Word: slaving
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...moved by "Walk Through Darkness" by David Anthony Durham (Doubleday: May), giving it a starred review. "Powerfully written and emotionally devastating, this new novel by Durham ('Gabriel's Story') tells the parallel tales of two men in antebellum America: William, a young fugitive slave, and Morrison, a white man hired to track him down.? In the thrilling climax, Morrison reveals an unexpected tie that binds him to William and makes a gesture that he hopes will redeem his sins. Durham's writing is forceful and full of startling imagery as he testifies to the courage (and sometimes the ambivalence...
...institutions that had no direct role in holding or trading slaves—even if they may have indirectly benefited financially from slavery—is not the best way to deal with disadvantages faced by blacks today. There is a morally important distinction between actively participating in the slave trade and receiving a charitable donation from someone who owned a slave...
...decades immediately following the Civil War, a proposal to compensate slaves or their direct descendants might have been viable—and certainly desirable. It would have been easier to identify those who were actively involved in the slave trade and benefited directly from the enslavement of blacks, and it also would have been easier to identify the heirs of the appropriate slaves. But monetary atonement for slavery is not feasible today, due to the impossibility of justly and correctly determining contributor, recipient and specific amount...
Chronological proximity, for example, allowed monetary reparations to be made to Holocaust victims who were used as slave labor in Nazi Germany. Similarly, the federal government offered reparations to survivors of Japanese-Americans interned during World War II and victims of race riots, but, in those situations, victims or their direct descendents were more easily identified...
Horowitz’s counter-arguments to reparations are similarly ludicrous. Present- day companies, especially in the insurance industry, have admitted to being direct beneficiaries of “cotton money.” There are Americans who can trace their ancestry back to slave-owners, and some even take pride in this fact...