WHY NOT ME?

President Bush Speaks at Goree Island in Senegal (Goree Island, Senegal, 7/08/03)

For hundreds of years on this island peoples of different continents met in fear and cruelty. Today we gather in respect and friendship, mindful of past wrongs and dedicated to the advance of human liberty.

At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed, and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises, and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return. One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.

Below the decks, the middle passage was a hot, narrow, sunless nightmare; weeks and months of confinement and abuse and confusion on a strange and lonely sea. Some refused to eat, preferring death to any future their captors might prepare for them. Some who were sick were thrown over the side. Some rose up in violent rebellion, delivering the closest thing to justice on a slave ship. Many acts of defiance and bravery are recorded. Countless others, we will never know.

Those who lived to see land again were displayed, examined, and sold at auctions across nations in the Western Hemisphere. They entered societies indifferent to their anguish and made prosperous by their unpaid labor. There was a time in my country's history when one in every seven human beings was the property of another. In law, they were regarded only as articles of commerce, having no right to travel, or to marry, or to own possessions. Because families were often separated, many denied even the comfort of suffering together.

For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, "no fist is big enough to hide the sky." All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God.

In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence and asked the self-evident question, then why not me?

If I recall correctly--which is unlikely--Hugh Thomas estimates in his outstanding book The Slave Trade that a staggering total of some ten million Africans were transported to the Americas. There's no way to excuse that, but it is important for us to try and understand it. There was not necessarily hypocrisy involved. Just as many Americans have convinced themselves that fetuses are not human, so too did our ancestors convince themselves that blacks were not human. It took an inexcusably long time for us to recognize that Africans too were made in the image of God, but when we did we acted accordingly, and, though too slowly, integrated them into society. We've much to regret, but perhaps need not get carried away in castigating ourselves. Mr. Bush seems to have framed the issue quite well--first by not apologizing; then by casting the problem as a failure to live up to our own Judeo-Christian and democratic ideals; finally by making it clear that it was bringing our behavior into conformity with these ideals that we righted the wrong. Our ideas were strong and true even if we were weak and false. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2003 10:48 PM