Will the House’s apology for slavery make a difference?

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution officially apologizing for the heinous practice of slavery in America and its lingering repercussions on race relations and equality of opportunity.  Such a federal mea culpa is not unprecedented; in 1988 Congress voted strongly to apologize for Japanese-American internment and to compensate survivors and heirs, and in 1993 came an apology for the cultural destruction of the Kingdom of Hawaii. 

However, few issues in American society are as persistent, divisive, and sensitive as race and the legacy of slavery.  Since the House’s apology passed, many in the media have decried this mainly “symbolic resolution.”  Lola Adesioye of UK’s The Guardian remarks that “while this long-overdue apology is an important step, it does not go far enough.”  There is no specific plan for rectifying the ripple effects of slavery in the United States, she argues correctly; the resolution is particularly futile in its avoidance of the issue of reparations.  NPR’s Keith Josef Adkins is “just not convinced that a federal apology has any weight.”  It is the efforts of the African-American community alone, he posits, that must clean up the ills remaining today from slavery and Jim Crow. 

In all likelihood, there will not be an outpouring of legislation from Congress aimed at righting the social wrongs sowed by slavery.  We should not expect any groundbreaking reparations laws, any quick fix to the inequalities in healthcare, any swell in funding for the public school system.  This does not mean, though, that the slavery apology was useless.  As Susan K. Smith writes in the Washington Post, “for the vast majority, an honest and intentional apology goes a long way.”  To assume that our society is somehow beyond such an apology, that a frank dialogue on race is not still terribly relevant, is naïve.  At the same time, institutional solutions – revisions to education and healthcare, for example – will do little to alleviate our “race problem” if there is no change in our personal, day-to-day interactions. 

Just talking about America’s often dirty past will not ultimately help, critics of this resolution say.  Such dialogue certainly cannot hurt, though, and may breed the understanding necessary to pass effective legislation later on.