Posted on 01/30/2002 1:30:56 AM PST by TopQuark
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- "ROOTS" was the only book I knew my teenage son to read, aside from assigned school books, computer manuals and chess books. He was thrilled to receive a copy autographed by Alex Haley, courtesy of George Haley, his brother, whom I had met.
Alex Haley himself I never really met, though I saw him in person once because we went to the same barber in Los Angeles. Both then and in his television appearances, Alex Haley seemed like a very decent man. That is why it is especially painful to have to recognize, now that the television series based on "Roots" is going to be re-run on its 25th anniversary, that its enormous success a quarter of a century ago was a tragedy for blacks and for American society in general.
Why a tragedy? The short answer is what Winston Churchill said during World War II: "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost." Some disastrous policies had been followed in the years leading up to World War II, and Churchill had sharply criticized those policies at the time but, now that the war was on, looking back could only interfere with the life-and-death job at hand.
There are some very big jobs at hand for black America -- and looking back at centuries past is a costly distraction from the work that needs to be done here and now. Moreover, the past that people are looking back at in "Roots" is not a wholly real past. When challenged by professional historians, Alex Haley called his work "faction" -- part fact and part fiction. He said that he had tried to give his people some myths to live by.
It was not that "Roots" merely got some details wrong. It presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened -- false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.
"Roots" has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero Kunta Kinte was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage. The village elders were likewise bewildered as to what these white men were doing, carrying their people away. In reality, West Africa was a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there -- and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.
Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly.
Because of the false picture of history presented by "Roots" and by other sources, last year we had the farce of the president of Nigeria making demands on the United States because of the enslavement of people whom his own countrymen had enslaved, and on behalf of a country where slavery still persists, more than a century after emancipation has occurred throughout the Western world.
"Roots" also feeds the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people. The tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that. People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought across the Atlantic. Asians enslaved other Asians, as well as whatever Europeans they could get hold of. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus ever got here.
Slavery, like cancer, was not limited to any particular country or race. To talk about cancer as if it were an American disease, or a white or black disease, would be absurd. If reparations were to be paid for slavery, everybody on this planet would owe everybody else.
There is no danger of that actually happening. The danger is that too many blacks, especially among the young and the ill-educated, will be backing into the third millennium still looking back at centuries past -- or at fictions about centuries past -- when there are opportunities all around them that most people in the rest of the world today would die for.
The ancestors of black Americans were not taken from some Eden, and there is no Eden for black Americans to return to today. If compensation were to be paid for the difference between where they are and where their ancestors came from, they would owe money, not receive money. But it would be ridiculous to lose the future because of the
THANK YOU!
There is a great book out called The Oyster Wars. I cannot recall the publisher ... no concern ... anywho, it recounts the bloody hostilities of the mid to late 1700s here in America over that wonderful little bivalve...the Oyster.
One particular chapter was devoted to the story of Irish immigrants being picked up in New York and sent down to the Potomic river (of Maryland and Virginia) with the promise of jobs on the water. Husbands would leave their families "up north" in hopes of returning soon with wages earned on the Oyster boats ... only to be never seen again.
The inlets of the Eastern Shore are to this day littered with countless Islands that were used as jails for the Irish workers. A veritable Irish slave trade that found itself hand-in-hand with the booming multimillion dollar Oyster market.
You won't hear that story in todays public school classrooms.
Hats off to Mr. Sowell for speaking the truth!
Heh--not only were the details wrong, they were plagiarized, as well. Haley lost a quite large lawsuit over that plagiarizism.
Why repeat something that is so patently false?
"Faction"...what a marvelously appropriate double entendre!
That said, I very much enjoyed Roots as a work of fiction. It was a well-plotted, engrossing saga with memorable characters and high drama. It's not great history, but you could say the same thing about Gone With the Wind. It is unfortunate that Haley chose to pass it off as even partly factual.
Oh, they’ll just ignore them like anything else they can’t counter because of that nasty concept called “Truth”.
The image Sowell cites “’Roots’ has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa” is so indelibly burned into the minds of the masses of ill educated or intellectually lazy, that it is almost universally substituted for truth.
That’s the real damage that something like the re-broadcasting of “Roots” will do. How many Americans will sit down for a night or two and gather “information” on “history” that they will use to form opinions for years to come. Rest assured that they’ll never actually open a scholarly book to verify the versions of events that Hollywood provides them. It would be too much trouble, and they already “know”, they saw it on T.V.
Owl_Eagle
”Guns Before Butter.”
