This was a piece written for another blog during the time that Gates did an op-ed about who should pay reparations to recompense for slavery. Although this was a while ago, the petty bourgeoisie must be exposed 365 so People of Color will not forget!
Gates’s intellectual assault and the war of ideas
While we have sell outs like Henry Louis Gates who is trying to share the blame between Africans and Europeans for the slave trade, we need real information so people can make a clear analysis. His analysis was written solely for the purpose of pleasing his white masters, and to give the general white population a way to clear their conscience with unfounded claims. See the op-ed here:
www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html?pagewanted=print
White people were the buyers and sellers in the slave trade, they were the rulers of the colonies in Africa and they are the benefactors to this day from both processes. It doesn’t matter that a few elite, petty bourgeois Africans participated. Those Africans were needed and Europeans were complicit in creating their status in order to facilitate the market THEY created. Gates argues that reparations are due, but that the African elite were equal benefactors in the slave trade, as a result, it would be difficult to determine who would pay.
This argument is riddled with contradictions. The African petty bourgeoisie will sell-out for a car and a one-story house. They are granted these trinkets by the very same powers who have inherited all the wealth from colonialism and slavery. There is no effort on the part of these neo-colonial leaders to fight for independent struggle of the working class then or now. These are the forces that white power selects and then offers us to elect. It is an age old trick. Gates is not an economist and is being paid very well to put misinformation out there so that white people can rest easy! If there is any debate on who should pay reparations, the Catholic Church is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, and their wealth came about at the expense of African and all people of color.
Henry Louis Gates is the epitome of the African petty bourgeoisie which he is trying to expose. As usual, it is a class conflict rearing its ugly head. It is important to note that the majority of African people were in bondage; as a result, the majority of African people on the continent could not have benefitted en masse as white people have. We were unable to exist as full functioning human beings, and the objective reality is that we are still denied this basic human right to this day.
Gates’s op-ed is subjective and comes from the position of who was more “evil”. Slavery was not about good/evil, it was about power/money, and it is downright false to claim that Africans have received either power or money for the masses. Gates’s class ally, Barack Obama, does not represent the reality for African people and he is not in any position to change this reality as Gates argues. Obama is white power in a black face, and he to, works for his white masters. He has no interest whatsoever in taking a definitive stand in favor of reparations. Obama and white power alike know that reparations would bankrupt this country into third world status because they live off the blood of African and other oppressed people around the world. To this end, Obama will never prove to be a useful tool for anything that African people must fight for.
Gates’s op-ed also serves the double purpose of driving an even further wedge between Africans on the continent and Africans in America. How many times have we heard Africans in America say “forget those Africans, they sold us anyway”? How much longer will we function and fight separate struggles? How much longer will we perpetuate the myth that our primary struggle is internal, when the architect of our division is white power? We cannot continue to let people like Henry Louis Gates bring new life to these types of arguments. We must use every outlet we have to combat these ideas that Henry Louis Gates loves to validate with his Harvard degree. We must crush his so-called acclaim, so that Africans and people of color all over the world know who he is, and what he stands for so that he can be exposed as a danger to forwarding the our revolution.
