Saturday, January 4, 2003

The uncountable billions of dollars spent by the government and private charity are not satisfactorily large, the slavery reparationists say.

Nor were the 365,000 dead Northern troops a sufficient commitment to justice.

The destruction of the South was not adequate penance, nor was the punishment meted out to its 165,000 soldiers dead from the war.

We have a number of lawsuits today against companies that allegedly benefited from slavery. A latter-day submission comes from Louisiana, where 3,000 are suing for money.

Without reliable records, few if any plaintiffs can prove that any of the defendants were unjustly enriched by ancestors in slavery. But that is beside the point. A new theory of liability is advanced against acts that, at the time, were legal.

“Most companies at that time benefited from slave labor, and most African-Americans are descendants of slaves,” Antoinette Harrell-Miller, a plaintiff, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

That, in a nutshell, is the case, not a legal one — for slaveholders and slaves are distant from us by generations — but one that transcends the law.

We have a call for secular baptism to wash the "stain" from the soul of the white race.

Thus, we must await the decision of Antoinette Harrell-Miller, her associates and most probably their descendants. They will tell us if and when white Americans are forgiven, provided the "stain" does not defile each new white baby, as we fear it will.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2003