New Jersey Gets Ready To Apologize For Slavery

As I've been saying all morning. I accept. (Now let's move on.)

We're all slaves to the machine.

I've been a "Slave to the Rhythm" and a "Ghost in the Machine."

But never a slave to a machine.

I keep thinking of that One Republic/Timbaland song.

For you Liz:

Apologize .

(That song is not for me. But THIS IS...)

I didn't know you used to be a slave, prof.

That's cool prof!

Mr. Roo,

Not only (as I stated before), have I been a "Slave to the Rhythm," I'm also a "Slave to Love."

Slave to love - isn't that on the 9 1/2 Weeks soundtrack?

Bryan Ferry, not a slave.

As if the rest of the country needs yet another reason to laugh at NJ.

I remember an old New Yorker cartoon, showing a dashiki-clad, militant sort who was scowling at a cocktail party at a milquetoast sort who was telling him, with a very meek look on his face, "I'm sorry, you must be mistaken. I wasn't even in Virginia in the 1620's when that ship you just mentioned came up the James River with its cargo..."

Really, this one is very silly.

just another example of what happens when you have a Democratically controlled legislature. Such backward thinking. I hazard to guess that most people agree that slavery is and was an abomination. But we can't change history so we learn from it (hopefully) and move forward. So, libs what is next in the apology list?

I thought the prof was a slave to YouTube.

Appologies should be proffered by the United States to the people of Iraq for destroying their country.

After slavery white folks get to dust themselves off and black folks have to live with it. Now do you understand?

No! No! We don't understand! Please explain it to us, lasermike! Expound at length! (This ought to be good...)

Mikeypal, you're back! Oh happy, happy joyday!

Can I assume you've dusted off your own wee sma' intellect and are ready to post again? And will you apologize to the folks here for wasting what you have of a brain on awesomely stupid posts? (Really, laserboy, suggesting that renting was a way to do one's part in the "green revolution" was you at your appallingly dumb best.)

I in turn, MellonBrush, await the apologies of Iraq to Kuwait, the Kurds, Christians, Jews, Yezidis and so many more.

And to each other for senseless violence. First things first, you might say.

I would like an apology to the U.S. for 9-11.

Cathar, I think you should appologize for your unabashedly gleeful invective directed towards lasermike.

He doesn't deserve your reprobation.

Waiting for an appology does not absolve a person or collection of persons from their own responsibility to appologize for harm done to others.

My great grandmother was born a slave. I welcome the appology

I'd apologize personally for American slavery but our family just wasn't around at the time.

We were just raising chickens and running burial societies in Eastern Europe until about 1920.

The Emancipation Proclemation, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, The Civil Rights Law of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, etc. These were government actions that DID something. This apology is just a bunch of empty words from the empty suits in Trenton. It is a lot easier to condemn evils from a century and a half ago than address the very real problems that effect the state today.

Will this raise graduation rates? Raise test scores? Reduce crime in the inner cities? Reduce unemployment? No! Then who cares? Enough with the grandstanding, Mr. Payne, you have a lot of REAL work to do.

Wasn't Waiting For My Apology a classic Velvet Underground tune?

MellonBrush, I still await, from long, long ago, at least mikey's sincere regrets that he called me, ROC, walleroo and several others "Nazis," "Klansmen," "neo-fascists" and several other nasty things. No such comments have been forthcoming from the ill-lettered and very confused weasel.

If you knew mikey, like I know mikey..., in other words, you wouldn't be posting so mistakenly.

And 140 or so years ago, my great-grandfathers on both the maternal and paternal sides did a far, far better thing than "apologize": they both fought for and to preserve the Union (and thus to upset many of Ron Paul's most ardent supporters), at places like Gettysburg, Stones River, Secessionville and The Wilderness. One even lost a hand.

The last slave we had was good old St. Patrick. He escaped, allegedly while his minder was off in the pub figuring the odds on a race, and then he achieved the ultimate revenge. He came back and converted us all away from our happy heathen ways and made us all good Christians. We honor him every March with a bank holiday and a nice parade. You lot here go a little nuts, in a charming sort of way. We love the duffer! But aplogize? Hell no! HE should apologize to US!

Seems like the nanny state is really that nanny with the gold grill from a few days ago asking folks to watch her kid...

(And Perlstein, while your peeps may have not been in America, you have benefited from this Country's past sorry acts.)

But feel better y'all, Obama will lead the way!

ALL nations have benefited--and not benefited--from the sins of their forefathers.

MM, my point is that many White folks who claim (like Perlstein) that "my family wasn't in American during slave times" or "my family didn't own any slaves" still benefited our nation's past.

Similarly, as a man, I know I have benefitted because of my gender.

I say this without any ill feeling, so please don't take it as inflammatory. (Although by simply saying it, some here will flip out with their usual charge of "reverse" racism....)

There are no slaveowners in my past, but I have no problem with the apology. It's an apology from the state -- the same state that condoned and enabled the slavery.

It's very easy to let the lack of an apology prevent healing, even over many generations. Think how so many Armenians would feel if Turkey gave them a sincere acknowledgment and apology for great historical wrongs (similarly, the Japanese to the Koreans and tons of other combinations).

Look at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- a big part of that country's progress away from apartheid was achieved through a formal process where step one for many was the simple act of fessing up to bad things.

Thanks appletony. Nice to see a nugget of decency and common sense here. The apology certainly doesn't do any harm, it might make some people feel good, and there's no pork barrel spending involved. Some good deeds should go unpunished.

