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Books on Reparations
Belinda's Petition:
A Concise History of Reparations For The Transatlantic
Slave Trade
/
Race, Racism & Reparations
Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on
Reparations /
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century (1996)
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Repudiating an
Apologist
Skip Gates’ "End
the Slavery Blame-Game" Nonsense
By Dr. Ron
Daniels
Renowned Harvard
Professor Henry "Skip" Gates recently wrote an Editorial
Opinion piece entitled "Ending
the Slavery Black-Game" which was prominently
featured in the New York Times. Professor Gates
argues that certain African nations and leaders played
major roles in capturing Africans and selling them to
European slave traffickers. Therefore, from his
perspective, Africans were equally complicit in the
holocaust of enslavement, thereby nullifying any claim
for reparations for the cultural, mental, spiritual and
physical damages inflicted on Africans in America. It
appears the point of Professor Gates' Op-Ed piece is to
silence the demand for reparations once and for all by
shifting the burden for enslavement and the subsequent
centuries of enforced labor, colonialism and apartheid
on to the shoulders of Africans. In short, if Africans
had not captured and sold their own people, the
trans-Atlantic slave trade and development of the
"peculiar institution" would not have transpired.
I'm sure Professor
Gates' position provides relief and comfort to some in
White America who are tired of hearing African Americans
"complain" about the adverse effects of enslavement on
the evolution of the Black community in the U.S. and the
demand for reparations. After all, if an African
American of such prestige and prominence can say that
there is no need for reparations, then it must be so.
Of course this is
not the first time Professor Gates has fancied himself
standing up against "misguided" claims and positions by
his own people. It was not so long ago that he emerged
as the self-appointed hit man on a mission to discredit
Afro-centricity and African-centered education as
"pseudo" disciplines. When leading scholars like Dr.
John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Leonard Jeffries, Dr. Charshee
McIntyre, Dr. James Turner, Sonia Sanchez, Dr. Molefe
Asante, Dr. Maulana Karenga and a host of others were
contending that the goal of Black Studies/Africana
Studies must be "education for liberation," it was
Professor Gates who sided with the academic
establishment in castigating this approach.
Indeed, he became
the "darling" of conservative White academia by
denouncing African-centered Black Studies programs as
"separatist" enterprises, lacking in scholastic rigor
and objectivity. It was also from this perspective that
he advanced the notion of African culpability for
enslavement in a television documentary.
The New York
Times Op-Ed piece is simply the most recent effort
by Gates to assure the world that Africans did it to
themselves and therefore are at least as complicit in
the horrors of the African Holocaust as Europeans.
Despite his highly controversial arrest at his home in
Cambridge in an obvious case of racial profiling,
perhaps, Professor Gates is attempting to demonstrate
that we really do live in a "post-racial" America by
relieving a Black President of the burden of dealing
with the "divisive issue of slavery reparations."
Unfortunately,
wittingly or unwittingly, he has allowed himself to
become an apologist for peoples and nations who do not
want to accept responsibility for the greatest
transgression against human rights in history, the
holocaust of enslavement. This dangerous posture must be
repudiated.
No reasonable
scholar would dispute that some African nations played a
role in the slave trade. First and foremost it is
important to remember that the institution of slavery is
as old as humankind and Africans were not immune to
engaging in it. Though slavery in any form is never to
be condoned, there was no comparison between the kind of
involuntary servitude evident among some nations in
Africa and the British American form of chattel slavery.
Indeed, the latter form of servitude was the most
dehumanizing and brutal the world has ever known.
Moreover, slave trafficking never evolved as the
principal means of economy for African nations. In fact
the holocaust of enslavement seriously disrupted the
development of the continent.
But, that's not the
major point. Two of the best sources on the origin and
impact of African enslavement are
Capitalism and Slavery by the former Prime Minister
of Trinidad, Sir Eric Williams and the classic work
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
by the brilliant
Guyanese scholar/activist Walter Rodney. The major point
is that Africans did not initiate the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, which was the impetus for enslavement,
nor were Africans the primary beneficiaries of this
system of exploitation/oppression.
