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The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your
letters to the editor.
We condense letters; most, as published, won't exceed 300 words. A letter must include the writer's name and city, which will be published, and an address and telephone number for verification, which will not be published. Writers may be limited to one letter every 30 days. Open letters, letters to third parties and poetry are not considered. Letters from people living outside the Chronicle's circulation area usually are not considered.
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Web posted September 10, 2000
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Let me explain. The Holocaust was an effort to annihilate a race of people and slavery is a process for placing people in bondage for monetary gain. The lasting impact of the two processes is significantly different.
If one is successful in annihilating a race of people, everything associated with them is removed forever from this earth. If you are not successful, their culture, their religion, their behavior, their principles, their family values, live on. Often times, having been threatened with extinction, the race grows stronger.
Now let's talk about slavery. It makes no difference who puts you in slavery or who is your master. Slavery takes a group of people, in this case Africans, and forces them to work for little or no compensation. To eliminate or reduce uncontrollable and unacceptable behavior, slaves are subjected to social conditioning. Generation after generation is socially conditioned until you have a race of people who are socially conditioned.
Recall the movie Roots. Toby resisted social conditioning while Fiddler accepted it.
Concurrently, the group of folks who are not enslaved are being socially conditioned to expect a certain behavior from a person in bondage. These are the single most significant differences between slavery and attempted extinction.
Decedents of African slaves are doctors, factory workers, police officers, lawyers, ministers, farmers, teachers, and community leaders. But unlike a survivor from the Holocaust, we are without our culture, our religion, our spirit, our principles and our family values.
Social conditioning stripped these African characteristics from us. Some of these characteristics have been revived, some were adopted from our former slave owners and some we are still in search of.
The African slave experience would be better compared to the Tribe of Israel's experience after crossing the Nile River. God isolated them for 40 years, so the Bible says, in the wilderness until they were able to redefine who they were. African American slaves were ``freed'' to live in an environment where whites had come to expect a particular behavior and were empowered to guarantee it.
An experience that took 40 years for the Tribe of Israel continues today for every slave descendent and we do not need symbols like the Confederate flag perpetuating the ``conditioning'' process for every young black and white.
Dennis M. McClendon, Evans
