by Gloria Dulan-Wilson
Brothers and sisters, I just received this communique from Brothers James McIntosh and Omowale Clay in reference to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. And it looks as though the gauntlet has been thrown down - again.
I probably don’t really have to say anything, because their letter stands for itself. But that would be too easy, particularly when I, myself, as a New Yorker, have some very strong opinions and concerns about the future of one of the greatest repositories of Black Culture ever.
So, prior to my sharing their letter with you, allow me to make some simple statements (and you know that with me, nothing is ever “simple”).
In the first place who tells your story (our story) and who shapes your history (our history) has a great deal of control over you/us. It was for this reason that Arturo Schomburg started the Schomburg library in the first place. Not because he wanted the New York Public Library to control it, but because he wanted to be sure that our truth about us was in our hands and under our control. When he started the Schomburg collection, nobody was telling our story, and when they did it was distorted, full of lies, and as an afterthought.
Secondly, when it came to who would be the lead factor in the continuation of that truth and the flow of information for and about the Black community, we have been more than adequately served by Dr. Howard Dodson from 1982 to the present. Not only was Dodson a scholar, but he had flair, panache and a love of the Black community of New York and the world that could not be denied. And of course, we in turn loved him back. Under Dodson the Schomburg expanded, grew and became the central gathering place for scholars, students, celebrities -- all wanting to be a part of the very rich and live history that is ensconced within those walls.
We, the Black community, was very clear when we stated that Dr. Dodson’s stepping down would leave a hole in the community, and some very big footsteps to follow. Very big indeed. We were also very clear when we stated that in order for the progress that has been made under Dodson to continue unabated, we had already done our research and selected Dr. Molefi Asante, scholar, historian, and lover of Black people and their history to fill those considerable shoes.
As usual, as is their wont, it seems that white folks just can’t refrain from trying those divide and conquer games. They’ve been doing it since slavery, and they have it as a habit somewhere deep in their subconscious minds. Even though they don’t say it, it’s obvious that they still operate under the Plessy v. Ferguson case where Supreme Court (in-)Justice Roger B. Taney stated that a Black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
And the New York Public Library’s ersatz search committee is operating under the same rubric. Even though a panel was held to discuss the upcoming selection of the successor to Dr. Dodson, and the Black community clearly expressed their selection (read choice), under LeClerc, they pretended to work with the Black community, having brought Dr. Asante to New York four (4!!!!!) times for interviews. Then, schizophrenically they turned in another direction and chose a complete and totally different candidate.
Then, adding insult to injury, they had the temerity and the gall to promulgate the announcement under the signature of Henry Louis “skip the truth” Gates!!
Gates of all people, who had the nerves to say that Black did not deserve reparations; followed some inanities stating that African had brought slavery upon themselves. If my memory serves me correctly - and it does - the Black community castigated Gates for not being or acting in the best interest of Black people It was obvious that Gates has drifted to the “white side” (not unlike Darth Vader’s drift to the dark side - same sinister meaning). In fact, I think we, the Black community, made it clear that Gates was not to have anything to do with the selection of our next head of the Schomburg because he had clearly shown his insensitivity to the needs of Black people (Gates defection to the “white side” is a story for another time - check www.gloriadulanwilson.blogspot for additional commentaries on Gates). His involvement in the affairs of Black New Yorkers was not welcome or desired.
Those wishes clearly were not honored either. So, thinking they can play their modern version of “divide and conquer,” the NYPL search committee (and those that back them who are the real culprits) are looking to pit two equally competent scholars (Asante and Muhammad) against each other, with the possibility of the Black community falling on either side of the line.
But the Black community has already spoken. And we did not stutter!! Just as we did not stutter in 1982 when we stood for Howard Dodson over the white selection for the Schomburg!
However, we are not going to play diversionary tactics with the vapid New York Public Library, either. The Schomburg Library is one of Harlem’s finest centers for Black History and Research. It was not designed by the NYPL. It will not be mismanaged by the NYPL, or those who only deign to show up and make decisions that are not in our best interest when it pleases them.
The Black community is solidly behind Dr. Asante, and will back up the Save the Schomburg Coalition in ensuring that our selection for head of the Schomburg, Dr. Molefi Asante, is the one who is hired. It’s our library; it’s our research center; it‘s our community. And Dr. Asante is our choice.
