The Long Shadow Of Slavery

But by the time Shipler returned this year, some honesty was peeking through. Now, a descendant of slaves from a neighboring farm provides a vivid supplemental tour explaining that the overseer was stingy and slave children were forced to sleep on rags. White college interns spend summers there re-creating the lives of plantation slaves and pretending to experience the real thing. Not surprisingly, some whites aren't happy about the changes. According to Shipler's ""A Country of Strangers,'' one white visitor told the black tour guide: ""We came to hear about George Washington, not about you.''

So where should the rewriting of history stop? It's understandable that the New Orleans school board would erase the names of Confederate generals from largely black schools. But last month it went a step further and took Washington's name off an elementary school, which was renamed for Dr. Charles R. Drew, an African-American who pioneered the blood transfusion. Even that might be fine, as long as Washington's accomplishments are still taught. The writer Sol Stern found that the only George Washington his son had learned about in his New York City public school was George Washington Carver.

Some of the new sensitivity about symbols of slavery involves not just morality but money. At the University of Mississippi, college officials are upset with students and alumni who insist on waving the Confederate battle flag at Ole Miss football games; it turns out the flag hurts the university's athletic recruiting--and ultimately its fund-raising. Christie's auction house last month quickly bowed to pressure and canceled an auction of 19th-century slavery posters. It's not only wrong (Christie's never had an auction of Nazi memorabilia) but looks bad; scares away customers.

IN THE POLITICAL REALM, CLINTON AND REP. TONY Hall, Democrat of Ohio, launched a debate last spring over whether the U.S. government should formally apologize for slavery, as Germany did for Nazism. The idea hasn't taken off, in part because no one can agree on what to apologize for--or what it would accomplish. A day of general repentance? Clinton and Congress apologizing for events 130 years ago? What happens the day after an apology?

Some suggest the apology should be quite specific. Ronald Tabaki, an ethnic-studies professor at Berkeley, argues that an apology is in order for not better recognizing that the Union wouldn't have been saved without black troops who entered the Civil War in 1863. But Stephan Thernstrom, author with his wife, Abigail, of the new book ""America in Black and White,'' says the whole idea is silly. ""I think 600,000 deaths [the toll of the Civil War] and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments are apologies . . . If we want to seriously consider apologizing, the African nations are also to blame. This was a global phenomenon.''

The most common response from both blacks and whites is summarized by Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia: ""Apologizing is the easy way out. [It] could be seen as a substitute for something more substantive.''