Gates bats about 50/50 between liberalism and rational ideas.
Posted on 05/02/2010 9:02:10 PM PDT by neverdem
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...
--snip--
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...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My mom’s comment many a-time, “Their own people sold them into slavery” ~ mom.
“...reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.”
Why stop there? Why not compensate all the descendants of displaced American Indians? Did deep Al, Jesse. You stand on and benefit from stolen land. Give up the jack.
Isn’t the author one of the participants in the infamous Beer Summit?
And worse, there is STILL SLAVERY and SLAVE TRADING in Africa today.
I would think those whose ancestors were sold by their brethren to the slave traders would be using foundations and other means to STOP THE SLAVERY FOREVER. If blacks in America like the African name in front of there genetic code, they sure do IGNORE their brothers and sisters still STUCK in AFRICA and subject to rape, beatings and the slave trade. What is WRONG with african Americans who ignore this but who like to fuss and whine about their freedoms here?
And who ran the slaver markets on the west coast of Africa.
Oh that’s right—Arabs.
Gates bats about 50/50 between liberalism and rational ideas.
Indeed! He is the one towards whom the police acted stupidly.
Yep. And he went ghetto when he was arrested.
My thinking also.
Okay, I’m up for that. When these African countries, and all the European countries involved ante up their reparations, we in America will kick in our part. I’m not worried about paying...
Sadly this will be ignored by the opportunists (Jackson and Sharpton) who need to keep blacks down for them to succeed financially. The black community really needs to wakeup.
Statistically it is highly likely that almost every person on the planet is descended from both slaveowners and slaves.
The only real issue is how far back you have to go. In the time of Cicero the island of Britain was renowned as a source of particularly stupid slaves.
It's hard to imagine a more RACIST point of view. Obama has X amount of skin pigmentation and solely on this basis he is qualified to take action on race (assuming action is needed to begin with)?
See, it’s so true...too bad it’s so cliche...
Proof positive that you really can take the professor out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the professor!
I’ve just always been baffled by the desire to place blame for a practice that is as old as mankind, practiced on all continents and among all people at one point or another. I seriously doubt there’s any one group that can claim never to have been held in bondage, or never to have held another in bondage. It’s a practice that continues in some parts of the world to this day, particularly in Africa and in Islamic nations, a fact that should be discomfiting to the son of Africa and the son of Islam known as Barack Hussein Obama. But, no, he’s going to place his narcissistic, hypocritical self right at the forefront of reparations for something that the United States did not begin and a great deal to end, in the western hemisphere at least.
Nope. Few if any Arabs made it all the way to the West Coast, prevented by warlike tribes in the rain forests. Arabs and part-Arabs dominated the slave trade up the East Coast and across the Sahara, which had much higher death rates than even the Atlantic trade, but they never got much into the trade to the New World.
You're confusing 19th century attempts to stamp out residual slave trade with the period of its thriving in earlier centuries.
BTW, less than 5% of the slaves shipped from Africa across the Atlantic were brought to what is now USA, yet somehow it seems the USA is supposed to carry most of the guilt. I'm up for 5% if Brazil agrees to its 40%+ and so on.
Cop: Gates Told Him "I'll See Your Momma On The Porch"
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/07/24/cop_gates_told_him_ill_see_your_momma_on_the_porch.html
_________________________________________
Good article on Gates over at WND...
“...”Since 1991, Gates has been teaching African American studies at Harvard, where he serves as the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. De Bois, an American civil rights activist, sociologist, historian and author, was an avowed communist and also a socialist sympathizer.
Du Bois was for a brief time a member of the Socialist Party. In 1927 he infamously traveled to the USSR, where he called the Soviet system “the most hopeful vehicle for the world.” Eight years later, he published the book “Black Reconstruction,” which offered a Marxist interpretation of the Reconstruction Era. ...”
Meet the man at center of Obama’s race controversy Gates immortalized communist, linked to radical black activists:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=104938
Gates is a piece of work. Now he’s trying to repair his public outbursts against the police who tried to protect him by throwing his own under the bus. It’s a little late to trot out the truth in defense of your own azz, Skip.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.