Stay Blessed &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
Gloria Dulan-Wilson
THE LETTER FROM THE COALITION FOLLOWS:
As many of you might know, The Save the Schomburg Coalition is engaged with the New York City Library in a battle for who will direct the Schomburg. Because we stepped to the library with a candidate of indisputable credentials of the highest order, Dr. Molefi Asante, they choose the familiar course of divide and conquer. After giving Dr. Asante four interviews the New York Library Administration (led by President Paul LeClerc) announced this past week the selection of Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who they (the library) made great efforts to point out is the Great Grandson of Elijah Muhammad.
Although we can appreciate this young developing scholar, we thought it necessary to engage him in the context of what is at stake in Harlem today and the role WE must play in its defense and development.
The letter to our young brother follows - we will not be divided in this battle to Save The Schomburg. Please Forward far and wide, inclusive of whatever press contacts you know. A Luta Continua
Subject: SAVE THE SCHOMBURG: A CONVERSATION AMONG BROTHERS
November 24, 2010
Greetings Dr. Muhammad,
We know you are a person of quick understanding so we will be as brief as we can. In 1982, the NYC Public Library announced the appointment of a white curator of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. We of the Schomburg Coalition let them know that this was unacceptable.
Demonstrations were held at the home of the appointee. Two of our members, Charles Barron who is currently a NYC Councilman, and Preston Wilcox, now an ancestor were arrested during that struggle. A lawsuit was filed against the Library by Attorney Alton Maddox and after a protracted struggle, the Library was forced to appoint Dr. Howard Dodson, selected by the Schomburg Coalition from the resumes that the City had previously thrown in the garbage.
When it was announced this year, that this position would soon again become open, we sent an open letter to Paul LeClerc, NYPL Board Chair. We informed Mr. LeClerc that America's foremost scholar in African/African-American History was making himself available for the Directorship of the Schomburg. A coalition once again formed (Save the Schomburg Coalition) to demand Dr. Molefi Asante's appointment.
The (New York Public Library) engaged in a public relations battle --writing letters to the Amsterdam News, New York City’s largest Black secular newspaper, claiming that some members of the Black community were responding to rumors that whites wanted to move the Library and dismantle it etc. They hired the foremost Black PR firm in the city to hold a community forum to assuage these concerns and the Coalition’s alleged response to “rumors”.
All of this was done to avoid dealing with a united effort to support Dr. Asante's selection. At that community forum, the coalition showed up in numbers and made the same demand. A few days after that a small meeting was held between NYPL Board Chair Paul LeClerc, officials from the library, the Mellon Foundation and 5 representatives of the Schomburg Coalition-- Dr. Adelaide Sanford, Charles Barron, Camille Yarbrough, and the two of us whose signatures appear at the end of this letter. Board Chair Paul LeClerc was given Dr. Asante's sixty page curriculum vitae, which documented his scholarship, administrative experience and teaching credentials; all evidence of a history of professionalism that has encompassed the publication of seventy books, over 400 published papers and being named by an international conference of African scholars as "one of the top ten greatest minds in the African world today”.
At that meeting, Mr. LeClerc was again informed that the Black community was poised to fight if Dr. Asante was not invited to apply for this position. Within 48 hours, Dr. Asante was invited to an interview - and so began an amended search process which involved Dr. Asante being interviewed a total of four times.
History informs our firm belief that the selection of Dr. Asante for the position of Director of the Schomburg Center, backed by an united Black community, inclusive of a united front of his colleagues (who declined their own consideration for the directorship in support of Dr. Asante’s candidacy), presented a formidable dilemma to the New York City Public Library System and the Bloomberg administration. Those candidates that had an inside track to the directorship, now had to compete with a Black man whose life’s work presented an insurmountable hurdle to overcome.
The NYPL eventually settled on a course of action they felt would divide our community by selecting a young Black man, with a blood linkage to a historic figure (Elijah Muhammad) of the Black Nationalist Movement in this country. We recognize you as a young and gifted African historian. As such, we thought it critical to put your selection to the Directorship of the Schomburg in the context of the history that has defined our struggle for community control over this valuable institution. In this context we would ask that you carefully review and evaluate the Schomburg struggle.
Most importantly, it is our hope that you understand that outside of the context of a Black community demand, Library officials such as, Mr. LeClerc, Henry "Skip the truth" Gates and their associates, would have attempted to choose a non-Black, as they did the last time this position became open. This letter is an open communication between the Schomburg Coalition and you. It is our request that you discuss with us the way forward in this situation, having been informed of the process that occurred before your appointment.
