Um...Sorry?

The U.S. Senate has delivered an official apology for slavery and the Jim Crow laws that kept African-Americans in a state of quasi-freedom for decades after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The bill, passed unanimously (and wouldn't it have been interesting if there had been a dissenter), is surprisingly honest and robust in its language, condemning slavery not merely as an execrable-but-ancient practice but also for the legacy of humiliation, lost culture, fractured families and general inequality that its victims, and the country as a whole, struggles with to this day. Maybe my bullshit detector is wonky, but the apology seems as sincere as these politically orchestrated things ever get, and not just a false reckoning engaged in with the hope of forever consigning slavery to dusty history books where it can be comfortably ignored. 

But it's hard to feel too celebratory about this apology, however genuine it may be. I suspect that, for an awful lot of people, particularly young people, any urge to applaud was quickly muted by a question nagging at them from the inside. A question that goes something like, "It's taken them how long?" Anyone who hadn't looked into it might have assumed that this had been done decades ago, as, of course, it should have been. After passing the bill, many senators talked about how it constituted a step toward "healing old wounds," but I wonder how many wounds have actually been torn open, or at least picked at, by this reminder of how slow the U.S. has been to acknowledge its most grievous crime. 

Still, it had to happen sometime, and certainly 146 years isn't quite as bad as 147, 148 and so on. And maybe the majority of African-Americans will follow the lead of Terence Samuel, deputy editor of the online publication The Root, who eloquently accepted the apology in this column. 

For African-Americans like Samuel to take the high road is astonishingly gracious, more so than the U.S. government can possibly expect. But it's probably what the nation needs.