The demand for huge
numbers of human beings to be utilized as free labor in
the western hemisphere was not a function of
developments in Africa. Rather it was a direct
consequence of the ruthless subjection, domination and
colonization of regions in what came to be named the
"Americas." It was the insatiable need/demand for free
labor to make the colonies of the Americas profitable
which triggered the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the
horrific enslavement of Africans by Europeans - in some
instances with the forced or voluntary collaboration of
African leaders and nations.
Similar to the drug
traffic which plagues many urban Black communities, this
destructive enterprise was not initiated by Black people
and Black communities are certainly not the primary
beneficiaries. The drug dealers and so called "kingpins"
of the drug traffic in the Black community may live
relatively large in comparison to others in the hood,
but their take is a mere pittance compared to the huge
profits reaped by the global drug cartels. And, while it
is legitimate to condemn the drug dealer as a "menace to
society," it is clear that dealers are bit players in
the broader and more lucrative drug traffic controlled
by forces external to the Black community.
The holocaust of
enslavement may have provided a pittance of benefits for
African collaborators, but it led to the amassing of
obscene fortunes for the initiators of this vast global
system of exploitation. As Walter Rodney documents, the
commercial and industrial revolutions in Britain, France
and other European nations was fueled by the capital
extracted from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The
Triangular Trade produced a similar effect in terms of
dramatically accelerating the commercial and industrial
revolutions in North America.
However, as
referenced above, while Europe and America
thrived/developed from the holocaust of enslavement,
Africa and African people were devastated by the
horrendous loss of millions of lives, the displacement
of millions more, the destruction of community and the
underdevelopment and stagnation of the continent.
In the United
States the capital extracted from enslaved Africans,
with the complicity of the government and active
involvement of numerous financial institutions and
corporations, bolstered the expansion of the economy and
benefiting Whites at all levels of society directly or
indirectly. Meanwhile, enslaved Africans were considered
less than human beings under a system of chattel slavery
that defined them as property by law. Africans in the
U.S. suffered generations of cultural aggression,
separation of families and brutal treatment while their
free labor enriched the slave masters and the nation.
Apparently
Professor Gates does not believe these factors are of
consequence when attempting to apportion blame for the
holocaust of enslavement. In this regard his gravest
mistake is to suggest that the
perpetrator/initiator/principal beneficiary and victim
of a crime are equally guilty because some within the
victimized community collaborated with the victimizer.
This is utter nonsense and must be rejected for what it
is, a crude attempt to relieve the perpetrator from the
burden of responsibility for the crime.
Hence, Professor
Gates is an apologist for the system of oppression that
enslaved our forebears and invented theories of white
supremacy that are so deeply ingrained in the fabric of
American culture that he could be arrested by a White
police officer for attempting to enter his own home in
the first decade of the 21st Century.
Africans in America
are due reparations, and the process must begin with an
acknowledgement of the horrific wrongs committed against
our people. Rather than apologists, whose mission is to
confuse the issue, we need an appropriate apology from
the U.S. government and all private and public
institutions which were complicit in perpetuating and
profiting from the peculiar institution.
And, to be
meaningful, ultimately the apologies must be backed by
significant initiatives to repair the damage inflicted
on Africans in America as a collective whole, a
corporate body that was underdeveloped by centuries of
enslavement. Then and only then, can we achieve the
reconciliation that apparently Professor Gates' Op-Ed
piece superficially and prematurely seeks to attain.
Dr. Ron Daniels
is President of the Institute of the Black World 21st
Century and Founder of the Haiti Support Project. He is
a Distinguished Lecturer at York College City University
of New York. His articles and essays also appear on the
IBW website
www.ibw21.org and
www.northstarnews.com. To send a message, arrange
media interviews or speaking engagements, Dr. Daniels
can be reached via email at
info@ibw21.org.
