A month and a day ago, Henry Louis Gates wrote a remarkable op-ed for the NYTimes, “How to End the Slavery Blame-Game“.
“Remarkable” because of who wrote it (and I suppose remarkable whenever the NYTimes prints something that actually makes us believers in American exceptionalism stand up and cheer).
If the Nation of Islam is booing it, then you know the Harvard professor must have said something right.
Here’s part of what he wrote:
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. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
Gates’ position isn’t one against the idea of reparations for descendants of slavery (and this post isn’t about rehashing the ridiculous, unrealistic notions regarding reparations); but one in acknowledgment that if there is reparations to be delivered, then Africans themselves can jump to the head of the line in paying out 40 acres and a mule to black Americans.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
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. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
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. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.
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.
This post isn’t about “watering down” and minimizing America’s guilt in the participation of slavery; it’s about making sure the role others played isn’t minimized and watered down while our guilt gets magnified.
If Henry Louis Gates, Jr. can reasonably acknowledge the fact that “white” America is not uniquely guilty of participation in the evils of slavery, then perhaps he is someone you can sit down and hash things out with, over a beer.
And maybe The Nation of Islam who thinks Professor Henry Louis Gates wrote “stupidly” on this topic….maybe they can arrange to have a “bean pie” summit to discuss their differences?
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.
If reparations for slavery should be paid after all these years, shouldn’t the reparations come from those who enslaved them, sold them and took the money?
Just saying!
Gates was never a slave so he is owed nothing. There are no living former slaves so they are owed nothing. I never bought, sold or owned slaves so I owe nothing. I think that should sum it up nicely.
OLD TROOPER Glad to see you are well. I mentioned on Mike’s post that the 2 Dems in Hawaii got 58% to Repub. 39% and therefore Dems should win in Nov. when it’s one on one.He went ballistic.Guy’s got a very short fuse.Hope you’re rotating back to Montana soon.All the best RJW
Reparations are nothing but another handout. No one in this country has ever been a slave or owned a slave except the Africans who came from Cameroon and brought their slaves with them and are in the slammer now. I would think that decades of welfare, food stamps, low income housing, low interest mortgage loans, low interest minority loans, CRA, affirmative action, preferential treatment would have taken care of this problem but with some people it is never enough. If you think about it, CRA is the biggie. After all, this program brought down the rest of us.
There’s a reason it was called the slave trade. The only place slavery still exists today is in Africa, yet one doesn’t hear much of it.
If the US is ever to pay reparations, then so should Every nation which had participated- including and Especially ALL muslim nations, which held the slave trade for a thousand years before Europe jumped into it, and still hold the slave trade right up the present day.
The comments on the link to the NOI are what we are up against. Basically the argument is “WEB DuBois said white men were guilty (in 1895) so Gates is a lousy historian.” WEB DuBois was practically the original poverty pimp, intellectual elite socialist. It’s absurd that on the one hand the NOI commentators run down Gates for being “educated” (ie, he went to school and forgot his “blackness,” the fate Michelle dreaded in her famous thesis) and praising DuBois because–he’s a Harvard graduate (therefore smart because he was educated)… who did not have all the historical data Gates now has, because there hadn’t been all the interest in black history at the time… The blacks of 1895 had much different experience to go by and no doubt still very raw feelings over slavery. In that day they had DuBois and his opposite, Booker T. Washington, who said “time to go to work.” And it is so to this day.
Talk about black and white differences, this is a a mirror world, where a bunch of people are determined to define themselves in terms of bitterness over past injustice. I wonder if a shrink anywhere has noted the psychopathology of deliberately choosing a path of hostility and defining any change in bitterness as capitulation to the enemy. Because this seems to be the definition of “blackness.” This is setting up the conditions of permanent failure in life, glorying in failure, leaning on blame as a defense mechanism–sheesh, think of your blood pressure if you had to live like that. It’s no wonder that blacks, as a group, have a lot of health problems. No one seems to have noticed that people who are chronically angry or chronically hopeless are also prone to a lot of health problems, yet these are the qualities enshrined and used to define culture. What a trap. Then because it’s always someone else’s fault, the other is continually guilt-tripped over the self-inflicted wounds.
From Professor Gates:
“… Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.”
Really?
I had always presumed Dr. Livingstone to be a white man; if so, it’s nonsense to believe Mr. Stanley “was going where no (white) man had gone before.”
