Lowell,
I love the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation campaign for the United States. As Reverend Wright has remarked, other countries' governments have offered formal apologies to the peoples they have abused and enslaved. Why not the United States? The reason I feel an apology and a Truth and Reconciliation campaign are essential at this moment is that I see America dividing itself along racial lines in some sectors more sharply than ever. The losers in this present scenario are the young, poor people of color who -- judging from the desperate look in their eyes and the rage which understandably is always bubbling close to the surface -- feel themselves to be on the outside of the American Story. This is a crime. Richard Wright finally left America for Paris because he felt that America "had made the Negro a strange people." He was referring, of course, to the profound damage that centuries of slavery and then homegrown terrorism (the KKK) and institutionalized racism wrought. As the novelist Charles Johnson has remarked, perhaps the greatest tragedy of slavery was that "it epidermalized being."
Now, NOBODY should have to live in such a circumstance, much less a people who laid the economic foundation for this country, are responsible for much of what we recognize as American culture, and literally built the White House. It is my opinion that only an apology and an acknowledgment of what transpired will actually give us the possibility of becoming one people.
Keep fighting the good fight, Raceman.
Cheers, Dan
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