US faces up to its racist past but is not willing to pay for it

AMERICAN LETTER:Senate apologises to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States

DEMOCRATS AND Republicans in Congress agree on little these days and most of President Barack Obama's policy initiatives have been greeted on strictly partisan lines. However, this week the Senate voted unanimously to apologise to African-Americans for centuries of slavery and the decades of segregation that followed its abolition.

The resolution, which was co-sponsored by Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin and Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, acknowledged "the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws" that kept the races segregated at state and local levels into the 1960s. It apologises to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, "for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors" under slavery and Jim Crow laws.

The resolution also acknowledges that today's African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow laws "through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty".

It declares that the story of enslavement and segregation should never be purged from or minimised in the telling of American history, and identifies African-American slaves and their descendants as a model of courage, commitment, and perseverance.

"You wonder why we didn't do it 100 years ago," Mr Harkin said after the resolution was approved.

"A national apology by the representative body of the people is a necessary collective response to a pat collective injustice. So it is both appropriate and imperative that Congress fulfil its moral obligation and officially apologise for slavery and Jim Crow laws."

Mr Brownback acknowledged that the apology on its own did little to right the wrongs suffered by African-Americans in the past, or the inequality of opportunity between whites and blacks today.

"It doesn't fix everything, but it does go a long way toward acknowledgment and moving us on to the next steps to building a more perfect union, doing the things that Martin Luther King would talk about, like building a colourblind society," he said.

Illinois Democrat Roland Burris, the only black member of the senate, also praised the resolution.

"Some in the black community will dismiss this resolution. Some will say that words don't matter - that the actions of our forefathers cannot be undone," he said.

"But words do matter. They matter a great deal." In common with African-Americans in the House of Representatives, however, Mr Burris expressed concern about a disclaimer attached to the resolution that made clear it could not be used to support a claim for reparations.

After slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War in 1865, General William Sherman issued an order granting freed slaves 40 acres of tillable land and a mule.

After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Jackson reversed the order and within a few years, many of the freedoms won by African-Americans during Reconstruction were rolled back.

From 1619 to 1860, slaves imported from Africa contributed more than 605 billion hours of free labour, first to the American colonies and later to the United States. The cost of this labour amounts to tens of trillions of dollars at today's values - more than $600,000 for each African-American alive today.

"African-Americans helped to build our nation brick by brick and have contributed to her growth in every way, even when rights and liberties were denied to them," President Barack Obama said yesterday in a statement marking the anniversary of the end of slavery.

"In light of the historic unanimous vote in the United States Senate this week supporting the call for an apology for slavery and segregation, the occasion carries even more significance."

Mr Obama's election as president last year persuaded some white Americans that they now live in a "post-racial" society where gross inequality and discrimination are in the past.

Blacks - who are twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites - know better.

Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks said he views the Senate's apology as a confession that could hasten the payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves.

"Much is owed, and it is very quantifiable," he told the Washington Post after Thursday's vote.

"It is owed as one would owe for any labour that one has not paid for, and until steps are taken in that direction, we haven't accomplished anything."