> Letter: Horowitz's diatribe contains historical
>inaccuracies
>
> By John Hope Franklin
>
> Here are a few things to bear in mind when reading the
> diatribe on slavery and reparations that appeared in The Chronicle a few
> days ago.
>
> All whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery.
> All blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All whites,
> including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not
>only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves,
> thereby adding strength to
>the system of control.
>
> If David Horowitz had read James D. DeBow's The Interest
> in Slavery of the Southern on-slaveholder, he would not have blundered
into
>the fantasy of claiming
> that no single group benefited from slavery. Planters did, of course. New
>York merchants did, of
> course. Even poor whites benefited from the legal advantage they enjoyed
>over all blacks as
> well as from the psychological advantage of having a group beneath them.
> Meanwhile, laws enacted by states forbade the teaching of
> blacks any means of acquiring knowledge-including the alphabet-which is
the
> legacy of disadvantage of educational privitization and discrimination
> experienced by African Americans in 2001.
>
> Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery.
> They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are white, or the
> loathsome disadvantage, if they are black; and those positions are
> virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century. The pattern of
> housing, the discrimination in employment, the resistance to equal
> opportunity in education, the racial profiling, the inequities in the
> administration of justice, the low expectation of blacks in the
>discharge of duties assigned to them, the widespread belief that blacks
> have physical prowess but little intellectual capacities and the
widespread
>opposition to
> affirmative action, as if that had not been enjoyed by whites for three
>centuries, all indicate that the
>vestiges of slavery are still with us.
>
> And as long as there are pro-slavery protagonists among
> us, hiding behind such absurdities as "we are all in this together" or "it
> hurts me as much as it hurts you" or "slavery benefited you as much as it
> benefited me," we will suffer from the inability to confront the tragic
> legacies of slavery and deal with them in a forthright and constructive
> manner.
>
> Most important, we must never fall victim to some scheme
> designed to create a controversy among potential allies in order to
divide
> them and, at the same time, exploit them for its own special purpose.
>
> John Hope Franklin
> James B. Duke Professor Emeritus,
> John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and
>
>
>