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Story Highlights:
Katrina Browne: House and Senate have apologized for slavery
She says slavery benefited the North as well as the South
Slavery created enduring disparities in society and economy, she says
Browne: Empathy and effort can address the legacy of slavery
By Katrina Browne
Special to CNN
updated 1 hour, 8 minutes ago
Editor's note: Katrina Browne is the producer/director of "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North." The documentary has been nominated for an Emmy for research. For more information, see http://www.tracesofthetrade.org/.
(CNN) -- The Senate voted to apologize for slavery on June 18. The House apologized last summer. The first family -- descendants of Africans, of enslaved Africans and of slave-holders -- visited a slave fort in Ghana.
These were historic occasions, and they occasioned the kind of hue and cry that always accompany the subject of slavery and whether we still need to reckon with it.
I believe we do need more reckoning, and a little more love and a little more logic would help that process.
Logic first: There's this quasi-math problem in which things don't add up. Many African-Americans naturally feel as if there is unfinished business from the past, while many European-Americans (and others) don't think they should inherit burdens from a past not of their making. So there's this generational equation to be worked out, and it will take big hearts, eager hearts, to do so.
The calculation is a bit easier for me at first glance. I'm the seventh-generation descendant of the worst slave traders in American history. I found out from my grandmother when she was 88 and I was 28, a few years before she died.
Over three generations, from 1769 to 1820, the DeWolfs brought more Africans to the Americas than any other family. They conducted the trade from Rhode Island, the "largest" slave trading state, contrary to what most of us would expect.
It's natural for me to feel a particular burden. I wasn't the perpetrator, I didn't inherit money from the slave trade, but I gained so much through the accident of birth: material comfort, education, access, a sense of entitlement.
A look at the other branches of my family tree makes it more complicated. I have ancestors who were here during slavery but, as far as I know, didn't own slaves, and I'm also the descendant of Irish immigrants who came to work in factories in New Jersey in the late 1800s.
What I've learned is that this ancestry is not exempt either:
• Slavery was not just a Southern but also a Northern institution. Northerners, including the "middling" classes, owned slaves for over two centuries; they dominated the slave trade (which included ship-building, producing trade goods, regular folks buying shares in slave ships, etc.); they fueled industrialization with slave-picked cotton. From workers to the wealthy, everyone was part of the slave-based economy, even if just as consumers.
• Slavery benefited immigrant families, even after the Civil War. Millions of Europeans flocked to the "land of opportunity" for jobs in a booming economy built largely on unpaid labor. Immigrants struggled when they arrived but then found routes to prosperity closed to African-Americans for a century after slavery as a result of official and unofficial segregation.
Within two to three generations, my Irish ancestors were solidly middle-class, not because they worked harder than African-Americans but because they were white. They worked hard, and the system worked for them: home loans, home values that rose in white neighborhoods and not in black ones, college loans, access to better-paid jobs ... it all added up.
So I can't help but conclude that slavery was central to building this nation, paving the way for so many, at the expense of so many. It was a national institution, not a Southern fluke or a sin of the wealthy few.
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