JOHN BRUMMETT: I feel guilty — don’t you?

Alabama formally apologized the other day for slavery. Let's hope all those Alabama slaves looked down from heaven to behold this legislative enactment. Perhaps they felt better, maybe even, in a way, freed.

Their living descendants, those to whom living legislators bear actual ongoing responsibility, might be forgiven if underwhelmed.

How about apologizing for George Wallace's standing in the schoolhouse door? How about apologizing for Bull Connor's turning the dogs and hoses on black demonstrators in Birmingham? How about Alabamians apologizing for passing that constitutional amendment in the 1950s defying federal law and presuming to interpose separate schools for "whites and coloreds?"

More to the point, to bring matters to the relevant here and now, how about Alabamians apologizing for declining three short years ago in a public vote to repeal that amendment, that disgraceful excuse for constitutional law?

You'd forgotten that, hadn't you? Seeking to modernize and appear less backward and monstrous, Alabama's Legislature referred a repealing amendment to the general election ballot in 2004. The idea was to clean up that little anachronistic embarrassment.

It might have sounded like a good idea. But, gosh-darnit: The repealing amendment failed.

It came close, though. There's always that.

Your typical Alabamian voted for George W. Bush and for keeping the races separate in schools. There was a certain consistent logic. It was to go backward statewide, nationwide, worldwide, for all of humankind.

One thing that happened on that vote -- and here you'll think I'm kidding -- is that Alabama's Christian Coalition came out against the repealing amendment. It argued that the repealing amendment would give judges more authority over schools. We can't have that. We might end up with court orders to make educational opportunity equal and better for everybody.

Perhaps you sense that I am decidedly unimpressed with Alabama's apology for something in its distant past for which current residents, who have plenty to answer for themselves, bear no direct responsibility.

I am similarly unimpressed -- if not quite equally so -- with Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, who preceded Alabama in this apology for slavery. I am underwhelmed by preliminary talk here in Arkansas of following suit, though I feel it necessary to boast that, unlike Alabama, we managed to repeal our segregation amendment in 1990, by a razor-thin margin.

Alabama and all Southern states -- indeed, all of these United States -- have plenty to apologize for today, for our living, breathing modern selves.

We should leave our ancestors' sins to our ancestors, and consider our own.

In the case of so-called baby boomers, we should apologize for our flight from court-ordered integration of schools to our private academies, our suburbs, then our exurbs, leaving our once-beloved, once-vibrant central cities robbed of capital and commerce, left to disadvantaged black inhabitants and decay, from which rose drugs and crime and a perpetuating cycle of poverty.

We have the substandard schools left to neglect in those central cities. We have the profiling by our police of black persons inhabiting these areas we've abandoned, and profiling them even more intently when they venture to conspicuousness in our suburbs and exurbs.

We have the Republican political strategy begun in the late 1960s to take cynical advantage of Southern white resentment of racial integration to build a new Republican electoral majority. And we have these new-age discriminations against immigrants happening to be Latino.

If we want to heal something -- all of us, not only Alabamians -- we should consider ourselves.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.