BrianGarst.com

Professor Henry Gates has penned an insightful op-ed regarding slavery, blame and reparations.  In it he spends significant time discussing the role of black Africans in promoting the slave trade, a topic all too often ignored in both history texts and popular discussion:

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, 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.

…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.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “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.”

Although I enjoyed his historical account and thoughtful approach to the issue, I fundamentally differ with Professor Gates on whether reparations ought to be paid at all.  While he acknowledges that, “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,” he misses an important point.

The issue of extraction is not merely complicated by the role of Africans in the slave trade. The fundamental obstacle to reparations is the fact that no one responsible for slavery is alive today.  While we can, in some crude fashion, measure the negative impact on those who are alive today, we cannot place any blame on people for the actions of their ancestors. Nor can we condemn whole groups (American whites, particular African tribes, etc.) for their histories. Reparations should never happen because extracting the payments from anyone would be fundamentally unjust.

race issues