Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.

Published: April 22, 2010

Cambridge, Mass.

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Scott Bakal

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
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.
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.
Given this remarkably messy history, 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.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with thetheory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic.”

Why the Onion's Crappy Apology Is Worthless

The satirical site's mea culpa to Quvenzhané Wallis makes it OK to take things even further.

• By: Madison Gray

When I watched Quvenzhané Wallis telling the story of a little girl called Hushpuppy and her adventures living in a poor Bayou area in Beasts of the Southern Wild, I was enchanted by how well she articulated her life and the world around her. I had so much hope that she might be the youngest person ever to take home a golden statuette and wanted to believe that everyone else on the planet shared my sentiment.

The best actress trophy went to Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook, and the pervasive thinking for Quvenzhané was probably something like, "It's OK, Princess, you were still wonderful." But that wasn't the case in the offices of the Onion, the Chicago-based satirical news website. Someone, possibly a social media editor, as yet unnamed, decided to place this on Twitter:

"Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c--t, right?"

The tweet was reportedly taken down an hour after it was posted, but not really. Anyone who follows the Onion on Twitter and everyone who doesn't got wind of this tweet, and it spread across the Web like, well, the smell of bad onions!

The controversy has, at least for half a day -- which is equal to months on the Internet -- became to the Oscars what the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" became to Super Bowl XXXVIII. Nobody's even thinking about Argo or Ben Affleck or red carpets or lengthy, tearful speeches now, and anybody with access to a keyboard is pissed, and rightly so (except for those who try to explain that the joke was aimed at Hollywood itself and not the girl, and make themselves sound fugazi in the process).

"How dare they use that kind of vulgar language when referring to a 9-year-old girl?" "This wasn't funny!" "They've gone too far!" ... And on and on it goes. That's until something else catches people's short attention span.

Onion CEO Steve Hannah, betting on short attention spans, quickly whipped up a mea culpa for the tweet, offering his most humble "we screwed up" plea for forgiveness.

But that's why the Onion's half-assed apology for the tweet, while maybe sincere, isn't enough, and nothing they can do ever will be.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.
When you put something out there in the media, good or bad, it's out there and can't be taken back, no matter how sorry you are. Just ask Don Imus. His infamous "nappy-headed hoes" quip was heard and never unheard, because the damage was done, like throwing acid in the face of a girl in Afghanistan who is trying to get an education, or a slave owner raping one of his slaves. It's just that sexist and racist, and I'm not sparing the feelings of anyone at the Onion, since they didn't spare Quvenzhané's.
So while an apology is part and parcel when someone says or does something this thoughtless, it only really pushes the envelope a little further for someone else who believes that in order to be funny someone needs to be offended.
Don't get me wrong -- edgy comedy is funny. Hell, Richard Pryor did it for years, and I'll argue that he's the funniest man of all time. But as raunchy as his language was, he never directly aimed it at anyone's child. He was smart enough to know that what he said had to be carefully engineered not only for maximum impact, but to make the social statements that he intended.

So perhaps that's the takeaway from all this: When you try to be funny, be adhesive. What came out of the Onion was the opposite. In fact it was like dress socks on a bamboo floor: It caused the people at the Onion to slip and fall on their unfunny asses.
This is why, as many n-words and M-Fs as Pryor spewed, he never once had to apologize for them, because there was nothing to apologize for. It was just hot, sticky truth.

Madison Gray is a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based writer 

What Is It About Skin Color?

A top expert on the evolution of our pigmentation explains how we all became so color-struck. By: Nina G. Jablonski | Posted: February 6, 2013 at 12:55 AM

 

Digital Vision/Thinkstock

- Skin color is one of our most important biological traits. Its many shades evolved as humans moved far and wide into regions with different intensities of sunlight. Skin color is also a trait that has come to have deep cultural meanings -- developed over many centuries -- that influence our social interactions and societies in profound and complex ways.