Source:
BlackAgendaReport
posted 7 May 2010
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Response
In-Defense of Privilege
"Smirched with compromise, rotted with Opportunism"
We should not be
surprised that in a period of growing economic
disparities—in
the US and globally, at a time when progressives in
society have failed to find viable solutions to the
essential question of the day, that THROWBACKS will
quickly move in to fill that void.
I think Vladimir Bilenkin—perhaps
quoting Marx--expressed such a social order in society,
this way:
"When the contradictions accumulated in society cannot
be resolved by its progressive classes this task is
accomplished by its reactionary forces."
So, unfortunately the discussed case here of Skip "the
jip" Gates, show that the previligentsia is now rising
to its historic task, in defense of their interests.
Without the assertive intervention of progressive
intellectuals such as Daniels, Ransby and progressive
political forces HISTORY COULD WELL DEVELOP ON ITS BAD
SIDE.
As an example, in the last century, we see that the
retreat of German Progressives in support of German
Nationalism, was part of the process that enabled the
rise of Hitler. Peace and Blessings,
Yao Lloyd D. McCarthy
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The
Essence of Reparations
(Baraka) /
Race, Racism & Reparations
(Cortlett)
Obama's America and the New
Jim Crow (Alexander)
/
Michelle_Alexander Part
II Democracy Now
(Video)
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Remarks by the President and the First Lady
at Presentation of the National Medal of the
Arts and the National Humanities medal.—November
5, 1998—THE PRESIDENT: Near the beginning of
this century, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted a
"black tomorrow" of African American
achievement. Thanks in large measure to
Henry Louis Gates, that tomorrow has turned
into today. For 20 years he has revitalized
African American studies. In his writing and
teaching, through his leadership of the
Dream Team of African American scholars he
brought together at Harvard, Gates has shed
brilliant light on authors and traditions
kept in the shadows for too long. From
"signifying monkeys" to small-town West
Virginia, from ancient Africa to the new New
York, Skip Gates has described the American
experience with force, with dignity and,
most of all, with color. Ladies and
gentlemen, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
(Applause.) The Medal is presented.)—clinton6
The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of
Afro-American Literary Criticism (1989)
Colored People: A Memoir (1994, memoir) |
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” |
We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have
disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue
to do so until we are finally living on one
integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of all this
remarkable change will survive the process they
helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago
remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question.
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” |
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His father distrusted the police, who had frequently
called him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr. Kennedy’s
father “relished Muhammad Ali’s quip that the Vietcong
had never called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places his
father, and Mr. Wright, in sympathetic historical light.
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Ella
Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
A Radical
Democratic Vision
By
Barbara Ransby
One of
the most important African American leaders
of the twentieth century and perhaps the
most influential woman in the civil rights
movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an
activist whose remarkable career spanned
fifty years and touched thousands of lives.
A gifted grassroots
organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital
behind-the-scenes work that helped power the
black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key
figure in the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime
mover in the creation of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. |
Baker made a place for herself in
predominantly male political circles that included
W. E.
B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and
Martin Luther King
Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a
vibrant group of women, students, and activists both
black and white.
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Alexander
Crummell
A Study of Civilization and Discontent
By
Wilson Jeremiah Moses
The
third, and most egregiously neglected Pan African
intellectual black nationalist is Alexander Crummell
(1819-1898). Born in New York, brought up as an
Episcopalian, as a youth he was introduced to Greek,
Latin, and biblical languages thanks to the support
of his father, who was born in Africa, a member of
the Temne ethnic group. |
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He received his bachelors
degree, and passed his examination in classical Greek at
the University of Cambridge in England. In 1853,
he took up missionary work in Liberia. His sermons
and addresses are classic illustrations of the Christian Afrocentrism that later characterized
the Garvey Movement. He was a solid advocate of
African American political rights. Gravitating
towards high church ritual, he anticipated Elijah
Muhammad’s hostility to grass roots black religion,
which he viewed as a plantation survival and part of
a slaveholder’s conspiracy to undermine the moral
and intellectual development of African Americans.
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