It must have been a tough decision for the editors of the Washington
Post last week whether to lead on page one with the return of baseball
to the District of Columbia or the story about the demonstration in
Annapolis to acknowledge white guilt for slavery. As it turned out,
the editors went with baseball, but the slavery-guilt wallow was at
least the lead of the Metro section. Nothing quite beats white guilt,
I guess, unless it’s baseball.
In fact, the Annapolis guilt wallow beat just about anything most
white people could imagine. Calling itself “A Slavery Reconciliation
Walk of Penitence and Forgiveness,” the event attracted a whopping
24 participants, 11 of them children, according to the Washington
Times account. Actually, all of them were children, but leave that aside.
The wallowers, the white ones anyway, draped themselves in chains
and placards acknowledging their guilt for slavery, and wore T-shirts
with the words “So Sorry” and armbands labeled “penitent.” Black
participants wore armbands with the word “forgiver.” This
tells you what sort of “reconciliation” the wallowers had
in mind.
If it doesn’t, white wallower Carol Palmer, a 38-year-old child
in tears over her guilt, made it clear. “I am a descendant of
a slave owner,” she blubbered, “and I thought this would
be a way of acknowledging the injustice and for others to see that
I am truly sorry for the actions of my forefathers.” Miss Palmer “was
confined in a yoke with three other white persons,” the Times reported.
The guiltfest was sponsored by an organization calling itself the “Kunta
Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation and Lifeline Expedition,” after the
late black writer who cranked out the book Roots back in the 1970s,
a work purporting to explore the author’s racial heritage in
Africa and early America but which was later shown to have been mostly
fabrication. The “expedition” that showed up in Annapolis
last week “has held similar events in several European cities,” the
Times says.
“Today we are here to show that we in Annapolis have the will
to take persistent steps toward applying chemotherapy to that cancer,
racism,” proclaimed Leonard Blackshear, the group’s president.
Apparently he has nothing better to do than traipse around the world
flagellating himself and whoever else will submit to it, and from the
sympathy the Post exuded, maybe it’s worth it.
“The march comes during a troubled period for race relations
in Anne Arundel County,” the Post fretted. “A series of
racially tinged incidents over the past few years has raised concerns
among government officials and community leaders.” Those “concerns” range
from white opposition to a new black college in the county to the distribution
of alleged “neo-Nazi” flyers at a local high school. Nobody
seems to worry about the possibility of “racially tinged” incidents
involving black “racism” against whites. That, you see,
is not what “reconciliation” is about.
“Reconciliation” recalls the similar initiative peddled
by President Bill Clinton some years ago, when he too traipsed around
the country (and even to Africa) to wallow in white guilt. Such wallows
have become a regular institution for whites these days, and they always
reveal the same underlying pattern of assumptions.
Assumption One is that only whites have anything to feel guilty about.
The eagerness of black African chiefs to sell their own men, women,
and children into bondage to whoever could fork up enough beads and
bullets is never mentioned.
Assumption Two is that only the evil that whites are said to have
committed is important. The fact that it was whites who outlawed and
suppressed the slave trade is also forgotten, as is the fact that slavery
endures in Africa to this day — on a massive scale.
And Assumption Three is that slavery was and is totally evil — despite
the fact that almost all civilizations have practiced it, that major
philosophers and religious figures have defended it, and that, in the
absence of slavery, most Africans (and indeed many Middle Easterners
and Europeans, whose ancestors often experienced slavery under one
empire of the past or another) would still be living in savagery.
The guilt wallow was right about one thing. Whites did indeed practice
slavery, whether as Greeks, Romans, Americans, Englishmen, or other
Europeans. You don’t have to approve of slavery to see that they
did so because they shared a deep and unshakeable faith in their own
race and civilization, a faith that created and sustained their will
to conquer the world.
The real reason we have to put up with the kind of guilt wallow that
slopped around in Annapolis last week is that whites today have lost
that faith in themselves. Wallowing in guilt and phony “reconciliation” that
barely masks an anti-white agenda is a good way to make sure they never
recover it again.
[This column was originally published by Creators Syndicate, October
5, 2004]
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The Samuel Francis Classics are copyright © 2008
by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, www.fgfbooks.com.
All rights reserved.
Political pundit Samuel Francis was an author
and syndicated columnist. A former deputy editorial page editor for
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, he received the Distinguished Writing Award
for Editorial Writing from the American Society of Newspaper Editors
in both 1989 and 1990.
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