We notice one another's skin because we are visually oriented animals, but there is no genetically programmed bias to favor one color over another. Over time, however, we have developed beliefs and biases about skin color that have been transmitted over decades and centuries and across vast oceans and continents.

The first scientific classification of humans, published by Carl Linnaeus in 1735, was simple and separated people into four varieties by skin color and continent. Later, Linnaeus not only added more physical traits to his descriptions but also changed them to include information that he had surmised about temperament. Europeans were white and "sanguine," Asians were brown and "melancholic," Native Americans were red and "choleric" and Africans were black and "phlegmatic."

This analysis was the first authoritative classification that combined physical traits with folk beliefs about dispositions and character. The folk beliefs had little to do with fact or observation but were mostly just fables -- racist pronouncements that were personal and emotional expressions of, at best, discomfort and, mostly, prejudice. From this point on, debasing associations of physical appearance with temperament and culture became commonplace and were considered scientific. Racism had found its intellectual foundation.

The first person to formally define "races" was the noted philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in 1785 classified people into four fixed races, which were arrayed in a hierarchy according to color and talent. Kant had scant personal knowledge of human diversity but opined freely about the tastes and finer feelings of groups about which he knew nothing. For Kant and his many followers, the rank-ordering of races by skin color and character created a self-evident order of nature that implied that light-colored races were superior and destined to be served by the innately inferior, darker-colored ones.

Despite the strong objections of many of his contemporaries, Kant's ideas about a fixed natural hierarchy of human races, graded in value from light to dark, gained tremendous support because they reinforced popular misconceptions about dark skin being more than a physical trait. The preference for light over dark -- strictly speaking, white over black -- was derived from premedieval associations of white with purity and virtue, and of black with impurity and evil.

The light-dark polarity was extended to the human sphere with the establishment of the slave trade and hereditary slavery in the Americas. Negative associations of dark skin and human worth were now profitable. As the transatlantic slave trade became more lucrative, the moral polarity of skin colors was accentuated to the extent that light and dark were respectively associated with human and animal, creating one of the most sinister and long-lived patterns of unfairness that the world has ever known.

The notion that the superiority of the white race was part of the natural order was deviously reinforced by the rise of modern "scientific" racism in the late 19th century. Certain "stocks" of humanity were considered to be more highly evolved and civilized because of their color, superior "fitness" and "adaptations." "Racial souls" were seen as mapping onto unique suites of physical traits, creating crazy ideas of ranked human types and civilizations. The association of color with character and the consequent ranking of people according to color stands as humanity's most momentous logical fallacy.

Today one of the biggest concerns is the reinvention of clinical concepts of race, based on inaccurate generalizations about the susceptibility of people to certain disease risks. If clinical constituencies redefine and repackage the races as real biological entities, then we face a new era of scientific racism no less frightening than the first. Clinical authorities hold a sanctified place in American society and are capable of creating a new reality of labeled races that will be widely believed and promulgated because it is "for the good."

The idea that race is a social construct is becoming more widespread, but that doesn't diminish scientific racism as a real concept in the minds of many people who want to believe in it. Nor does it lessen the lived experience of racism today. Racist beliefs, anchored in the scientific racism of a bygone era, persist today but are mostly hidden because it is socially and politically unacceptable to air them. 

Indeed, the bankrupt concept of fixed and immutable human "races" -- packages of physical and behavioral traits -- ranked by color has led to the creation of potent and persistent racial stereotypes. When these stereotypes are propagated widely by revered authorities and transmitted faithfully from person to person and generation to generation, they can last and last.

"Races" are not just labels, because they can determine fate. Race labels that are associated with negative or positive depictions and narratives can have powerful effects by planting in people's minds the idea that their own group is superior, inferior, smarter, stupider, stronger or weaker than another.

