Henry Louis Gates and reparations for slavery

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.

Now that we've congratulated Professor Gates for his recognition of history, let us descend upon him for his outrageous, ridiculous notion that 1) reparations from taxpayers whose ancestors played absolutely no role in slavery should be demanded; and 2) that for those whose ancestors were involved, the sins of the father should be passed on to the son.

Should we even worry that this unworkable, unfair, un-American idea of paying off Black Americans for slavery might actually become a reality some day?

With Barack Obama as president, anything is possible:

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.

"Extracting" reparations from the taxpayer as well as governments abroad would be an interesting exercise. Should the Gauls, the Celts, the Teutons, and most of the rest of Europe seek redress from the Italians for the millions of slaves owned by Romans? What's the difference? A couple of hundred years? If the issue is truly "one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization," why stop with America? Professor Gates is being hypocritical if we don't go all the way back to classical civilization in Egypt, Sumeria, Babylon, Persia, and other ancient civilizations - all of whom bought and sold slaves in the normal course of empire. To single out Africans as victims is purely subjective and selfish, besides being wholly political.

And even here, the native Americans were sold into slavery as well. Do we exclude them because they didn't have to endure the Middle Passage?  Why are the Indians in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere not worthy of their own reparations regime?

It is not the "sin" of slavery that concerns the professor but his agitating for the "extraction" of wealth from those who have it to those who don't. Reparations will always be no more than an excuse to redistribute money from the many to the few while dishonestly, and piously attempting to base such notions in a moral framework.

And since President Obama only opposes reparations because they are "unworkable," the unsaid conclusion to that idea is if any way can be found to do it, the president will proceed.

Try telling the truth and running on that in 2012, Mr. President - if you dare.

Hat Tip: Larrey Anderson