We recognize that you have been placed in a difficult situation. Let’s have a conversation that puts the integrity of our community first. We plan on sending an open letter to Paul LeClerc which will reflect the Coalition’s position on this critical community issue. We hope that at that time we/you will have a better insight into the history and direction of this fight to Save the Schomburg. Respectfully, James C. McIntosh, M.D. and Omowale Clay Co - Chairs, Coalition to Save the Schomburg(Formerly known as Schomburg Coalition)
FootNote from GDW:
Now that you’ve read the letter, there are several things that we must consider going forward. Both Dr. Asante and Dr. Muhammad are wonderfully talented, intelligent, empowered Black men. So we are not trying to set up any sort of situation that would dignify one while denigrating the other. We likewise are no longer willing to allow others to make key decisions for us, when we are perfectly capable of making them for ourselves.
When they purport to make these decisions it becomes “his-story” not history - or their story, not our story. When they try to keep us off balance, playing keep away with our rights, we have every right not to adhere to their edicts.
In case you haven’t been watching the international (world) news lately, it may be of interest to note that the rest of the world is likewise finding this out for themselves. In London, where there have been proposed massive cutbacks in education, the student, from elementary to college level have turned out enmass on the steps of Buckingham Palace to let it be know that “they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. The surrounded the police, turned over a few police cars, and got the message across.
Not only are we facing the Schomburg leadership issue; Bloomberg is trying to foist Kathie Black on the community as the next Chancellor, even though the community has made it clear that she is patently unqualified. In New York we’re facing cutbacks in education, including public, charter and head start programs. We’re witnessing massive layoffs in our schools on both the public and charter school levels; and threatened job layoff at the city and state level, while at the same time they increase MTA and Transit costs; water bills, utilities, all increasing, while the needs of the people, of those who truly make up the communities are ignored. Why aren’t we as mad as hell like they are in other parts of the world. While Wall Street gets bonuses, we are getting banged. It’s time to do some “banging” back; make some national headlines.
Make it known that we are not sheep to be herded about while they take liberties with our liberty. So, after reading this, make sure you pass it on.
More importantly, though, get in touch with Dr. McIntosh and Omowale Clay to find out what you can do to help bring Molefi Asante on board as head of the Schomburg; and beyond that what do we need to do to shape our the Black community into a viable, supportive, empowered environment for us and our families.
In fact, if we can get the various groups who are objecting to the way things are being run (read, ruined) around here, to gather and not only protest, but shut down the city and the state simultaneously, we too might get some national and international attention.
The time for side lining, half stepping, fence sitting, or sending long distance support is past. It’s really time for visibility and viability.
The Schomburg is only emblematic of so many egregious acts perpetrated by the infrastructure against the Black community. It has to stop NOW. We not only have to stop it, but we have to make sure that we get what we want NOW.
Stay blessed &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
Gloria Dulan-Wilson
Gloria Dulan-Wilson Blog/ ECLECTICALLY BLACK NEWS
For Eclectic Black People
VIP: Views . Interests . Perspectives
Showing posts with label Henry Gates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry Gates. Show all posts
4.27.2010
WE DESERVE REPARATIONS NOW! BLAME THE GUILTY, NOT THE VICTIMS, FOR THE TRAUMAS OF SLAVERY - Reprinted from 2010
By Gloria Dulan-Wilson
Hello All:
The following is in response to an article emailed to me by a Ms. Burnette that was copied from a New York Times Article featuring Henry Louis Gates. The article appears below. My comments are first. Read the article below first in order to understand where I'm coming from. Thanks, GDW
I grow tired of the "blame the victim" missages (yes, I said "missages", not messages -- because they are miss-leading info) that we get from our erudite, but not always on target brother. Frankly, I like Prof. Gates. But, as far as I'm concerned, he is not the end-all/be-all when it comes to African/American issues. He definitely has a place and a role, but I think we must be vigilant when it starts to sound more like what the whites are saying than the whites.
I do not like the blame the victim trend of thought we seem to be following lately. It's especially onerous when the circumstances of the victim is couched in modern mis-interpretations, deliberately overlooking the victim's lack of sophistication, or understanding of the underlying motivations of a group of predators so skilled in the decimation of whole civilizations for their own rapacious pleasure which is what the invading europeans who hit Africa like the bubonic plague were.
