Ending Whose Slavery Blame-Game, Prof. Gates?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I would ordinarily not be rejoining any article written and published by Harvard University’s Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and, as usual, seeking to scornfully blame continental Africans, as a whole, for the untold hardships and misery visited on African-Americans through the collaborative sale and enslavement of the latter by African and European elites. I wouldn’t because in 2005, as I was to learn from the former Affirmative Action Officer at the tranquil and sprawling suburban community college where I teach in New York, Prof. Gates categorically declined to keynote a Black History Month celebration primarily because this writer had composed and published a 30-part series of articles (titled “The New Scapegoats”) aptly carping the renowned literary and cultural critic for having distastefully and disdainfully used the privilege of his television documentary series (titled “Wonders of the African World”) to foster gratuitous African-American animus against their continental African kinsfolk.
I would also learn later, albeit obliquely, from the same Affirmative Action Officer, that Prof. Gates had, indeed, presented quite a decent offer to my college, entailing the institutionalization of an annual scholarship program for two African-American students from my college to Harvard, only if I could, in not so many words, I presume, be swiftly, effectively and permanently disengaged from my job. The Harvard heavyweight would also, according to the former Affirmative Action Officer, promise the college an undisclosed handsome monetary largesse. Needless to say, in the wake of the widely publicized Gates-Crowley Affair last year, I had pertinent occasion to reprise some of the preceding and so do not intend to belabor our present subject with much of the same.
Suffice it to observe in passing that Prof. Gates’ latest New York Times Op-Ed fare on the question of the “considerable” role played by continental Africans in the sale and enslavement of African-Americans offers nothing that is either worthwhile or fundamentally edifying. Instead, in an increasingly cynical and jaded manner, the Piedmont, West Virginia, native assumes the lurid stance of a rabidly anti-African critic, perhaps, in hopes of leveraging his global renown and reach in order to do to continental Africans what 500 years of slavo-colonial onslaught by Europe could not do – a phenomenon which approximates the Gatesian equivalent of Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” for the incredibly indomitable spiritual and cultural resilience of European Jewry.
Thus nearly at every turn in his recent scholarly and journalistic offerings on the subject of slavery and reparations, the renowned Harvard millionaire professor has not spared the least opportunity to immitigably malign and viciously exaggerate the extent to which “Black” Africans were systematically complicit in merchandising their own kin (See “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” New York Times 4/22/10).
Ironically, albeit scarcely surprisingly, such vitriol comes in the “heady” wake of the quite prolific author’s having expediently appropriated Human Genome Technology (HGT) to scientifically establish the fact of him being genetically 70-percent Caucasoid (or European) and only 30-percent Africoid (or Negroid). Indeed, it was in view of the latter that in the wake of the Gates-Crowley Affair, I quite reasonably, and perhaps even plausibly, suggested that it strikingly appears that what had irked the Harvard egghead the most, in his highly televised and dramatized encounter with Cambridge, Ma., Police Department’s Officer James Crowley had far less to do with the latter’s cuffing of Prof. Gates in the sacred comfort of his own home, than the fact of the “victim’s” fellow Irish-American kin impudently and flatly refusing to acknowledge their mutual ethnic affiliation.
It is also rather rude for Prof. Gates to insinuate President Barack Obama (a man he is widely known to have voted against in the Democratic presidential primaries) into the slavery and reparations discourse, particularly, when the Harvard star player himself implicitly acknowledges the fact that while, indeed, the President’s father was a bona fide African of “Nilo-Luo” descent, there is hardly any evidence to suggest that the Luo of Kenya played any remarkable role in the massive sale and enslavement of African-Americans. May we, therefore, aptly surmise here that in the “Martyr Complex” imagination of Prof. Gates, the mere fact of President Obama’s father having hailed from Kenya automatically and inextricably implicates the man who generously hosted this morbidly irreverent “neo-con-federal” West Virginian to a beer party at the White House in the wake of the Gates-Crowley Affair?
While, indeed, many a contemporary African leader has expressed profound regret in reaction to the bizarre question of the proverbial “Peculiar Institution” (apologies to Kenneth Stampp), the fact starkly remains that there were culprits and victims on both African sides. (Now, I don’t expect any deafening and hysterical “Blaming-The-Victim” plaints and/or charges from any reader. Needless to say, Prof. Gates irresponsibly insisted on being frontally rejoined, and so the bellicose brat had to be served in kind).
Interestingly, Prof. Gates’ article about “How to End the Slavery Blame-Game” also wistfully reminded me of my auto-reaction, in the wake of the Gates-Crowley Affair, when the newly-elected pioneering leader charitably referred to the ego-contused Prof. Gates as “a friend.” In his pretentiously expert article, the man who ought to have since long familiarized himself with President Obama’s stance on the reparations question, instead, finds himself quoting another one of his newly-discovered “white kin” by the name of David Remnick whose latest book, titled “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” quotes one of the President’s former University of Chicago students as making the following remark, supposedly reflective of Mr. Obama’s “mixed feelings about the reparations movement”: “He [then Prof. Obama] told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.” If so, then why regressively and boorishly attempt to saddle a man who clearly has far more pressing issues on his mind than a copycat Judeo-centric chimera?

At any rate, what Prof. Gates deviously attempts to achieve with his rather jaded and embarrassingly fuzzy article, has been far better done by the astute and sterling likes of John Henrik Clarke (whom Gates once described in a New York Times article as a “pseudo-scholar”), Nathan I. Huggins, Chimweizu, Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, W. E. B. DuBois, Ivan van Sertima and Cheikh Anta Diop, to scratch just the surface.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is also a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy policy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “The New Scapegoats: Colored-on-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].
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