What is wrong with these people?

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 18, 2004]

The only good thing to be said about the "Slavery Reconciliation Walk of Penitence and Forgiveness," a march that took place last month through the streets of Annapolis, Maryland, is that it attracted only 24 participants and fewer than 500 spectators.

As described in the Washington Times and the Newport Daily News, the 24 participants, comprised of blacks and whites, played roles depicting slaves and slave owners. This high street theater proved crazier than most, as the whites made spectacles of themselves, playing the part of slaves -- wearing handcuffs and chained to one another, with yokes about their necks. With T-shirts reading, "So Sorry," the whites acknowledged their "guilt" for slavery. The blacks wore armbands with the message, "Forgiver," as they drove forth their human cargo.

What is wrong with these people?

In deference to writer Alex Haley's discredited work, "Roots," the event was sponsored by the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation in alliance with a London-based group, Lifeline Expeditions. Several of the participants were British.

The black Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane had some terse observations on the supposed reversal of roles. Writing for BlackAmericaWeb.com, he noted the obvious attempt of the organizers to "tug at the heart strings and induce guilt among white folks." Kane tweaks the event's silliness and asserts that both blacks and whites have become "so addicted to the notion of black victimhood," that we prefer to ignore a chunk of history, when Africans and Moors really did enslave Christian whites.

"You have to wonder," he writes, "if those Britons who went around Annapolis apologizing for their ancestors enslaving blacks were aware of their own history. But don’t expect them to take a trip to Morocco and demand an apology in kind for the Moors enslaving their ancestors."

Syndicated columnist Sam Francis, in "What Wallowing In White Guilt Is Good For," calls the street event a "guiltfest," and describes a weeping white woman, who took part in the walk, yoked and chained to three other whites. Her tears apparently were due to her ancestors' wickedness, and she tearfully confessed, "I am a descendant of a slave owner." Francis writes:

Such wallows have become a regular institution for whites these days, and they always reveal the same underlying pattern of assumptions.

Assumption One is that only whites have anything to feel guilty about. The eagerness of black African chiefs to sell their own men, women and children into bondage to whoever could fork up enough beads and bullets is never mentioned.

Assumption Two is that only the evil that whites are said to have committed is important. The fact that it was whites who outlawed and suppressed the slave trade is also forgotten, as is the fact that slavery endures in Africa to this day -- on a massive scale.

All mainstream newspaper accounts of this "walk" were sentimental in the extreme. Look at the idiotic title the Washington Times gave its story on the event: "Slavery roles reversed in walk aimed at healing spirits." Healing spirits? Or, more likely, pouring salt on wounds?

The Baltimore Sun ran an op-ed by one Dan Rodricks, who not only accepts his white guilt, but referred to the theatrical display as "a kind of spiritual pilgrimage." Rodricks expressed anger over a handful of whites who had the nerve to walk alongside the procession, mocking the ridiculous cortege as it made its way through Annapolis. "They could have been doing so many productive things with their Wednesday morning," he complained, failing to catch the irony of applying this dictum to those 24 self-flagellating "slaves" and "slave owners."

What is wrong with these people?

The Annapolis penitence walk was just the first of several that are planned to take place in other towns and cities in the United States.

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