If Africans "had a hand in the slave trade," it was due their lack of understanding of the ramifications of the situation. And the invading whites were good for taking advantage of the innocence, good will and ignorance of the people, and used it against them in so many instances.
Like the American Indians in the US, or the indigenous people "discovered" by Columbus, when a tribe vanquished another tribe, they were first subjugated to ignominious tasks and humiliation by the conquering tribe. Generally, however, they later intermarried into the tribe and they all became one. That was the tradition in Africa, in the Caribbean; in Japan; in China; Saudi Arabia, and so many other FIRST WORLD CULTURES. It was how things were done. Some were "sold" into slavery in the peripheral biblical countries. Some were sent to Rome, Spain, Greece, etc. But most of the African tribes active in the trade were not ever aware of the heinous, hideous, nefarious, evil, sinister, debasing, denigrating (can't say enough bad things about it -- because, truth be told, we are still subjected to the same underlying racism) that whites -- German, French, BRITISH, American (a/k/a British), Spanish, Portuguese and Danish, subjected us to via the trans-Atlantic Slave trade, and chattel slavery.
And don't you dare ever, ever, try to say that Black people had a material hand in the resulting 400 years we endured once we were stolen from the Motherland. (read Stolen Legacy)
Do they owe us? YES!!!!! BIG TIME!!! And they know it. They've been trying to duck that responsibility for quite some time. That's why Lincoln was assassinated. That's howAndrew Johnson became president -- he was a southerner from Tennessee that stood for the status quo, rolling back what Lincoln had done. Rutherford B. Hayes actually sealed the deal in dismantling Lincoln's benevolence.
Fast forward to now, and there is a debate as to whether or not they should do for us what they did for the Japanese and some of the other entities they try to curry favor with. They owe us and they owe Africa - big time. The egregious "theft of service" happened both during and after. And the Rape of Africa continues -- in case you haven't noticed, this time at the hands of the Chinese; while at the same time African Americans are still undergoing the remnants of Racism -- from substandard housing, ecological racism, substandard education; to the lack of job opportunities, racial profiling, prison industrial military programs, etc.
Yet they can't figure out how to repay us. If they can figure out how to wage a war over nothing, they can figure out how to repay us for 400 years. It's quite simple. If they can construct two mega million dollar baseball stadiums in a city that had material complicity in the evisceration of Main Street, while their Wall Street robberymen get away with murder; they can definitely figure out a way to make sure that we receive reparations.
In fact, I'll make it simple:
Give each and every African American who is now living in the U.S. (what is it, 32+ million of us?) $1 million tax free dollars each (upon completion of a post-traumatic slave debriefing, and specific level of education/training for those who have not finished school; and financial literacy for those who have); and one 4 bedroom/2 bathroom house with one car. The reparation can begin now and go over a 10 year period. That, plus the quality education or training program kind of levels the playing field. The tax free angle keeps it from being gobbled up by the system; and the financial education means we learn how to manage our money and make sure we use it wisely and invest it intelligently. Four bedrooms, two bath rooms and a car replaces the 40 acres and a mule. Notice I said each person, not each family. The individual must be of legal age to be eligible (18 years).
It's just that simple. We don't need algorithms; we don't need actuarial scientists; it ain't rocket science folks. And if we stop the stupid war with Iraq, we would most definitely have the money to do that, underwrite the new health laws, as well as put together an educational system that truly EDUCATES all Americans.
But tt's too easy to try to shuffle along and put the blame on the victim; while the victim in turn continues to duck and dodge the issue; and the slave traders' progeny continues to profit from our misery.
I, for one am tired of hearing this. Read Tom Burrell's Brainwashed. That might clarify the amount of propaganda we are subjected to on an ongoing basis. Read Joy Degruy's Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome; how about from **Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin, and Up From Slavery by Lerone Bennet? Study J.A. Rogers "World's Great Men of Color," WEB duBois (anything and everything he writes is golden); Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson. Better yet, read "The Philosophies and Opinions of Marcus Garvey," the original by Marcus Garvey (not the watered down version). We need to re-educate ourselves. We need to stop allowing them to slide out from under their very real culpability, past and present, that still pervades this country.
African Americans need to wake up and inform themselves. Pull out all those old, original books that were honestly written by Black men and women who lives were on the line, but made it their business to tell the truth.
