Should white people write an apology letter to black people apologizing for slavery?
No. Most white people in the U.S. are not descended from slave owners. Their ancestors had no part in slavery. There were black slave owners, too. Should we research everyone’s genealogy to find out who is descended from slave owners and who isn’t? “The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states. The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).” Slavery is an ugly part of our country’s history, but those of us who are alive today aren’t respo
