The legislative body of Virginia has expressed “profound regret” for slavery and the exploitation of Native Americans, four centuries after the state gave birth to both ills in America.”The General Assembly hereby acknowledge with profound regret the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans and call for reconciliation among all Virginians,” the resolution states. “The moral standards of liberty and equality have been transgressed during much of Virginia’s and America’s history.”
All the states, including those in New England, profited hugely from slavery and indeed, without that slave labor, the country would not have been created the way it was or nearly as fast. May others states follow Virginia’s lead.
Reparations need to be part of what’s done. Apologies are the first step. Restitution and amends should come next, trying to right the indeniable and inhuman wrongs that have been done. This includes Native Americans too.
Everyone is apologetic about slavery but everyone likes the results. Civilization, itself, is slaved-based. Slavery was the “shortcut” between primitive tribal society and the modern world. More recently, it funded the industrial revolution, which made slavery non-economical. Americans who purchased slaves from African tribes were participating in a global slave market whose existence pre-dates written history. In America, all races, not just whites, owned slaves. The Cherokees, for example, were the last to give up their slaves. After the Civil War, the U.S. government ended slavery on tribal lands by purchasing the slaves and setting them free. Free African-Americans also owned slaves. (One of the biggest southern slave-owners was a black freeman.) Only a small percentage of free blacks owned slaves, of course, but only a small percentage of whites, probably about eight percent in the south, owned slaves.
Everyone alive today is a beneficiary of slavery, including African Americans, who enjoy a much higher standard of living than those left behind in Africa.