I don't ever remember there being any signs, placards, books or ads written by Africans in any African language or dialect inviting whites in to come to Africa and buy human Black slaves to take back to America or England to torture, rape, castrate, and hang; do you? I don't remember there ever being any such friendship between the chiefs and the white maurauders -- the chiefs were as likely to be killed as the people they ruled. Don't remember there ever been any floor plans designed by Africans whereby they diagrammed how to lay their people end to end on top of each other so that more of them could fit in the vessel, so in case one of them didn't make it, they could be thrown overboard and still have enough cargo to realize a profit. Do you? If you come across any documentation of the sort, I would certainly like to see it. The slave trade may have used hapless African tribesmen to help do their dirty work, but it was totally and soley initiated and implemented by whites.
And stop trying to make President Obama the scapegoat in this issue. Yes, he has a role to play, but you're not going to dump all this on his shoulders without him having the full weight of the information before him as well. The President is a very intelligent brother. His sense of history runs a lot deeper than a few clippings in a publication that has spent most of its time trying to vilify him and his efforts. Additionally, this takes all of us reading from the same page, so to speak to make it work for all of us.
Frankly, I think it's time to either start Saturday Schools or Sunday Sessions, where we as a people across the nation begin to reacquaint ourselves, our history, our cross cultural similarities (i.e. where did all those boats that shipped us from Africa land, and how are we similar and how are we different).
We need to begin reconnecting our fragmented history now. If we start now, we can have a compendium of ECLECTIC BLACK HISTORY that will debunk the lies and begin the system of communication to get us reunited --Africans/African-American/African-Jamaicans/African-Trinidadians/African-Haitians/African-Caribbeans/African-Brazilians/African-Venezuelans/African-Guyanese/African-Martiniquans/African-St. Lucians/African-Asians, and on and on and on.
There is a healing needed. We have to do it from the inside out. Of course we deserve reparations. We deserve apologies. We deserve all of that and more. But we also have to look at the fact that as a result of the horrors we've endured, we've been the subject of our own self-hatred. As such, we have to forgive ourselves and each other and begin to work together to heal ourselves.
I appreciate Dr. Gates tracing of our various ancestral lines. I think we do need to know where we emanated from. But, given the fact that we were forcefully "bred" during our enslavement, it really doesn't matter in the long run. If we decide on a particular tribe we want to affiliate with in Africa, we should be able to be welcomed into that family source. They can't prove us wrong. If we use what we know to help Africa get back on her feet, we should be welcome regardless of what the tribal underpinnings are (of course I know that many of our brothers and sisters there are a long way away from such considerations; but perhaps this is one of the other focal points we need to be looking at). Neither of us can afford to continue wallowing in our ignorance, allowing others to make pronouncements and decisions for us.
It really does all begin with us. We have to make the first steps. We have to make sure that we are as knowledgeable about who we are as anyone who sets out to define us (white or Black). And if it does not move us forward as a people, we have the responsibility to keep digging. Or decide to redefine ourselves in such a way that it has the maximum benefit for us as ECLECTICALLY BLACK PEOPLE of the World. But we most definitely and assuredly deserve reparations, and no flimsy rationalization of some African involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade mitigates the debt owe us by the miscreants who started it. They benefitted, now we deserve compensation.
Stay Blessed &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
Gloria Dulan-Wilson
On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Judy Burnette wrote:
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
April 23, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
by HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.***
Cambridge, Mass.
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 compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
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. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.
African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He 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.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic.”
Gloria Dulan-Wilson (me) is a Black woman, former Black History Educator; Academic Advisor, Writer, Activist and Eclectically Black ###
**I inadvertently attributed these books to the wrong authors. I guess I've been out of the classroom longer than I thought. I will take a dose of my own medicine and re-read these wonderful wealth of Black history and information. GDW
***Henry Louis Gates is know among Black leaders, activists and intellectuals as Henry "skip the truth" Gates. And it appears he lived up to this appellation.
Hello All:
The following is in response to an article emailed to me by a Ms. Burnette that was copied from a New York Times Article featuring Henry Louis Gates. The article appears below. My comments are first. Read the article below first in order to understand where I'm coming from. Thanks, GDW
I grow tired of the "blame the victim" missages (yes, I said "missages", not messages -- because they are miss-leading info) that we get from our erudite, but not always on target brother. Frankly, I like Prof. Gates. But, as far as I'm concerned, he is not the end-all/be-all when it comes to African/American issues. He definitely has a place and a role, but I think we must be vigilant when it starts to sound more like what the whites are saying than the whites.
