Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
- The House of Representative’s vote to apologize for the horror of slavery was an easy call. Several states have done their mea culpas on slavery. The resolutions the states and Congress passed were mild, innocuous, and ultimately toothless. In truth that’s all they were supposed to be. But the House resolution was still important. It was tacit acknowledgement of something that the slavery apology opponents vehemently deny and that is that slavery was not just the evil doings of greedy Southern planters.
The U.S. government encoded slavery in the Constitution and protected and nourished it for a century. Traders, insurance companies, bankers, shippers, and landowners made billions off of it. Their ill-gotten profits fueled America’s industrial and agricultural might. For decades after slavery’s end, white trade unions excluded blacks and confined them to the dirtiest, poorest paying jobs.