I still await an apology from the Cossacks who made my Great Uncles dig their own graves before killing them. The dance of death goes on and on... we are all slaves to the rhythm of life, low & high, black, white, all shades of past hatreds and fleeting moments of bliss...now, on to South Carolina!....PAZ in a slavish state of mind.

I suppose that anyone who is here in the US, of any race or gender, has reaped the benefit. So I suppose everyone should apologize. And then we should all get together and apologize to the Indians.
Sure, it does no harm. And if it has meaning to some, all to the good I guess. It seems rather pointless to me, but to each his or her own.

You are right, Prof, we citizens here in the present have all indirectly benefitted in some ways from the slavery in our nation's past, (not to mention Manifest Destiny- per Cro'nam) even though many current American families did not arrive here until much later.
Ironic, though that you, Prof, mention Obama, who, I believe, has a father who grew up in Kenya, and a white mother, from Wichita Kansas.
If either of them decended from antebellum American slaves, the mother
is the more likely of the two. The father was elsewhere at the time, much like my "peeps" as you call them.
Seeya.

You make a very good point, Appletony.

You make a very good point, Appletony.

And then assorted Amerind tribes could apologize to each other for the genocide they waged upon each other. (What, you never heard of, say, the Mandans? Or of the Comanches' view of themselves as bloody exemplars of racial "manifest destiny?") Perhaps Amerinds in general could even apologize to white folks for exterminating some of them when they first arrived here themselves afterwards, as some archaelogical evidence now suggests. And then the Incas and the Aztecs alike could apologize to other tribes for being so nasty as rulers that others flocked to the side of the Conquistadors when they first landed in Mexico and Peru...

It gets tiring. It becomes tiresome. It goes on and on. It only provides more fuel for racialist phonies and con men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. It resolves absolutely nothing. And it pays very little heed of historical realities. It may still be something that few if any legislators can afford to vote "no" on, but it is distasteful and misbegotten, and it plays on white liberal guilt in the worst ways.

Someone above also mentioned South Africa's Truth & Reconciliation Commission. One might profitably point out that said commission itself has studiously overlooked the complex role of the Zulus in South African history from their "founding" as an empire around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th. Anyone curious about this aspect of race relations in Africa should read Donald R. Morris's "The Washing Of The Spears," which recounts a long span of violent interactions between the races and tribes that Nelson Mandela and his old ANC cohorts probably prefer should never be mentioned. And I have yet to read from South Africa about a movement there to "apologize" for screwing the Zulus for so long and so horribly. In concert with both the Brits and the Boers, too.

Another difference vis a vis the Reconciliation Commission is the simple fact that, at its inception, a lot of the characters who were part and parcel of the apartheid system were still alive and in quite a few cases still held important positions. There were actual "villains", if you will, still around to apologize and/or forgive. That is of course not the case with slavery.

Whether or not there still exist slaves isn't the point, as I suspect any moron knows. The point is, the effects of slavery are still present. Pick up any newspaper on any day and they will become plentifully evident.

Apologies? Yes, okay. A good idea, but not enough. Reparations is what this is about.

Get our your checkbook.

Whether or not there still exist slaves isn't the point, as I suspect any moron knows. The point is, the effects of slavery are still present. Pick up any newspaper on any day and they will become plentifully evident.

Apologies? Yes, okay. A good idea, but not enough. Reparations is what this is about.

Get our your checkbook.

Whether or not there still exist slaves isn't the point, as I suspect any moron knows. The point is, the effects of slavery are still present. Pick up any newspaper on any day and they will become plentifully evident.

Apologies? Yes, okay. A good idea, but not enough. Reparations is what this is about.

Get our your checkbook.

Whether or not there still exist slaves isn't the point, as I suspect any moron knows. The point is, the effects of slavery are still present. Pick up any newspaper on any day and they will become plentifully evident.

Apologies? Yes, okay. A good idea, but not enough. Reparations is what this is about.

Get our your checkbook.

Perlstein---- still looking for your point.....

The effects of hitting the post button 4 times are also "plentifully evident".

Let me ask you this. Should I get out my checkbook?

I think any ex-slave should receive reparations from any ex-slave owner.

cro,

Don't leave it out, Corzine is on the hunt for cash......

Perlstein, I should have simply said I was confused by your post, rather than the tone that could be read into it. Sorry.

(The prof is working towards a more civil dialogue).

Slavery does of course exist today. And not just via cases like the recent one involving a family on Long Island. It remains endemic and systemic in parts of the Arab world and Muslim-dominated areas of Africa and Asia. The British Anti-Slavery Society remains active for good reason, and its website is worth visiting occasionally for news and updates..

(And then there was Prince, who during a long dispute with his recording company walked about in public with "Slave" painted on his forehead!)

One problem with the issue of "reparations" (among many) is that Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al and assorted other poverty pimps and poseurs would of course demand a role in deciding how best to pay them out. Would you really want to write out a check that would pass even figuratively through such lads' hands? (Not even Mikey, I suspect, would go for that one, whatever the throbbing speed that particular day of his sloppily bleeding heart.)

Prof:
Anyway, to tidy up my point, Obama's "blackness", if it matters to anyone, hails from his father's side, an immigrant from Kenya, coming here long after the civil war, and as a free man and not a slave. As such, he is more like the classic American immigrant story, and not another result of the legacy of slavery, as far as I can tell.