It should be said that unlike many advocates for reparations to the African American community for our slaver past, Professor Gates is a tad more realistic about who should be paying.Indeed, Gates points to the prominent role played by Africans themselves in the abomination - one of the few scholars to do so.Gates in the New York Times: 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...(Read Full Post)