To the Editor:
In “Ending
the Slavery Blame-Game” (Op-Ed, April 23), Henry Louis Gates Jr.
notes that African rulers and merchants were deeply complicit in the
Atlantic slave trade. Despite Mr. Gates’s contention that “there is very
little discussion” of this fact, it hardly qualifies as news; today,
virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook
includes this information.
Mr. Gates’s point is that the African
role complicates the process of assigning blame for slavery and thus
discussion of apologies and reparations by the United States. I believe
that apologies serve little purpose and that reparations are unworkable.
But the great growth of slavery in this country occurred after the
closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808.
It was Americans, not
Africans, who created in the South the largest, most powerful slave
system the modern world has known, a system whose profits accrued not
only to slaveholders but also to factory owners and merchants in the
North. Africans had nothing to do with the slave trade within the United
States, in which an estimated two million men, women and children were
sold between 1820 and 1860.
Identifying Africa’s part in the
history of slavery does not negate Americans’ responsibility to confront
the institution’s central role in our own history.
Eric Foner
New York, April 23, 2010
The writer is a
professor of history at Columbia University.
Note from KBJ: I had nothing to do with slavery and am not (therefore) responsible for the fact that it existed. If Professor Foner feels guilty, that is his prerogative, but he should not try to make others feel guilty when they are not.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 