AMERICA owes African-Americans a debt

["ÁÎ×Ó¹â HenryC.K.Liu ¹ù¤l¥ú" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This LA Times piece was reprinted in a Hong Kong newspaer: the HK
Standard - now US owned.

The US also owes the country to native Americans.

US must look within, atone for its holocaust

           STORY: AMERICA owes African-Americans a debt. It is an old
debt. It has lain around in edgy disregard for a century and a half.
           Long-term neglect of it has aggravated exponentially its
original consequence, itself being staggering.

           Its compounded interest can be measured in the social
disrepair of its contemporary victims: black youth who menace one
another and society in general; black mothers, weary and solitary
beneath the burden of bleak prospects; black fathers, shorn of manhood
before becoming man-like.

           These, the heirs of slavery's destructive promise, lag
economically far behind whites as a group in American society. Almost no
one, black or white, expects blacks to close this gap in the foreseeable
future. So small is any such expectation that the very question of it
occurs only to a statistically insignificant number of people, black or
white. About as motionless as China's ancient terra cotta Qin dynasty
soldiers, the two groups have known since Jamestown where to find each
other on the American economic ladder: whites at the top, blacks at the
bottom.

           We've all, in the United States, been pretty much left to
figure out for ourselves why this static verticality is so. Whites no
doubt (even liberals privately) ascribe it to their innate superiority.
Most blacks attribute it to contemporary racial discrimination, although
more than a few would harbor a lurking doubt or two about their relative
worth.

           Almost never discussed in the United States is the seminal
cause of what long ago cleaved us into two unequal, mutually hostile
racial societies. It is not that slavery is never discussed or publicly
acknowledged, but simply that when slavery is discussed its story is
told to us as an academic recollection of a closed American chapter,
as if the 246-year episode could be cordoned off in a blameless rubric
of America's sanitised version of itself.

           Slavery was, and remains, an American holocaust. It lasted 20
times as long as the Nazi Holocaust. It killed at least 10 times as many
people. It extinguished on three continents and a necklace of vegetal
isles a people's sustaining sense of selfhood. It eviscerated whole
cultures: languages, religions, mores, customs. It plundered. It raped.
           It commodified human beings. It mercilessly crushed African
social and economic institutions in order to capitalise its own.

           It psychologically hulled empty its victims. It wrenched from
them their history, their memory of what they had once meant to the
world and to themselves, and replaced their estimable story of their
people with another, alien and reproachful. All of this accomplished on
a scale of human cruelty the world theretofore had never witnessed.

           And when this monstrous institution finally drained of energy
a mere 135 years ago, the United States (which had for 21/2 centuries
hosted, facilitated and materially benefited from the forced labours of
millions of uncompensated human beings) would embrace for the next
hundred years racial segregation and de jure racial discrimination,
leaving a disproportionate number of American descendants of slaves
bottom-stuck in debilitating poverty.

           And then, rubble stilled, dust settled: silence.

           Even as around the world restitution for less heinous crimes
of shorter duration had been made to Koreans, Poles, Aborigines, First
Canadians; even as the United States Government made restitution to
Japanese-Americans interned during World War II: silence.

           Even as US Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat laboured
to make 16 German companies compensate Jews used as slave labourers
during the Nazi era: silence.

           Slaves had built the US Capitol, cast and hoisted the statue
of
 freedom atop its dome, cleared the forest between the Capitol and
 its co-symbol of American democracy, the White House: silence.

           Construction of the National Museum of the American Indian
will begin soon on the National Mall. Plans have been laid to build near
the mall a Japanese memorial park to commemorate Japanese-American
victims of World War II internment. Daily, Americans queue in long lines
to enter the Jewish Holocaust Museum, where the Nazi terror is
remembered in wrenching detail.
           Yet nowhere on the mall can anything be found _ monument,
memorial or stone tablet _ to commemorate the hundreds of millions of
victims of the American holocaust. While urging other nations to
publicly atone for past misdeeds, the United States schizophrenically
 has repressed its own.

           The American government for hundreds of years played a key
role in deconstructing Africa and millions of its issue. It abused them
as beasts of burden and released them uncompensated into a racial
environment certain to hold them fast in perpetuity to the economic
bottom of American society.

           It is now the United States' turn to atone. To pay its debt.
To
 materially compensate slavery's living victims. And to commemorate
 in its public architecture those tortured souls who can no longer hear
 a simple apology. - Los Angeles Times

            Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, is
author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.