When do we stop apologizing for slavery?

[ForrestGump]

I happened to glance at DU tonight and, in LBN, saw a thread about how Nebraska (not a slave state) was not going to apologize for slavery. Some of the responses within kinda boggled my mind and set me to wondering...

Specifically, I began to wonder when a nation should -- if ever -- basically "get over" (yes, I hate the term, but it works) a legacy of slavery. The country I'm thinking about first and foremost is the USA. One poster in the aforementioned thread basically insisted that all Americans owe an apology and that the underpinnings of The American Way were thanks to the legal exploitation of slave labor up 'til the latter part of the nineteenth century. I can't say I especially begrudge an apology, really, even if only collectively as humans, not necessarily as just Americans. Even in its most restrained forms, slavery was (and is) brutality, and we all know that the brutality was often absolutely unrestrained here and abroad.

And what of me, born and raised outside the US and only becoming a US citizen as an adult? I was naturalized in 1993...my ancestry is British (Scottish and English) and so what did I have to do with American slavery? I suppose you could stretch and say that, in trading with the South and backing the CSA during the Civil War, Britain benefited from American slavery, and they certainly did before that, including before 1776 when what is now the eastern USA was a colony. But, still, it's not only a bit of a reach but is not something that I hear people talking much about -- in discussions of apologies and reparations, and similar, it's seemingly always the US that's indicted. And, along the same lines, what of American children who were born in that same year, 1993? American children born any time since slavery, really...for that matter, American children born outside of states that permitted slavery even before the Civil War, and their progeny.

This, of course, does not even begin to consider the thorny issue of racism. For one, though the racism was institutionalized in the South right up through living memory, it was certainly not endemic to the South but was simply harder to discern up north.

Then again, there's that British heritage of mine. The English side of my family tree's very well documented because they were all gentry and nobility (the Scots were decidedly the opposite, wild Highlanders who are barely documented but who I imagine were not likely to be major players in the African slave trade) and there're no slave profiteers there. Colonial adventurers and, further back, Knights of the Crusades, sure -- by this I mean that I'm sure they took part in some dirty deeds for King and Country -- but no slavers in the Americas, Asia, or the Caribbean that I've been able to identify. But, still, the Brits were the ones who brought slavery to the New World, at least slavery that involved captured Africans. And slavery was also practiced by locals in the parts of Africa from which unfortunate Americas-bound slaves originated, and many Africans were active participants in the slave trade. For that matter, slavery was traditionally practiced by at least some native tribes in the Americas.

All this just kind of makes me wonder when a nation or an ethnicity can forgive itself, or be forgiven, for a history of slavery. Is it just a matter of time, with white Americans (mostly of the South) being among the most recent and large-scale overt slaveholders in industrialized nations? And, yes, I say 'overt' because many in this country and in this country's corporations' overseas facilities are essentially slaves, even now, as are many people in other countries around the world (look to the diamond trade for one example, and then there's the worldwide sex-trade slaving industry).

If this sounds very confusing, it's because trying to get all this straight is confusing me terribly, and not just because I haven't had much sleep lately. I'm hoping that someone else will write something here that seems to place it in a sane perspective. Perhaps the best I can come up with right now is that we all, regardless of race, religion, nationality, or age, need to apologize for the existence of slavery, in all its forms. And, better yet, we need to do something concrete to stamp out the remaining vestiges of that despicable practice...