Wilkerson also asks whether Paul expected Philemon to effectively make the past disappear by saying to Onesimus, “I’m sorry I enslaved you.” This is another way of raising the question Johnson raises about Onesimus’s voice: if he cannot articulate the anger and pain he endured in the past, this means he is being silenced in the present. Wilkerson pursues this line of questioning to probe the hard issue of what is required for real racial reconciliation to take place in America.
