On reparations: Henry Gates gets it
Remember Henry Gates, Obama’s buddy who had a run-in a while back with a Cambridge cop? A few weeks ago he published a surprisingly balanced and thoughtful opinion piece in the NY Times that admitted the role of Africans in the slave trade, and pointed out it wasn’t just about exploitation by evil white people:
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa…
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time…
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World…
African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
Gates ends up giving up on the idea of reparations, not because he thinks they’re unwarranted but because he thinks it impossible to determine who would pay them (everybody?). Gates ends his piece with a paean to Obama the great racial healer, but we’ll ignore that and just say that his essay is both hard-hitting and brave—and that it’s sad, isn’t it, when telling the truth becomes an act of courage. But perhaps ’twas ever thus.
I heard that Cinque, of Amistad fame, went into business as a slave trader.
Anybody know?
As has been said, but not often enough, the Arabs took three to five times as many Africans out of Africa east. Today, around the Indian Ocean, in the ME, or Arabia, there are no places which look like Jamaica, Haiti, or even Alabama.
It would be nice to know what happened, and nice to see the race hustlers and lefties interested in it.
Could the admission be a political ploy to somehow salvage his credibility? Either way, pimpin’ in Africa is as old as the soil beneath it, this ain’t really news. That Gates would dare utter the blasphemy is however, quite interesting.
There’s an interesting rant at http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/rants/slavery.php where, after going back through some european and family ancestry, he concludes with the last paragraph:
In his family history, Colored People, Gates calls his mother a racist, because she so despised whites. I remember he was criticized when the book was published because it wasn’t the angry, wholesale indictment of American society that lefties expected. So maybe he’s more thoughtful in his writings than in his actions.
roc.
You think maybe he reacted without thinking, pulling the race card by reflex, and discovered his old pal Obama forced him to grab the tiger by the tail?
Without Obama, he might have apologized.
Given his position on profiling it’s encouraging to see he recognizes the issue of slavery was more complex than whites enslaving blacks. Now he just has to offset the garbage Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Jeramiah Wright, and any number of other race pimps dump to the masses.
Of course, where the scent of free money lingers in the breeze of injustices spoken the hearing and voices of the victim classes will tune to the mantra of “you owe”.
I find it rather ironic: liberals — chief among them, the President of the United States — have engaged in obscene race-baiting based on the claim that as a consequence of the new Arizona law, people will be (might be?) stopped simply based on the color of their skin. Yet many of these same liberals want money/reparations made to people……..simply based on the color of their skin!
I have to admit that I also find it courageous of Prof. Gates to publish this book, and am rather surprised as my only other knowledge of him is in reference to the public brouhaha after the Cambridge incident (when the President also took a front seat in the race-baiting before he “knew all the facts.” Hmmm…. come to think of it, he and Eric Holder have much in common…). I happened upon an article just last night about the new book, and while it took me by surprise, I have to admit a new begrudging respect for the man. Add to that roc scssrs’ revelations, he may well deserve more respect than I have thus far accorded him, although actions and real-life behavior inform as much as scholarly publications, in my book.
I also heard that.
Given the behaviour common in Africa, it is hard to accept the idea that African slavery would be “kind”. Granted, adding a racial aspect (and cultural aspect) makes it worse in some ways.
There is still slavery in the Sudan. And Bill Clinton once claimed that the Muslim/Arab world hated us because of slavery . . .
Don,
given “behaviour”, who’s “us” that Clinton, of vile memory, referred to?
And the English word “slave” comes from “slav” because so many slavic people at one point were slaves. The “slavs” are white.
sshh! dont tell the PC folks.
Now if can just get someone, anyone in the African American community, to admit that Africans are still selling their brothers into slavery…….Bueller??? Anyone???
According to this article it would appear that Cinque was not a slave trader.
Sounds to me like a black man adjusting his tack to continue plucking urchins from the sea of white liberal guilt.
It’s still bad, sayeth Skippy. But I, too, will grant you honkies absolution if it will get me what it did Barack.
I agree with Skippy Gates? I feel so dirty now.
Thomas Sowell wrote:
“Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans; more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed.
The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.”
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-sowell_02edi.State.Edition1.284716c.html
So, when are we going to get our reparations from North Africa?
I know it’s off subject but speaking of Harvard,,,,
Man accused of duping Harvard pleads not guilty
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/18/delaware-man-accused-duping-harvard-pleads-guilty/?test=latestnews
Personally, I have no trouble with the idea that if historically your group has been oppressed by someone else’s group, irrespective of whether you yourself suffered from the oppression or people now living in the other group committed it, you’re entitled to reparations. Seems like a good idea but first things first.
It’s been about four hundred years since the slave trade came to what became the United States. Christian persecution of Jews stretches back about four times that long. So any Christians reading this weblog who feel guilty enough over the slave trade to support reparations for American blacks…you owe me first.
Check is fine but I prefer cash.
And by the way, we’ve already had decades of reparations. Affirmative action as it developed, minority set-sides by government and private business, scholarships to universities and expensively-funded support programs for such students…African-American “themed” dormitories…lots more. Why doesn’t this count?
haha can I get money from the Turkish government then?? I am partially Armenian. oh and I’m half Irish so the British owe me big time, as do the Vikings.
Seriously though, my Armenian parent is still mad at the ottoman empire…
Also, isn’t Britain still mad about being invaded by the Romans?
Alex, gently pointing out that however far back it goes, persecution of Jews in America has been not so much the last 400 years. Prejudice, plenty. Persecution in the usual sense, not so much. That’s going to really gum up the math of figuring out who owes what.
“North African” has significant overlap with “Moslem,” BTW. Perhaps the most enslaving people in the history of the world – and there’s significant competition for that dishonor.
> I heard that Cinque, of Amistad fame, went into business as a slave trader. Anybody know?
Not according to Steven Spielberg…
As I understand it, while the movie ends with him sailing back to Africa, in real life, he moved to the West Indies and traded in slaves himself, so, yeah.
There is debate over this, however. I’m not sure I trust the University of Oklahoma, since such organizations can clearly have a great big axe to grind when it comes to this sort of thing. I’d want to know a lot more about the author’s background and academic honesty.
If true, though, it also puts paid to this claim:
> Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was”
Clearly, he did. Indeed — far more so than any white man. And yet he still chose to engage in it.