The Long Shadow Of Slavery

Even commemoration is complicated. While Jews have ritualized their ancient bondage in Egypt with an annual Passover Seder, African-Americans have a more ambivalent attitude toward their painful past. Young blacks in particular don't seem anxious to dwell on slavery. ""When I think about slavery it just makes me mad,'' says Troi Cain, a 15-year-old at Dunwoody High School in Atlanta. ""I get mad at white people for doing that to us and makes me think all white people are bad, but I know they're not.''

At a minimum, the increased attention to slavery might help straighten out some misconceptions. In his comprehensive new book, ""The Slave Trade,'' Hugh Thomas, an eminent British historian, points out that responsibility for slavery extends more widely through the British and American Northern establishment than is generally known. Everyone from the founder of Brown University, to John Locke, philosopher of liberty, were at least investors in slave-trading companies if not traders themselves.

Thomas argues the worst blame should be assigned to royal families, among them Louis XIV of France and Ferdinand of Spain, as well as the African rulers of Benin, Ashanti, Congo and other kingdoms who for generations sold Africans from other tribes to European traders, often in exchange for cloth. (Even today, pockets of slavery remain in Mauritania.) Slavery was also present in the Islamic world.

Ironically, about the only group that Thomas absolves of blame is the one fingered by Louis Farrakhan and other anti-Semites. Thomas, who writes that one of his own Christian ancestors might have been implicated, could identify only two out of thousands of Anglo-Saxon traders who were Jewish. (A few Portuguese traders had been born Jews but converted.) More broadly, many Americans wrongly believe that the American South held the bulk of transatlantic slaves. In fact, of the roughly 11 million black slaves who survived the journey to the New World between the mid-1500s and the mid-1800s, only 4.5 percent (500,000) came to North America; the majority went to Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti, though many were sold to the United States from there.

Some African-Americans, invoking the compensation that was recently provided Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, are resuming a longstanding fight for reparations. But that would be impractical financially and probably counterproductive politically. The Japanese-Americans were compensated for the loss of their own freedom, not that of their ancestors. That gave them a claim of lost income. What's more, Americans whose forebears didn't own slaves (even in the antebellum South, 95 percent did not) or arrived here after slavery ended are understandably resistant to the idea that they bear direct responsibility for slavery because of their skin color.

It's more persuasive to argue that society owes an indirect debt to African-Americans, the only Americans who came to this country wholly against their will. Here, some knowledge of slavery helps provide context to explain why African-Americans differ from immigrant groups. ""When you think about affirmative action, people say, "My God, you've had 30 years [of it]! Wasn't that enough?' But we were enslaved for almost 300,'' says Velma Maia Thomas, who manages a black cultural center and bookstore in Atlanta. Orlando Patterson, a black Harvard professor, argues that ""the thing that makes African-Americans special is the period of Jim Crow which was very much a kind of slave system except without individual masters.'' In other words, blacks were essentially in bondage into the 1960s.