Stereotypes are not realities, and the behaviors they engender are not inevitabilities. Human attitudes are constantly subject to revision through experience and, more importantly, through conscious choice. Biases can be modified and eradicated on the basis of experience and motivation, and stereotypes can be changed when people are motivated to think about someone, in any way, as a member of their own group. Educating our children and youths about the evolution of skin color, the history of race and the dangers of stereotyping may have remarkable and positive results for humanity.

Nina G. Jablonski is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. This essay is based on her new book, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color.

2013!

Happy New Year!!!

There's been so much going on that I haven't had the same amount of time to devote to my blog as of late. At the very least, I wanted to wish you all a very Happy New Year after such a busy holiday season. I'll be back soon after MLK Jr./Inauguration Day with pics. I'm very excited about attending the Presidential Inauguration for the second time in a row. See you soon! I wish you great blessings of health and happiness in 2013!

-Elijah

What Became of the Hip-Hop Politicians?

They were supposed to be the new breed. What happened to elected officials of the hip-hop generation? By: Lottie Joiner | Posted: December 19, 2012 at 12:47 AM

Harold Ford (David Goldman); Artur Davis (Chip Somodevilla/Getty); Jesse Jackson Jr. (Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty)

-- During the Congressional Black Caucus legislative week in 2004, there was a fundraising reception held for a young black politician from Chicago who hoped to represent his state in the U.S. Senate. The honorary chairs of the fundraiser were Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.), Artur Davis (D-Ala.) and Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.). They helped raise money for Barack Obama, who went on to win the Illinois Senate seat. We all know how the story ends. In 2008 Obama became the first black president of the United States and in November was elected for a second term.

The young black politicians who helped raise funds for Obama were known as the "the New Breed." They arrived in Washington during the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s and were part of the hip-hop generation, the generation born between 1965 and 1984. Jackson became a member of Congress in 1995. Ford joined him in the House two years later. In January 2003, Meek and Davis were sworn in. And just two years earlier, in 2001, Kwame Kilpatrick became the youngest mayor of Detroit when he was elected at age 31.

"I think it's exciting anytime young people of color emerge in an elected office," James Peterson, director of Africana studies and associate professor of English at Lehigh University, told The Root. "It's doubly exciting when those folks come from the hip-hop generation and identify with the constituents of hip-hop culture."

Indeed. This cohort of young black politicians was smart, driven, dynamic and energetic. They hadn't marched on Washington, but they had come to take Washington by storm.

"The younger generation really tried to position themselves as being part of the new breed that didn't wear race on their sleeve, that was committed to reform and good government ... and to do better than previous generations of black politicians had done and actually be able to address inequality in the community," said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University and author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America.

One of the most ambitious was Ford. When he entered Congress in 1997, he was selected as the Democrats' freshman class president. He was only 30 years old in 2000 when he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Two years later, he boldly ran for the position Democratic leader, ultimately losing to veteran lawmaker Nancy Pelosi, who became the first woman to lead a party in Congress.

But what happened to these young men who came into office with such ambition? Unfortunately, their aspirations met reality, Gillespie said.

Ford and Meek, both from political families, ran for Senate in their respective states and lost. Davis, a Harvard graduate and former assistant U.S. attorney, wanted to be the first black governor of Alabama but failed to secure the Democratic nomination in his state.

"The younger generation actually thought that there were greater opportunities for them to be able to act upon their ambition, and because of that they took risks that older black politicians and earlier cohorts of black politicians didn't take. Unfortunately they [the risks] didn't pay off," said Gillespie. "In Artur Davis' case he miscalculated. He took the Obama moment and hoped that it would transfer to success in the Deep South."

The tragic disappointment of Jackson and Kilpatrick is another story. After 17 years in Congress, Jackson resigned from his seat on Nov. 21 to "focus on restoring" his health. Jackson was diagnosed with bipolar II depression this summer. The former congressman remains under federal investigation for misuse of campaign funds. Kilpatrick resigned as mayor of Detroit in 2008 after a corruption trial that included a sexting scandal. He served jail time and is currently in court again facing more corruption charges.