I do not like the blame the victim trend of thought we seem to be following lately. It's especially onerous when the circumstances of the victim is couched in modern mis-interpretations, deliberately overlooking the victim's lack of sophistication, or understanding of the underlying motivations of a group of predators so skilled in the decimation of whole civilizations for their own rapacious pleasure which is what the invading europeans who hit Africa like the bubonic plague were.
If Africans "had a hand in the slave trade," it was due their lack of understanding of the ramifications of the situation. And the invading whites were good for taking advantage of the innocence, good will and ignorance of the people, and used it against them in so many instances.
Like the American Indians in the US, or the indigenous people "discovered" by Columbus, when a tribe vanquished another tribe, they were first subjugated to ignominious tasks and humiliation by the conquering tribe. Generally, however, they later intermarried into the tribe and they all became one. That was the tradition in Africa, in the Caribbean; in Japan; in China; Saudi Arabia, and so many other FIRST WORLD CULTURES. It was how things were done. Some were "sold" into slavery in the peripheral biblical countries. Some were sent to Rome, Spain, Greece, etc. But most of the African tribes active in the trade were not ever aware of the heinous, hideous, nefarious, evil, sinister, debasing, denigrating (can't say enough bad things about it -- because, truth be told, we are still subjected to the same underlying racism) that whites -- German, French, BRITISH, American (a/k/a British), Spanish, Portuguese and Danish, subjected us to via the trans-Atlantic Slave trade, and chattel slavery.
And don't you dare ever, ever, try to say that Black people had a material hand in the resulting 400 years we endured once we were stolen from the Motherland. (read Stolen Legacy)
Do they owe us? YES!!!!! BIG TIME!!! And they know it. They've been trying to duck that responsibility for quite some time. That's why Lincoln was assassinated. That's howAndrew Johnson became president -- he was a southerner from Tennessee that stood for the status quo, rolling back what Lincoln had done. Rutherford B. Hayes actually sealed the deal in dismantling Lincoln's benevolence.
Fast forward to now, and there is a debate as to whether or not they should do for us what they did for the Japanese and some of the other entities they try to curry favor with. They owe us and they owe Africa - big time. The egregious "theft of service" happened both during and after. And the Rape of Africa continues -- in case you haven't noticed, this time at the hands of the Chinese; while at the same time African Americans are still undergoing the remnants of Racism -- from substandard housing, ecological racism, substandard education; to the lack of job opportunities, racial profiling, prison industrial military programs, etc.
Yet they can't figure out how to repay us. If they can figure out how to wage a war over nothing, they can figure out how to repay us for 400 years. It's quite simple. If they can construct two mega million dollar baseball stadiums in a city that had material complicity in the evisceration of Main Street, while their Wall Street robberymen get away with murder; they can definitely figure out a way to make sure that we receive reparations.
In fact, I'll make it simple:
Give each and every African American who is now living in the U.S. (what is it, 32+ million of us?) $1 million tax free dollars each (upon completion of a post-traumatic slave debriefing, and specific level of education/training for those who have not finished school; and financial literacy for those who have); and one 4 bedroom/2 bathroom house with one car. The reparation can begin now and go over a 10 year period. That, plus the quality education or training program kind of levels the playing field. The tax free angle keeps it from being gobbled up by the system; and the financial education means we learn how to manage our money and make sure we use it wisely and invest it intelligently. Four bedrooms, two bath rooms and a car replaces the 40 acres and a mule. Notice I said each person, not each family. The individual must be of legal age to be eligible (18 years).
It's just that simple. We don't need algorithms; we don't need actuarial scientists; it ain't rocket science folks. And if we stop the stupid war with Iraq, we would most definitely have the money to do that, underwrite the new health laws, as well as put together an educational system that truly EDUCATES all Americans.
But tt's too easy to try to shuffle along and put the blame on the victim; while the victim in turn continues to duck and dodge the issue; and the slave traders' progeny continues to profit from our misery.
