The Long Shadow Of Slavery

Patterson argues that the problem of blacks is not so much poverty as this legacy of slave owners breaking up families: ""It's not normal for men to abandon their children the way you see in underclass behavior. In no part of the world do you get this phenomenon except among ex-slave populations in the New World,'' he argues, challenging the scholarship of Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman, who claim that black family structure stayed relatively intact during slavery. ""You can't explain that in terms of poverty; in fact, poverty often brings families closer together. You have to explain it by over 275 years of assault on the key roles of father and husband. It messed up the gender relations of African-American men and women, and they're still very fragile.''

The challenge is to focus on that problem without condescending to blacks or guilt-tripping whites. Stanley Crouch is an iconoclastic black critic who is impatient with what he sees as an effort by some blacks to trump Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. ""We don't need a victims' gold card, and we don't need people feeling guilty about slavery; the whole idea of guilt just makes people madder,'' Crouch says. Taking aim at Afrocentrism, he argues that ""the key is there was never any abolitionist movement in Africa,'' where tribes generally lacked democratic traditions, and slaves had little chance for freedom. Even though they owned slaves, Crouch says, at least the American founders set up a system that could eventually end slavery: ""What we need are people who recognize that integrated teams have always been instrumental in the advancement of the country. From abolishing slavery to ending segregation, blacks never did it alone.''

""Amistad'' may help here. The film is not just about Cinque's magnificent pride and defiance and the suffering he and his fellow slaves endured. It's also about white lawyers and judges--many of them slaveholders--who applied the law to free them. Ultimately, that legal victory wasn't nearly enough. ""He has far more questions than answers,'' Cinque says of John Quincy Adams. Americans couldn't answer the basic questions about race in 1839 and it led to war. We can't answer them fully today, but it's still too soon and too important to stop trying.

IN AMERICAN BONDAGE

The European slave trade was both lucrative and brutal. Historians estimate that between 10 and 15 percent of the slaves who left Africa died along the route of the "Middle Passage."

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