Isn't it remotely possible that the legacy of slavery has done
serious harm to all of us?  Moreover, shouldn't we at take
into consideration that there are a great may ways to
acknowledge the evil of slavery, and the complicity of a good
many of our past statesmen, perhaps even most, in its
perpetuation?

The issue of slavery, and the damage it has done to all
Americans, is deeply engrained in our nation's history.  We
can, broadly speaking, refer to the American political
tradition as a species of liberalism.  Those of our ancestors
who wanted to reconcile the ownership of slaves with the
social contractarian liberalism of the founders faced a tricky
problem.  They solved it by emphasizing the paternal
benevolence of slavery, and the perpetual childlike nature of
those people qualified to be enslaved.  Guys like John C.
Calhoun (or in Virginia, Stringfellow, Dew, or Fitzhugh)
suggested that slavery was good for the slaves because it
civilized and christianized them, just so long, of course, as
they remained under the paternal supervision of the slave
owners.  The character of American racism stems from this
brilliant synthesis of liberalism and its antithesis--the
slave could not be entrusted to exercise responsible adult
self-government, and thus was unfit for citizenship.

Its a mistake then to call racism "illiberal."  Rather, the
peculiar nature of American racism derives from the effort
that its most able advocates extended to reconcile the
circumstances of perpetual chattel plantation slavery with the
liberalism of Locke, and after him Adams, Jefferson, Madison,
and the rest of the founders.  What had been a racism based on
English ethno-centrism became fused with the American liberal
tradition.  Or to put it another way, the corruption
represented by slavery extended pretty deeply into various
influential strains of American political thought.

This corruption, needless to say, extended well past the
ratification of the 13th Amendment.  By the time slavery
ended, the corruption was deeply entrenched, and it permeated
American public thought well into the 20th century.  It
received a strong nudge from social Darwinism in the late 19th
century, and from the development of Eugenics thought in the
20th.  The last professor committed to teaching Eugenics
retired from UVA in 1954, and the influence of Eugenics
thinking extended well into the 1970s in the state's mental
health institutions.  The explicit repudiation of this variant
of racism is, relatively speaking, a recent phenomenon.  

Reparation or apology for the corruption that slavery
represented, and which, as I have argued above, extended well
beyond the simple ownership of slaves, does not have to take
the form of cash transfers.  Its pretty easy to see why that
is not an option that we have to take seriously, if for no
other reason than it would have the perverse effect of
accentuating racist thought in the short term (by introducing
a calculus of racial genealogy reminiscent of the
miscegenation laws of early 20th century Virginia).  

But there are other ways to repay the debt, and to acknowledge
publically not only the crime, but the deep taint it left
behind.  For example, we have an excellent and well funded
museum on the mall in Washington DC dedicated to the study and
memory of an historical crime that did not take place in the
U.S., and in which, the U.S. was not involved to anywhere near
the same degree as it was in the crime of slavery.  Why is
there no museum dedicated to the study of plantation slavery
in our nation's capital, in the space we as a people set aside
to allocate to the memorialization of our heritage?

Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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