"The Dangerous Henry Louis Gates "

by Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley.

"Harvard Prof. Henry “Skip” Gates has made it his life’s work to pander to whites by defaming Black people. In his latest blood-libel, Gates claims Africans share equal blame with Europeans for the centuries-long holocaust of the African slave trade. By Gates’ hideously bizarre reasoning, Black Americans should look to Black Africans for reparations."

Read the article here.

Henry Louis Gates has long pointed fingers at the collective African for their role in slavery.

I am not surprised by this his most recent nonsense.

In one of his sleep-inducing documentaries he asked a man in Tanzania if he felt responsible for slavery!

This he did right after he asked the man if he considered himself black.

The man looked puzzled and asked something like 'black as opposed to what?'.

Gates is ignorant but his ignorance is purposeful in fueling the mythology of whiteness.

African identity issues cannot be so easily collapsed into categories that Gates and his ilk theorize from afar.

His New York Times article similarly dilutes the reparations issue/movement.

In both contexts he is the unmistakable agent that provides whiteness the room to escape culpability for slavery.

In these terms Margaret Kimberley is spot on when she writes:

"Henry Louis Gates is perhaps the most dangerous man alive to black Americans. He has the cache of a professorship at Harvard University, a position which undeservedly gives his voice an added weight of authority on every issue. Gates’ area of specialty is African American literature, but he has shrewdly marketed himself as the “go to” guy on any and every issue effecting black people all over the world.

The secret of his success is not at all difficult to decipher. Gates is a masterful and consummate suck up. He sucks up to white people in the worst and most damaging way possible to other black people. He never passes up a chance to let white people off the hook for the evils they have committed and henever passes up a chance to blame black people for just about anything bad that has ever happened to them.

His latest outrageous and toxic thoughts were spewed, as usual, in the opinion pages of the New York Times. This tome, “Ending the Slavery Blame Game,” uses African participation in the slave trade as his latest cudgel with which to beat black people and to make a mockery of the question of reparations for the 200-year history of slavery in the United States. ..."

When I read Gates, or about Gates, I am always reminded of the words of Frantz Fanon who said: "I have seen the future of the black man and it is white."

Gates would not be relevant in any other terms. Obama too.

Onward!

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