Bill Clinton mulling the possibility of an official apology for slavery has elicited a fairly predictable set of reactions from white commentators, across what passes for the political spectrum in the mainstream press. From George Will to Russell Baker, the blathering classes have declared the idea foolish, hypocritical, counterproductive, laughable.

Let's get one thing straight: Bill Clinton is a sanctimonious hypocrite. He is quite happy to pander to racism if it'll help him politically. (Refresher course for those with short memories: Ricky Ray Rector, Sistah Souljah, Propositions 187 and 209). Russell Baker, in a recent column, points out correctly that an apology like this is frequently a way to win easy points at the expense of those long dead.

But Baker then goes on to promote the characteristic American response to history: let's pretend it never happened. Since all former slaves and slave owners are long dead, he opines, there's no point in apologizing for it. This is the general response to the proposal and indeed, to all attempts--notably, affirmative action--to rectify our criminal past. The past, Americans long to believe, has nothing to do with me! Adrienne Rich said it best: "In America, we have only the present tense."

Remember that this is a nation where removing the Confederate flag from a statehouse is still controversial. The flag, we are piously informed, represents something called "heritage," a heritage unrelated to the chief distinguishing feature of the society it represented--namely, slavery. Such examples of the selective memory of privileged European-Americans can be cited endlessly.

What's truly astonishing is the willful, self-induced, and utterly colossal ignorance required to believe that our present day race relations have nothing to do with slavery. As if segregation (look at a map of Seattle) is not the hangover of slavery. As if the insidious belief, far more common among whites than the official dogma will admit, that black people are inferior in all endeavors except sports, has nothing to do with slavery. As if chain gangs, crack cocaine sentencing, and the disproportionate application of the death penalty to African-Americans are not related to the post-Reconstruction attempt to re-enslave newly liberated people.

Which brings us to wealth. Those perennial studies on the disparity in income between African- and European-Americans also frequently note that there is an even greater disparity in wealth between the two groups. "Wealth" is what in a different tradition we call "capital." It is the accumulated income of generations; in other words, it is a historical development that can be traced, although with many a twist and turn, back to slavery. All that money the plantations made--all the wealth they accumulated--didn't just disappear. Much was destroyed in the Civil War, but a great deal more spread out, circulating throughout the national and international economy until it was thoroughly mixed with wealth from other sources.

Just because money's been laundered doesn't make its origins any cleaner, as the DEA will be happy to tell you. Nor did the wealth created by the institution of slavery fall directly into the hands of plantation owners. Factory owners in England, for example, benefited from cheap cotton whose price was artificially depressed by the use of slave labor. In short, it would be impossible to follow the chain of production and exchange that led from one particular plantation--much less one particular slave--to the stock portfolio of a particular investor, or the swimming pool of a suburbanite in Phoenix. But that doesn't change the basic fact that the wealth of this country was built on stolen land, by stolen labor, and that the wealth--and the damage created by that theft--are still with us today. For this, more than an apology is in order. Reparations are also required.

And that has been one of the unmitigated benefits of Clinton's raising the issue of apologies, however hypocritical or self-serving he himself maybe. Because in addition to the predictable harrumphing by the blatherers, the mainstream has finally begun to admit the topic of reparations into discussion. The Seattle P-I recently carried a full-page piece on the topic, in which, for the first time in memory, both the New Afrikan People's Organization and N'Cobra, a national advocate for reparations, were mentioned.

I don't hold out much hope of seeing the discussion go anywhere, absent a concerted movement on the scale of the Civil Rights movement by black folks demanding what is rightfully theirs. For one thing, it would require the blatherers to recognize the historical patterns of wealth, its accumulation, and the misery caused by extreme economic exploitation (don't hold your breath). But I am heartened to see it being discussed at all. It puts that much more strain on the resources of those who expend so much of their (and our) energy in denial.