"I Have a Nightmare"
by John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 30, 2002
"LET US NOT SEEK to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom." So spoke Martin Luther King, Jr. in his historic 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech. During the past quarter-century, however, Dr. King’s successors in the civil rights movement have turned a deaf ear to his exhortation; indeed they have virtually established anti-white rhetoric as their native tongue.
One person who has noticed this unfortunate development is a remarkable seventeen-year-old, black female student at an Akron, Ohio, high school. This girl recently entered an essay contest at her school, in which the entrants were to speculate on what Dr. King would say – if he were still alive – about the condition of African Americans and race relations in our country today. She begins her essay by discussing King’s devotion to nonviolent demonstration as a means of overturning the injustices of racism, particularly in the Jim Crow South. She then asserts, "If Rev. King were able to return to the United States today, he would be saddened by the direction the civil rights movement has taken." To contrast King’s vision with the reality that has evolved since his death, she thereafter presents an "I Have A Nightmare" speech describing King’s observations about contemporary black America.
"I have a nightmare," she writes, "that the black family in America has disappeared. While 80 percent of black children lived in a family with a father and a mother under the same roof when I [King] grew up, fewer than 30 percent do today. Why have we allowed this to happen? Neither the Klan nor Jim Crow did this to us. We have done it to ourselves." In these few sentences, she identifies the single greatest problem facing black Americans today; and in so doing, she articulates what our most prominent civil rights leaders – who focus almost exclusively on white society’s allegedly racist transgressions – dare not say. "I have a nightmare," she continues, "that young black women, and even young black girls, are entering motherhood at a higher rate than during my [King’s] lifetime without first entering into holy matrimony with the man who fathered that child. I have a nightmare that black men are conceiving babies and are not doing the right thing to make sure that their children are brought up right."
These are powerful words – words that, if written by a white author, would spark charges of racism in liberal circles. But even this girl, though she is black, is not immune to epithets and intimidation emanating from those same circles. She understands that many of her black peers, having been raised in a society where such "politically incorrect" musings are routinely trashed as symptoms of reactionary white bigotry or black "Uncle Tom-ism" – would be very angry to learn that a black person had written these seemingly heretical words. Consequently, terrified by the prospect of violent retaliation against her by her black acquaintances, the girl submitted her contest essay anonymously.
In the essay, she goes on to tackle other problems facing black Americans. "I have a nightmare," she writes, "that millions of black men and black women of all ages [are addicted] to illicit drugs. I have a nightmare that we blame the white man for our problems while we still deal in the streets, shoot it or smoke it into our bodies, and even kill each other to make our deal or get our fix. . . . I have a nightmare that black youth can be found lying dead in the streets over trivial matters. The Klan never killed us with the effectiveness [with which] we are killing ourselves today." Indeed she is correct; fully 94 percent of black murder victims today are slain by other blacks. These numbers dwarf anything the Klan was ever able to do, even in its shameful heyday.
The NAACP, she adds, "which is supposed to be non-political," runs media ads against candidates who are supposedly insensitive to the grave nature of white-on-black crimes, "but ignores the fact that Justice Department statistics demonstrate that racist attacks are nine times more likely to be perpetrated by blacks against other races, than by other races against blacks."
She also makes some noteworthy observations about today’s civil rights leaders, whom she characterizes as "race hustlers who cry ‘racism’ at every cause until the word racism has lost its true meaning." In a thinly veiled reference to Jesse Jackson, she writes, "I have a nightmare that a man who once marched with me [King], who was with me at my death, has used the civil rights movement to blackmail big businesses into supporting his cause, and to line his pockets – [all so they can keep] from being called ‘racist’ by him in public." She criticizes this same man for using the title "Reverend" while fathering a child out-of-wedlock, "and paying off the woman with money he extorted from these companies." Addressing Jackson’s stance on abortion, she writes, "I have a nightmare that this man sold his soul to the devil by publicly endorsing the murder of the most innocent lives in the womb, to curry [the] favor of a political party that has done more harm than good."
On the question of slavery reparations, she writes, "I have a nightmare that [while the [aggregate wealth of the] black community in this nation would make it the thirteenth most prosperous nation on earth, richer than any nation in Africa, black leaders still have the audacity to demand reparations for slavery. . . . While we must never forget our past as slaves, or past lynchings, the Klan, and Jim Crow laws, we must forgive the sins of previous generations and take advantage of . . . the greatest economic times the world has ever known." Such a proposition is indeed anathema to a civil rights establishment that continues to portray blacks in this country less as Americans, than as what Malcolm X once called "victims of Americanism."
