It must have been a tough decision for the editors of the Washington Post last week whether to lead on page one with the return of baseball to the District of Columbia or the story about the demonstration in Annapolis to acknowledge white guilt for slavery.

As it turned out, the editors went with baseball, but the slavery guilt wallow was at least the lead of the Metro section. Nothing quite beats white guilt, I guess, unless it's baseball.

In fact, the Annapolis guilt wallow beat just about anything most white people could imagine. Calling itself "A Slavery Reconciliation Walk of Penitence and Forgiveness," the event attracted a whopping 24 participants, 11 of them children, according to the Washington Times account. Actually, all of them were children, but leave that aside. [Slavery roles reversed in walk aimed at healing spirits By Robert Redding Jr., Washington Times]

The wallowers, the white ones anyway, draped themselves in chains and placards acknowledging their guilt for slavery and wore T-shirts with the words "So Sorry" and armbands labeled "penitent." Black participants wore armbands with the word "forgiver."

This tells you what sort of "reconciliation" the wallowers had in mind.

If it doesn't, white wallower Carol Palmer, a 38-year old child in tears over her guilt, made it clear.

"I am a descendant of a slave owner," she blubbered, "and I thought this would be a way of acknowledging the injustice and for others to see that I am truly sorry for the actions of my forefathers."

Miss Palmer "was confined in a yoke with three other white persons," the Times reported.

The guiltfest was sponsored by an organization calling itself the "Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation"  after the late black writer who cranked out the book Roots back in the 1970s, a work purporting to explore the author's racial heritage in Africa and early America but which was later shown to have been mostly fabrication, and by Lifeline Expedition, a London-based charity that has organized this commemoration internationally.

The "expedition" that showed up in Annapolis last week "has held similar events in several European cities," the Times says.

"Today we are here to show that we in Annapolis have the will to take persistent steps toward applying chemotherapy to that cancer, racism," proclaimed Leonard Blackshear, the group's president.

Apparently he has nothing better to do than traipse around the world flagellating himself and whoever else will submit to it, and from the sympathy the Post exuded, maybe it's worth it.

"The march comes during a troubled period for race relations in Anne Arundel County," the Post fretted. "A series of racially tinged incidents over the past few years has raised concerns among government officials and community leaders."

Those "concerns" range from white opposition to a new black college in the county to the distribution of alleged "neo-Nazi" flyers at a local high school. Nobody seems to worry about the possibility of "racially tinged" incidents involving black "racism" against whites.

That, you see, is not what "reconciliation" is about. [The Roots of Reconciliation
Washington Post,  By Christian Davenport, Sep 29, 2004]

"Reconciliation" recalls the similar initiative peddled by President Bill Clinton some years ago, when he too traipsed around the country (and even to Africa) to wallow in white guilt.

Such wallows have become a regular institution for whites these days, and they always reveal the same underlying pattern of assumptions.

• Assumption One is that only whites have anything to feel guilty about. The eagerness of black African chiefs to sell their own men, women and children into bondage to whoever could fork up enough beads and bullets is never mentioned.

•  Assumption Two is that only the evil that whites are said to have committed is important. The fact that it was whites who outlawed and suppressed the slave trade is also forgotten, as is the fact that slavery endures in Africa to this day—on a massive scale.

• And Assumption Three is that slavery was and is totally evil—despite the fact that almost all civilizations have practiced it, that major philosophers and religious figures have defended it and that, in the absence of slavery, most Africans (and indeed many Middle Easterners and Europeans, whose ancestors often experienced slavery under one empire of the past or another) would still be living in savagery.

The guilt wallow was right about one thing. Whites did indeed practice slavery, whether as Greeks, Romans, Americans, Englishmen or other Europeans.

You don't have to approve of slavery to see that they did so because they shared a deep and unshakeable faith in their own race and civilization, a faith that created and sustained their will to conquer the world.

The real reason we have to put up with the kind of guilt wallow that slopped around in Annapolis last week is that whites today have lost that faith in themselves.

Wallowing in guilt and phony "reconciliation" that barely masks an anti-white agenda is a good way to make sure they never recover it again.

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Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future.