I read about the history of slave trading years ago and I’m happy to see someone of Gate’s stature telling the truth in a public forum. Muslim and Africa nations still engage in slave trading and their treatment of slaves is definitely not benign; the very act of enslaving another Human Being is in itself violent and vicious. Living in the past and whining about it will do nothing but produce some very embarrassing realities when the past is fully examined.
When will the muslim and African nations abolish slavery?
@rich wheeler, Howdy Jarhead! I just want to get the deal done in Kandahar and get back to Big Sky country by November. As you understand I am neither a Democrat or a Republican but am not a fan of those that want to tax me more for any reason and deliver less. Hopefully in November the Consent of the Governed will speak loud and clear.
Regarding reparations, I’m still waiting for the US Government to give the Black Hills back to the Lakota Sioux Tribe and the US Veterans Administration to resolve the Claims backlog for our wounded warriors and for pretenders to resign or from or stop running for office. Other than that I owe no one else anything. Period.
The big fight for Kandahar has started here so my postings will be light. My Group here is now larger than a BCT and I have teams and support out right now. We could use a few more boots on the ground here but that’s not on the agenda for someone’s political reasons.
Take Care.
Patter 6,
And so it is. The race baiters, Wight, Jackson, Sharpton, Farcon, keep the blame game going. In doing so they hurt the very people that need the most encouragement to succeed.
The big story is not the fact that slavery existed. It always had. It is the moral movement to abolish slavery and free slaves, that was a big deal. Let’s invite African Americans to help celbrate St. Patrick’s Day. He was a Roman slave who went on to be a bishop and patron St. of Ireland. Opportunities like that abound in America. Seeking them out makes better sense than hiding out in a nasty ghetto reliving slavery days.
While Old Trooper is waiting for the US gov’t to give back the Black Hills to the Lakota, the Arikara(Ree), who arrived in the area and claimed the Black Hills from unknown peoples already there (the hills show habitation for some 7000 years) around 1500AD, are waiting to get the same land back from the Cheyenne, who want it back from the Crow, who want it back from the Kiowa, who want it back from the Pawnee, who want it back from the Lakota who took the land by conquest in 1776.
Because the Lakota were the owners of the bluffs in the 1870s, the Arikawa, Crow, and Kiowa sided with the US gov’t. The Cheyenne and Lakota, having been friendly neighbors in the Minnesota area and having traveled west together, conquering the local tribes on the way, remained allied against the US gov’t, subsequently losing Paha Sapa by conquest in 1876 by the US.
Now, exactly which group has a truly non-conquest claim to the Black Hills? How far back should such nonsense go? Should the Franks be forced to abandon France, returning to Germany? Do the Magyars need to leave Hungary to reoccupy Mongolia? Do the Angles, Saxons, Normans, Celts have to leave the British Isles leaving them to the Picts who aren’t natives either?
The Black Hills belong to the last guys who can hold on to them just like any other piece of land on the planet. If given the absolute choice of remaining in the United States or being repatriated to his ancestral home in Africa, Prof Gates would most likely choose to remain in America.
Not to mention it’d be a bear to move the Crazy Horse memorial, Indigo….
Yep, no one ever mentions that 1/2 of freed slaves in the US became slave owners themselves. Its nice to see some one give discredit to those who sold the slaves. We always focus on the buyer and blame them, but someone had to sell them before the buyer had the opportunity to buy. All slavery info for the US has been distorted and our children learn the evil white men in the south were the bad guys. Turns out many southern plantation owners freed their slaves before the war and the war was about unequal taxes north vs south not really slavery being the No 1 issue. The commander of the North’s army kept his slaves until slavery was officially outlawed. So the ones in the north were no where near innocent of the slavery abuse.
crazy honkys you will all be enslaved soon, honkys have the blood of innocents on their hands and their children’s hand you all will be enslaved again just like honky animals should be.
honkys need to face facts their race is a diseases that should die out, you all are a curse to this earth, your honky kids are devils that should burn in hell, at least they wouldn’t stink as bad.
Black Wealth/White Wealth (Oliver & Shapiro)
Making of the Second Ghetto (Hirsh)
American Apartheid (Massey & Denton)
There Are No Children Here (Kotlowitz)
Ain’t No Making it (MacLeod)
Unequal Childhood (Lareau)
The Shame of the Nation (Kozol)
Health Disparities in the United States (Barr)
The Mis-Education of the Negro (Woodson)
The Struggle for Freedom (Carson)
When Affirmative Action was White (Katznelson)