In a reference to Maulana Karenga’s creation of Kwanzaa, she writes, "I have a nightmare that the celebration of the arrival of Jesus Christ has been replaced by another practice originated in the 1960s by a convicted criminal who abused women. While this celebration is said to be about unity, it only further divides us [from] those we share this country with."
Perhaps her most important observation is that the most prominent voices to which her peers are consistently exposed present a monolithic view of American society. Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan, and others of their ideological ilk characterize white racism as black Americans’ principal foe. As columnist Deroy Murdock once put it, they "see a bigot under every bed." The essay author notes that in contrast to the liberal civil rights icons of our day, there are some very articulate black conservatives who present a more accurate picture of reality. But unfortunately they garner nowhere near as much media attention as their vocal, liberal counterparts. "I have a nightmare," she writes, "that black children do not know of Dr. Walter Williams, Dr. Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, and Clarence Thomas, and what they stand for." If more Americans, regardless of their color, were as well acquainted with the ideas of these great men as with the ideas of the civil rights brigade, students like this teenage girl would not have to fear the violent retribution of their peers simply for stating some thorny facts.
John Perazzo is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations.
This is almost never reported. Very few white people were ever allowed to travel deep into Africa, so the slave trading tribal chiefs could prevent others cutting into their trade. Any white who wanted to take his own slaves would have found himself in a fix like being alone in Indian country with no calvary. I've never heard if any of the Euro slave raiding parties like the ones in Roots ever happened, but it was infered they would meet an unpleasant end. The cheifs had total control over the slave trade and would kill any competition. Most all slaves came through a couple of islands in West Africa. These centralized places were the markets and shipping ports all in one stop, 100% controlled by Africans.
The best line in the article. Slavery's evils are essentially independent of race. People were not enslaved because they were black. They were enslaved because it was possible.
That isn't a misconception- "Roots" merely focused on one aspect of slavery- that which took place in America. It was not meant to address slavery in any other part of the world or at any other time in history.
Granted, some spend too much time in the past at the expense of the present or the future but some are blaming things like "Roots" a little too much for that. One TV miniseries is not enough to affect the condition of the Black community then or now.
Slavery was evil, no doubt, but it wasn't the evil that is destroying black America today - that evil is liberalism as practiced by big government Democrats and social engineers.
He is way, way off the mark here. In Virginia, to name one place, there were laws on the books permitting whites to kill African slaves. Blacks. In America, it was white enslaving black, and the laws show that. What was meant by "negro", if not blacks? Puhlease.
It is just a coincidence that out of 7 million slaves, 7 million of them were black.
Huck: He is way, way off the mark here. In the facts you point out I do not see any contradiction with the author's statement.
Consider a school, where a number of students' parents advance an idea that males teach mathematics badly. They point to the facts: numerous misstatements of well-known theorems, poor explanations in class, etc. As a consequence, these parents are sick and tired of "men teaching mathematics."
You probably would say exactly the same thing the author does about slavery: it is a "gross misconception" that poor knowledge of your kids is about men teaching mathematics. You reply by saying "way off the mark here:" in this school, all the teachers are male (as you put it, "In America, it was white enslaving black.")
You can see the point: one cannot use such a small sample and conclude something about gender and teaching.
The author makes a similar point. When looking a wide and complex social phenomenon such as slavery, one should not "localize" it to a particular area. Slavery was not, as he correctly states, about whites and blacks: it was about power. Those who could enslaved the ones who could not defend themselves. In most cases, the owners of black slaves were black; it is they who sold their "possessions" to others --- other black Africans, Arabs, Berbers, Europeans, and American colonists.
Do I need to add that slavery disappeared from Europe only recently and not yet from Africa? The Roma people (Gypsies) have been enslaved for centuries in Romania and freed later than the American slaves.
Of course, the local aspects affect the outcome. There is no doubt that racism in America has a lot to do with the fact that slaves happened to be black. Much the same way the West-Europeans looked down on Slavs who were routinely sold to them into slavery (as you probably know, the very word "slave" got into Latin after a large number of slaves from Eastern Europe ended up in Spain around XI century). You are correct, of course, that various discriminatory laws were stated in terms of the "Negro race."
Yet to say that "slavery was about white people enslaving black people" is a misconception. This is less than obvious only because we teach very little history and critical skills in our schools and because the leftist, power-hungry Black leadership promulgates this false image. "The Roots" contributed to that process.
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