So says Obama:
Sen. Barack Obama, speaking to a gathering of minority journalists yesterday, stopped short of endorsing an official U.S. apology to American Indians but said the country should acknowledge its history of poor treatment of certain ethnic groups.
“There’s no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we’ve got some very sad and difficult things to account for,” Obama told hundreds of attendees of UNITY ’08, a convention of four minority journalism associations.
The Hawaii-born senator, who has told local reporters that he supports the federal recognition bill for native Hawaiians drafted by U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, noted other ethnic groups but did not mention native Hawaiians when answering a question about his thoughts on a formal U.S. apology to American Indians.
“I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said.
“I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it’s Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.”
That, by the way, comes pretty close to Obama endorsing the monunentally unjust idea of reparations for slavery. Outside of that, I’d like to find a day over the past 30 years when we weren’t noting the tragic elements of our past…and counter that its time we started concentrating on the glorious aspects of our past. To be forever digging up the ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow and Wounded Knee does no one any good – it doesn’t help those who were treated unjustly (they are all dead), it doesn’t harm those who carried out the injustices (they are, also, all dead) and it makes it harder for us to reconcile in the modern world and, like the Seneca at Appomattox, say “we are all Americans here.”
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