Henry Louis Gates Jr. is exactly the type of person that Robert F. Kennedy despised back in the day and avoided at all costs. So did Martin Luther King Jr. So did Malcolm X. So did Medgar Evars. Men of movement didn’t stop long enough to give an audience to men who attempted to retard progress by making excuses for atrocities and telling blacks to pump the brakes on their demands for justice.
This is what Gates did with his New York Times piece on April 22, titled “Ending the Slavery Blame Game,” where he tried mightily to calibrate the precise percentages of blame for the abominable transatlantic slave trade and instructed blacks to cease their campaign for reparations.
Though those aforementioned legendary men (Bobby, Martin, Malcolm and Medgar) employed different strategies to secure civil rights for African Americans in the 1960s, they respected one another because they actually did something. They actually moved something other than their mouths and their pens. They weren’t sitting inside a plush office on a manicured campus, completely disconnected and disengaged from the harsh realities of the rest of “his” people. In fact, when people visualize RFK, MLK, Malcolm and Medgar, it’s never in that setting, whereas the mental picture you get of Gates is that of a man sitting and talking, regurgitating endless streams of verbal diarrhea and not much else.
RFK didn’t like people of Gates’ ilk because they sat around the table engaging in nonstop intellectual masturbation, working themselves into a professorial lather, but they can barely march to the kitchen to get more crackers and cheese to go with their wine, much less march for justice. King didn’t have much use for the Gateses of the world because they were equipped only to call plays from the booth. King needed folks who possessed the mental armor and intestinal fortitude to get onto the field of play. MLK prayed for men like Gates’, dusted off his feet, and kept it moving.
And we know without a doubt that Malcolm X — both the pre- and post-Mecca Malcolm — wanted black cowards banished because they appropriated so much of their energies to absolving whites of their deserved blame and guilt for their treacherous and murderous past.
The fact that Gates wrote that Africans took part in the slave trade, broke absolutely no new ground. Anyone who saw the record-breaking television mini-series “Roots” or cracked open a legitimate history book would know this. But the only ones who procured longtime enrichment from this dastardly deal was the Western World, whereas the continent of Africa was eventually dissected like pie and colonized by virtually every formidable power in Western Europe. Of course, this fact was conspicuously omitted from Gates‘ misguided diatribe.
Gates is part of that black elitist group of African Americans who cannot identify with the majority blacks. He didn’t even realize he was still black until he got arrested last year in that infamous arrest in Cambridge, Mass., last year. He’s been insulated within that educational cocoon and has lost touch with reality. That he is the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research defames the very name of the iconic genius he represents — or misrepresents.
The difference between someone like Gates and MLK is that the latter tried to appeal to whites’ sense of dignity and humanity to procure civil rights gains. He never, ever tried to engage in a pathetic display of apologizing for their inhumane, abominable treatment of blacks. If Gates’ scholarship is the best result of King’s time on Earth, then King wasted his time. –terry shropshire
