.
>
> To make the history of ending racism will require consciousness of the history
>of racism and its influences and causes of the present.
>
>Charles Brown
>
>>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 09/24/99 02:29PM >>>
>
>I would have said that the weakness of the 'reparations' strategy is
>that it projects racial oppression back into the past, as if present day
>discrimination were simply a hangover from the past, rather than
>something that is actively recreated in the free-market present.
>
>It was a core theoretical assumption of such apologetic analyses of race
>as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma that racism would be superceded
>by the modernisation of American society. The substantial fact is that
>the capitalist North created a more rigorous separation of the races
>than did the South.
>
>I heard Clinton once saying that the legacy of slavery would take many
>generations to overcome (as part of the motivation of his affirmative
>action programme, I think). Intrinsic to that idea is that social
>inequality in the here and now is an after effect of slavery. That, it
>seems to me is no explanation. What happened then does not explain the
>present.
>
>Better to address the inequalities of the present than to compensate
>those of the past. After all, no amount of iniquities heaped upon
>anyone's ancestors would matter one iota, if they were not reaffirmed by
>discrimination in the here and now.
-- Jim heartfield