Henry Louis Gates - "Ending The Slavery Blame-Game" Editorial

"Ending The Slavery Blame-Game" Editorial

In 2010, Gates wrote an editorial in The New York Times which discussed the role played by Africans in the slave trade. In an article for Newsweek, journalist Lisa Miller reported on the reaction to the editorial:

The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies field--especially those campaigning for government reparations for slavery--by insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. "Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that."

Gates's critics say he's a provocateur and publicity hound, stretched too thin and puffed up by his celebrity friends. Lolita Buckner Inniss, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, wrote a letter to The New York Times in response to the Gates piece in which she pointed out the obvious. No matter who did the capturing, it was white people who created the market for African slaves and perpetuated the practice even after the import trade was banned. "My first thought was, he's kidding, right?" she told me. "Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations." Gates has such an eminent reputation, she said, and "so much gravitas. Many of us were troubled."

The editorial begins and ends with the observation that it is very difficult to decide whether or not to give reparations to the descendants of American slaves, in other words whether they should receive compensation for their ancestors' unpaid labor and bondage. Gates also points out that it is equally difficult to decide who should get these reparations and who should pay them.