The Theory of Reparations, By a Formerly Black Harvard Professor

O.K., O.K., let's get started. Let's all agree that today is, officially, "African-American Question Day."

And here's the very first question for your consideration: What is it with our so-called “prominent” blacks, lately?

Are they engaging in self-hating, racially destructive public discourse because they really believe what they’re saying, or do they have some other, more base, more blatantly self-serving agenda?

The phenomenon seems to be occurring with greater and greater frequency, afflicting our most visible black elected officials, academics, media personalities and, even, regrettably, our national civil rights leaders.

Take, for example, the case of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, who’s been commonly referred to as a “prominent black intellectual.”

The other day, in a column he submitted to the New York Times, Gates, the highly acclaimed author and professor at Harvard University, produced one of the single most misleadingly revisionist and mealy-mouthed cases against reparations I’ve seen in a very long time.

The worst part of it was that he based his position on a premise that those most responsible for the global slave trade were not the Europeans and Americans, who owned the slave ships, the chains and shackles, the plantations and the slave quarters, and who forced blacks to work on an entirely uncompensated basis for more than 250 years in North America, alone. Instead, says Gates, it was the indigenous Africans, themselves, who caused the creation of the slave trade.

Gates' article is especially dangerous because it virtually absolves Europeans from any fundamental responsibility, whatsoever, for the existence of the heinous institution.

Unfortunately, the article will be seen as credible, in some circles, simply because Mr. Gates, like President Obama and Law Professor Charles Ogletree, claims an affiliation with a major Ivy League University.

In contemporary American culture, somehow, an affiliation with Harvard (or any of the other “Ivy League Universities"), or having studied in Europe (preferably at Cambridge University or Oxford University), and being able to emulate speakers of the “King’s English,” as closely as humanly possible, have bestowed instant credibility, somehow, on Americans – even on some African Americans.

By comparison, in this country, you get absolutely no credit or prestige for speaking any of the venerable and sophisticated African dialects that predate all of European culture by thousands of years, or having earned a degree at even the most important Asian or African university.

On the other hand, saying that one is a “Rhodes Scholar” instantly conveys an aura of authority, dignity and respect. I guess it doesn’t matter at all that the Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford University, was created by, and is still funded by, the estate of Cecil Rhodes, who killed, maimed and comprehensively oppressed millions of indigenous people in Southern Africa on his way to controlling their land and, thereby, controlling the sale of 90 percent of all the diamonds in the world, through the de Beers Company, which he founded.

This was the same Cecil Rhodes, by the way, who caused the Southern African land mass that is now Zimbabwe to be named Rhodesia, in 1895.

So, when people read that the "prominent" Mr. Gates, who received his Ph.D from Cambridge University, has reduced the concept of reparations for black slavery to a “judicious (if symbolic) gesture,” they might be understandably confused.

Contrary, I guess, to the reparations that have already been paid by the American government to wrongly imprisoned Japanese Americans after World War II; or those paid by the German government to Jewish World War II Holocaust survivors; or by the same U.S. government to Native Americans, Mr. Gates seems to believe, now, that reparations is an inappropriate concept and, even worse, that Africans, themselves, created the global slave trade, which was a “business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.”

Lucrative for the Africans?

Where is the evidence for that statement, Mr. Gates? There is ample evidence that slavery was the foundation for building tremendous fortunes throughout the Western Hemisphere and for launching the fledgling U.S. economy, itself, into a global power. But where is the proof that indigenous African economies were able to grow and prosper as result of the slavery “business?”

Relying, among other things, on an obscure quote from Frederick Douglass (I guess he did mean THAT Frederick Douglass), Gates alleges that Douglass referred to the Continent's indigenous people as “the savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa.”

But old "Skip" was just warming up.

He, apparently, fully intended that, by the time Americans had finished reading his column, they would cease, finally, to “wrongly” blame whites, at all, for the institution of slavery.

In his thirteenth paragraph, Gates offers 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.” Earlier on, he contrasted that with "the romanticisized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in "Roots."

"Romanticisized?" Is that what you think slavery was, Professor Gates?

“Given this remarkably messy history,” he shamelessly continued, “the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.”

By the way, here are some things I wasn’t surprised about after reading the column: One, that Gates would, and did, find a way to excuse his good friend and fellow Ivy Leaguer, Barack Obama, from the need to address the issue of reparations, again, especially with the mid-term elections breathing down the President's neck. He does that by quoting, conveniently, the author of the latest book on Obama, David Remnick, who wrote: “He(Obama) told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations, but in practice he didn’t really know if it was workable."

In his own shoddy, convoluted logic, I guess, Gates is publicly trying to divert black America’s focus away from the U.S. and Western European governments on this issue, and to have us, now, fix our attention on gaining reparations for slavery from Africa.

Man, this guy is good...illogical, intellectually dishonest, a transparent seeker of broader mainstream academic acceptance and a greater degree of personal assimilation into Eurocentric social circles, but good at all of that, nonetheless.

Wow! How could we have all been so wrong about all that slavery stuff for all those years?

Since I started out by reminding you that today was “African-American Question Day,” here’s another one for you: Do you think the highly esteemed Mr. Gates, who for years “struggled” with the challenges of being a black scholar in a predominantly white U.S. academic environment, has been influenced, at all, in his recent thinking, by his DNA test-related discovery that he has a high percentage of European ancestry and that, more specifically, he may be a descendent of the fourth century Irish King, Niall?

It appears that Mr. Gates has found out that he’s really not as “black” as he originally thought he was, and that he's decided to begin working overtime, on his new, less-black philosophical approaches.

Hey, I can understand him wanting to come to the public defense of his new-found relatives here and in Europe, but did the Yale and Cambridge-educated, Harvard professor have to throw all black Americans and the entire indigenous population of the African continent under the historical bus, to do so?

Methinks he went too far.

And, by the way, here's the last question: Now that he’s Irish, does Mr. Gates still qualify to be called a "prominent black intellectual?"

What do you think?


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