Slavery and Its Legacy: Facing Our Unhealed past

Slavery and Its Legacy:

FACING OUR UNHEALED PAST
WITH HOPE

FOR

TRANSFORMATION, JUSTICE, AND RECONCILIATION

ABOUT THIS STATEMENT

THANK YOU to Dr. Enoch Page for your mentoring, inspiration, and immense patience. We are deeply appreciative of the time and energy you took to help us with this effort.

Dr. Page is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His primary area of specialization is the scholarship of African enslavement, colonization, and global struggles for anti-racist liberation. He has studied and taught about the organization of racism in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States and currently teaches courses like The Anthropology of Whiteness, Activist Antiracism Through Film, and The Anthropology of Genocide. He is currently working on a book entitled Bamboozled by Whiteness No More.

Thank you also to Howard Clark for his valuable assistance with research on the enslavement of Native Americans; to Brother North Star for his steadfast guidance, encouragement, and support; to Dwayne Brewington and La Wanza Lett-Brewington for editorial contributions; and to our fellow members of European Dissent/Uprooting Racism in Our Community for beginning the conversation which led to this statement.

This apology effort was inspired in part by the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage (1998-1999), which was initiated by Sister Clare Carter and Ingrid Askew. Thank you.

Writing this apology has been both meaningful and difficult for us. We struggled with many parts of this statement because the topic is so complex.

Here are some examples:

¨ This statement does not adequately address Native American history or the need for reparations to descendents of enslaved Native Americans.

¨ Many descendants of slaves come from mixed heritages, and we have not addressed this subject at all.

¨ Some forms of slavery still exist today. According to the American Anti-Slavery Group, more than 10,000 individuals are trafficked into the United States every year and kept captive as, for example, sex slaves, domestic servants, and agricultural and sweatshop workers. While some are European, most are people of color from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. (See www.iabolish.org, http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/09/23_16691.shtml, http://www.polarisproject.org

Rather than avoid this whole conversation for fear of being incomplete or wrong in our presentation, we have taken the risk to proceed anyway.

This statement was conceived and completed between 2004 and 2008.

We welcome your feedback!

[We see a need] to transform the thinking that spawned racism, namely the appetite for material power and luxury in the Western nations, and the consequent reduction of human beings to the status of objects to be bought, sold, easily demeaned and killed for profit, denying the profound and noble spiritual nature of all people.”

~ Ingrid Askew and Sister Clare Carter, co-founders, Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage: Re-tracing the Journey of Slavery, 1999