I, for one am tired of hearing this. Read Tom Burrell's Brainwashed. That might clarify the amount of propaganda we are subjected to on an ongoing basis. Read Joy Degruy's Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome; how about from **Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin, and Up From Slavery by Lerone Bennet? Study J.A. Rogers "World's Great Men of Color," WEB duBois (anything and everything he writes is golden); Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson. Better yet, read "The Philosophies and Opinions of Marcus Garvey," the original by Marcus Garvey (not the watered down version). We need to re-educate ourselves. We need to stop allowing them to slide out from under their very real culpability, past and present, that still pervades this country.
African Americans need to wake up and inform themselves. Pull out all those old, original books that were honestly written by Black men and women who lives were on the line, but made it their business to tell the truth.
I don't ever remember there being any signs, placards, books or ads written by Africans in any African language or dialect inviting whites in to come to Africa and buy human Black slaves to take back to America or England to torture, rape, castrate, and hang; do you? I don't remember there ever being any such friendship between the chiefs and the white maurauders -- the chiefs were as likely to be killed as the people they ruled. Don't remember there ever been any floor plans designed by Africans whereby they diagrammed how to lay their people end to end on top of each other so that more of them could fit in the vessel, so in case one of them didn't make it, they could be thrown overboard and still have enough cargo to realize a profit. Do you? If you come across any documentation of the sort, I would certainly like to see it. The slave trade may have used hapless African tribesmen to help do their dirty work, but it was totally and soley initiated and implemented by whites.
And stop trying to make President Obama the scapegoat in this issue. Yes, he has a role to play, but you're not going to dump all this on his shoulders without him having the full weight of the information before him as well. The President is a very intelligent brother. His sense of history runs a lot deeper than a few clippings in a publication that has spent most of its time trying to vilify him and his efforts. Additionally, this takes all of us reading from the same page, so to speak to make it work for all of us.
Frankly, I think it's time to either start Saturday Schools or Sunday Sessions, where we as a people across the nation begin to reacquaint ourselves, our history, our cross cultural similarities (i.e. where did all those boats that shipped us from Africa land, and how are we similar and how are we different).
We need to begin reconnecting our fragmented history now. If we start now, we can have a compendium of ECLECTIC BLACK HISTORY that will debunk the lies and begin the system of communication to get us reunited --Africans/African-American/African-Jamaicans/African-Trinidadians/African-Haitians/African-Caribbeans/African-Brazilians/African-Venezuelans/African-Guyanese/African-Martiniquans/African-St. Lucians/African-Asians, and on and on and on.
There is a healing needed. We have to do it from the inside out. Of course we deserve reparations. We deserve apologies. We deserve all of that and more. But we also have to look at the fact that as a result of the horrors we've endured, we've been the subject of our own self-hatred. As such, we have to forgive ourselves and each other and begin to work together to heal ourselves.
I appreciate Dr. Gates tracing of our various ancestral lines. I think we do need to know where we emanated from. But, given the fact that we were forcefully "bred" during our enslavement, it really doesn't matter in the long run. If we decide on a particular tribe we want to affiliate with in Africa, we should be able to be welcomed into that family source. They can't prove us wrong. If we use what we know to help Africa get back on her feet, we should be welcome regardless of what the tribal underpinnings are (of course I know that many of our brothers and sisters there are a long way away from such considerations; but perhaps this is one of the other focal points we need to be looking at). Neither of us can afford to continue wallowing in our ignorance, allowing others to make pronouncements and decisions for us.
It really does all begin with us. We have to make the first steps. We have to make sure that we are as knowledgeable about who we are as anyone who sets out to define us (white or Black). And if it does not move us forward as a people, we have the responsibility to keep digging. Or decide to redefine ourselves in such a way that it has the maximum benefit for us as ECLECTICALLY BLACK PEOPLE of the World. But we most definitely and assuredly deserve reparations, and no flimsy rationalization of some African involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade mitigates the debt owe us by the miscreants who started it. They benefitted, now we deserve compensation.
Stay Blessed &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
Gloria Dulan-Wilson
On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Judy Burnette
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
April 23, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
by HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.***
Cambridge, Mass.
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 compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
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. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.
African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He 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.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic.”
Gloria Dulan-Wilson (me) is a Black woman, former Black History Educator; Academic Advisor, Writer, Activist and Eclectically Black ###
**I inadvertently attributed these books to the wrong authors. I guess I've been out of the classroom longer than I thought. I will take a dose of my own medicine and re-read these wonderful wealth of Black history and information. GDW
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)