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<span style="font-style: italic">What is your opinion on the question of reparations? below I quote from an article rcently written by Harvard professor Gates</span>
"There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. <span style="font-weight: bold">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.</span>
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.
<span style="font-weight: bold">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</span>.
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: <span style="font-weight: bold">slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike. </span>
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For <span style="color: #FF0000">Frederick Douglass</span>, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. <span style="color: #FF0000">“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.” </span>
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.
<span style="font-weight: bold">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</span>
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. <span style="color: #FF0000">Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent. </span>
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; <span style="font-weight: bold">the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted".</span>
Op-Ed Contributor - How to End the Slavery Blame-Game - NYTimes.com
"There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. <span style="font-weight: bold">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.</span>
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.
<span style="font-weight: bold">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</span>.
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: <span style="font-weight: bold">slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike. </span>
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For <span style="color: #FF0000">Frederick Douglass</span>, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. <span style="color: #FF0000">“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.” </span>
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.
<span style="font-weight: bold">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</span>
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. <span style="color: #FF0000">Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent. </span>
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; <span style="font-weight: bold">the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted".</span>
Op-Ed Contributor - How to End the Slavery Blame-Game - NYTimes.com
which i dont believe, cuz where they gonna spend it?). So maybe blacks should get a lil supm supm too!
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