Something truly extraordinary happened yesterday in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

It started to apologize.

The Virginia House of Delegates unanimously approved a resolution “expressing ‘profound regret’ for Virginia’s role in the slave trade,” according to today’s Washington Post. The Post article called it “a significant act of contrition by a body that used to start the day with a salute that symbolized the state’s Confederate heritage.”

The state Senate still must pass its own resolution and the Governor must sign; but the resolution before the state Senate “goes further than the House resolution in its condemnation of slavery” and is expected to pass, the Post says. And don’t forget, House passage was unanimous.

How far we have come in just a few weeks.

That’s when a southside Virginia delegate, Frank Hargrove (R-Hanover), said blacks should “get over” slavery and asked: “Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?”

As a Jew myself, I’m inclined to be charitable toward Del. Hargrove. He probably thought he was just being candid, like Sen. Joe Biden when he complimented Barack Obama for being a presentable black candidate. (Boy, Joe, me too — it’s about time.)

I’m grateful to Del. Hargrove too. I’ll betcha a nickel the Virginia Legislature wouldn’t even have considered these resolutions had he not, er, expressed himself. (Hargrove himself, his mouth washed out with soap, has introduced a separate resolution calling for Virginia to recognize June 19 as Juneteenth Day, the day the last slaves were freed in 1865. How can you help liking a guy like that?)

In the ’50s, the Virginia General Assembly responded to Brown v. Board of Education with a policy of “massive resistance,” closing numerous public schools rather than integrating them; from 1984-2001, it celebrated “Lee-Jackson-King Day” instead of Dr. King’s birthday; in 2002, the Republican leadership revived a pledge to the Virginia flag written by a Daughter of the Confederacy, though that ended two years later after Democrats refused to participate. Nobody’s perfect.

But Virginia also elected Doug Wilder, the nation’s first black governor, and now this. My hat is off to the Commonwealth, or anyway its House of Delegates. Their resolution is remarkably similar to the “national time of acknowledgment and atonement” I advocated in a posting last Nov. 17 (http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_blog/page/2/).

I stand by what I advocated then, but I’ve had further thoughts about it too. One: This question of America at last metabolizing the indigestible lump that is its descended-from-slavery black population could be rendered more-or-less moot via intermarriage. I’ll go further and predict that this will more-or-less have occurred some time around the day I die. Based on the attitudes and behaviors of my 22-year-old son Sam and his friends, it already has occurred for his generation … more or less.

My other thought is economic. The “national time of acknowledgment and atonement” which I proposed focused on hearts, not pocketbooks; but Maria Thompson, my nephew Michael’s wife, wrote a brilliant response focusing on that other, critically important factor. She sent it after this blog’s race debate last fall had subsided, so I never got to share it with you all. Next time, I’m doing that.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Local news flash: Mansionization under attack! Roger Berliner, my newly elected representative on the Montgomery County Council, has heeded an open letter I wrote and invited me and Carol along on a “mansionization tour” this Wednesday. I had challenged Berliner to keep his promise to put teeth into the anti-mansionization law now on our books (”Berliner Keep Your Promise,” Bethesda-Chevy Chase Gazette, Nov. 15, 2006, www.gazette.net/stories/111506/montlet165618_31961.shtml). I hope Berliner and the Council act before the last of my neighbors turns his rambler into a Ramada.