"Jesse Jackson, he wanted to break into the higher level offices that African Americans seldom win -- governor, senator," said David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Kwame, he said, "was a young man who didn't view the world as a potentially dangerous place. I think to some degree, he thought he could pretty much do what he wanted."

But for all their faults, the public still rooted for these young black men from the hip-hop generation. They wanted to see them succeed. "The reason why the downfall of these two men in particular was so disheartening was because this cohort did a really good job of presenting themselves as technocratic do-gooders. People believed the hype and I think assumed that they were not susceptible to the same sort of challenges and vulnerabilities that a lot of people are susceptible to," said Gillespie. "And so it's more shocking because they had always framed themselves as being very, very different from their predecessors who, sometimes, had ethics issues."

The young black politicians of the hip-hop generation have now moved on from Capitol Hill. Ford found his place in corporate America and is a popular television commentator. Meek continues to work on education issues with his family's foundation. Davis, who abandoned the Democratic Party and spoke at the Republican National Convention, worked at a law firm after leaving office and was a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics this spring. Kilpatrick continues to deal with his corruption charges.

Bositis believes that most of these young black politicians who entered Congress with great fanfare can still have a career in politics, if not elected office.

Though the new breed may not have accomplished all that they would have liked or reached their own personal goals, Peterson notes that their time in office was important in the bigger scheme of things.

"It really spoke back to older generations -- that suggestion that our generation was disengaged, that our generation was apathetic," said Peterson. "These leaders, successful or not, as they emerged, they really helped to sort of construct a counter-narrative to the political-apathy identity that some of these people try to hang around the hip-hop culture."

Inspiration

So, I think the rest of this year I'll focus all of my posts on things that I happen to find "inspirational" in one form or another. Sometimes I marvel at the sheer beauty of some of the things that God has created. Many of these things we take for granted. Here are a few of my favorite places to be in the continental United States, especially early in the morning when people are barely waking up...





Lyndon B. Johnson Memorial Grove here in D.C. is where you'll more than likely find me on a summer or fall Saturday morning after Judo practice lets out. You essentially enter from the south parking lot of the Pentagon and cross a bridge over the Potomac. You emerge on the other side eerily close to GW parkway with a grand view of the District. It's truly a sight to see, and one of my favorite places to take time out to think and meditate.





Twin Peaks, San Francisco. This place is perhaps my favorite on the West Coast. I admit I'm more of a "NorCal" person than "SoCal". San Francisco is beautiful, and after climbing to the top of a very windy(I suppose that's nothing new as San Fran is famous for these roads) Twin Peaks Blvd, you'll reach the top with an exhilarating view of the bustling city. I have to say however, this is more breathtaking than anything. If the winds are high that day, you will be in store for a scare as you actually see clouds whip past directly overhead!

Both sights are amazing at night as well! So the next time you're in either area, check them out! It will amaze you, I promise!

What Happened?

I've been super-busy, that's what happened. I had no time to post a blog, but some major events took place in the last month while I was away. Here they are in the form of pictures:



President Obama was re-elected!!! What an amazing thing, and I am truly blessed to have been alive and of sound mind to be able to experience, take part in(by voting) and witness(I went to inauguration in 2009) this historic time!



This is an illustration of what happened to me in late October. I hit a HUGE deer on GW Memorial Parkway on the way to work one Friday morning. I could have been killed! It was the biggest deer I had ever seen and it all happened so fast. Sorry that the deer had to die, but thankful that I'm alive.



I got engaged! I asked the love of my life to marry me and she said yes(just pretend those hands are Black in the picture). We're sorting out all of the details now. I'm blessed that someone I love, loves me too and is willing to deal with me for the rest of my natural life. God is Good!



This has nothing to do with anything-I just thought that these pics of Kobe "modeling" from awhile back were hilarious! LOL