Apologies
Twin Cities Business Monthly, June 1998
By Mitchell B. Pearlstein

President Clinton was pounded again by conservative journalists a couple of months ago, this time during a trip to Africa when he stopped just short of issuing a formal apology for slavery in antebellum America. He likewise drew criticism for expressing regret that, in the long Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, the United States had chosen to align itself with some less than lovely (albeit anticommunist) African regimes.

Given that it was a lengthy tour and Clinton was his talkative self, he also came to be criticized for suggesting that a main reason for genocide in Rwanda four years ago was American laxity. And he was blasted for declaring, most hyperbolically of all, that, "Perhaps the worst sin America ever committed about Africa was the sin of neglect and ignorance."

The president, obviously, was not the least bit chintzy in once more providing conservative reviewers with grist to devour. Yet while they were on target in citing the excess and absurdity of most of his comments, I nevertheless disagree with what they contended about Clinton's views on the specific subject of slavery.

I say this for several reasons, the most basic being that slavery was, in fact, the most dreadful sin ever committed by this country and its founding colonies. And that it is not inherently outrageous or unbecoming, even for a nation, to apologize for sinful behavior.

But I don't want to get ahead of myself, as it's necessary first to show how Clinton undercut his own good impulses in the matter of slavery by apologizing across the African continent with the same oversized appetite that he brings to just about all affairs. I would make two quick points.

First, the United States has little for which to apologize when it comes to leading the way in containing, and in the end defeating, the Soviet Union. This is the case insofar as safeguarding and freeing people from communism constituted the paramount moral test of the second half of the twentieth century, and the United States had no ethical alternative than to prevail in the Cold War.

In doing so, was Washington sometimes strategically compelled to support painfully imperfect democrats? Of course. But I have no hesitation in claiming that citizens of those nations ultimately have been well-served by such concessions to political reality.

And second, it was not Americans, but Hutus, who killed more than a half-million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Americans neither pulled a single trigger nor swung a single machete.

Could the United States and other nations have intervened more quickly to stop the killing? It's always easy, years after the fact, to say yes. But it is the height of condescension -- think of it as a kind of moral colonialism -- to suggest, as Clinton seemed to, that there is meager difference, if any difference at all, in the volume of blood that stained American hands and that which drenched the hands of those who actually committed genocide.

Yet neither of these criticisms, or others like them, should be employed to cloud what Clinton may be gearing up to do about the specific question of slavery: issue an official apology for it. Would this be a good idea? It all depends, is the waffling answer, on exactly how it were framed, how it were delivered, how it were interpreted, and what changes it eventually wrought.

It goes without saying, for example, that the whole exercise could turn into a mammoth botch if an official apology came to be seen, not as a solemn act, but as a trivial gesture. Or if it started a bandwagon for additional apologies to other mistreated groups. Or if it led to renewed claims for financial reparations. And so on.

But even acknowledging potential trapdoors like these, I'm simply not comfortable with the definitiveness of many colleagues on the right in opposing an official apology for slavery.

Critics on the right (and not just on the right, I assume) say things such as: It's impossible to unring a bell. To which I respond: terrific metaphors don't necessarily make satisfying balms.

Or they argue that there could never be a more tangible apology than the Civil War, as more than a half-million people died in order for slavery to end. To which I say: Why do I hear this mostly as an evasion?

Or critics point out that no nation has ever worked harder to cleanse itself of racism and other bigotries than has the United States. To which I answer this time: I proudly agree.

But I always return to two points in addition to what I said above about slavery being America's most terrible mistake and how repentance can be good for both individual and national souls.

While racism tied to slavery is neither the lone nor even the main cause of problems still hurting many Americans, only someone without any appreciation for the connectedness of history could possibly claim that all of slavery's fruits have been banished to history.

And while I attribute benign motives to the great majority of those in my camp who oppose racial preferences and similar policies, I recognize that many people, both black and white, do not share my confidence. It would be in the best interests of all concerned if -- by means of an apology that has more than enough weight to stand on its own -- conservatives demonstrated a higher measure of generous faith than many skeptics assume they possess.

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.