Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
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; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, 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. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
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.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.
SOURCE: The New York Times, April 23, 2010.
IS HE A RACIST?
James Watson’s Errant, Perilous Theories
IS DR. JAMES WATSON racist? After the controversy that erupted last fall when the father of DNA suggested that there are inherent, unalterable biological differences in intelligence between black people and everyone else, I wrote to Watson and requested an interview in which he could explain his remarks. Our conversation this spring underscores how America’s battles with race and racism will play out in the era of the genome.
Watson and his British colleague, Francis Crick, are remembered popularly for identifying the “double helix” structure of DNA. Watson’s contribution was to define how the four nucleotide bases that make up deoxyribonucleic acid combine in pairs; these base pairs are the key to the structure of DNA and its various functions. In other words, Watson identified the language and the code by which we understand and talk about our genetic makeup.
Watson was just 25 when he and Crick published their findings and 34 when he won the Nobel Prize. His youth and a certain absent-minded professorial quirkiness made him a national hero, the symbol of American enterprise and intelligence. In 1989, he was named head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. In 1994, he became president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a lavishly funded center for the advanced study of genomics and cancer.
On Oct. 14, a former Watson assistant, Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, wrote an article suggesting that Watson believes nature has created a primal distinction in intelligence and innate mental capacity between blacks and everyone else that no amount of social intervention could ever change. She quoted him as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa,” since “all of our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really” and that “people who have to deal with black employees find that [the belief that everyone is equal] is not true.”
His words caused a tidal wave of shock and disgust. The father of DNA seemingly supported the most ardent fantasy of white racists (David Duke waxed poetic on his Web site that the truth had at last been revealed). One of the smartest white men in the world seemed to confirm that the gap between blacks and whites in, say, SAT results has a biological basis and that environmental factors such as centuries of slavery, colonization, Jim Crow segregation and race-based discrimination—all of which contributed to uneven economic development—are not very significant. Nature has given us an extra basketball gene, as it were, in lieu of intelligence.
On Oct. 19, Watson profusely apologized; on Oct. 25, he retired from Cold Spring Harbor.
When I read about Watson’s remarks, I was astonished and saddened. Since we had met before, as alumni of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, I sent him a letter; as editor of TheRoot.com, I offered him a platform in the black world through which he could explain, defend and perhaps clarify the remarks attributed to him. He accepted, and on March 17 we spoke for well over an hour, with no holds barred.
“Well?” one of my friends asked. “Is he a racist?”
Not really. But I think that Watson is what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “racialist”—that is, he believes that certain observable traits or forms of behavior among groups of people might indeed have a biological basis in the code that scientists, eventually, may be able to ascertain; that, in the search for the basis of behaviors, we can move from correlation to causation (that genetic sequencing patterns can be correlated to intelligence); and that racial differences between ethnic groups in behavior and ability reflect immutable genetic traits rather than environmental factors.
The distinction between “racist” and “racialist” is crucial. James Watson is not a garden-variety racist, as he has been caricatured, the sort epitomized by David Duke. He also seemed embarrassed and remorseful that Duke and his ilk had claimed him as one of their own. Not surprisingly, he apologized profusely, contending that he had been misquoted, at worst, and taken out of context, at best.
But Watson does seem to believe that many forms of behavior—such as “Jewish intelligence” (his phrase) and the basketball prowess of black men in the NBA (his example)—could, possibly, be traced to genetic differences among groups, although no such connection has been made on any firm scientific basis. Girded by his conviction that everyone should be judged as individuals, he blithely asserted that if a genetic basis for “Jewish intelligence” was found, it wouldn’t affect anyone in the slightest: “no one should be judged by a term like ‘black.’” But a phrase such as “Jewish intelligence” contradicts this claim.
Precisely because of the misuses of science and pseudo-science since the 18th century, which put in place fixed categories of “races” to justify an econom
ic order dependent on the exploitation of people of color as cheap sources of labor, it has never been possible for a person of African descent to function in American society simply as an “individual.”
Watson’s error is that he is too eager to map individual genetic differences (which do exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and highly malleable), and to provide a genetic explanation for ethnic differences. Watson said he was gloomy about the prospects of Africans as a group but later insisted that people shouldn’t be judged as groups. Doesn’t this illustrate the persistence of race categories, of “kind-mindedness,” despite his declared intention?
Abilities and behaviors, such as intelligence or basketball skills, that are popularly attributed to groups and are defined as “genetic” will continue to limit or determine the treatment of individuals who fall into those “racial” categories, regardless of an individual’s propensities and achievements. In the end, visions that are racialist may end up doing the same work of those that are racist.
Having spent the past three decades studying racist discourse about the degree of reason that people of African descent possess, I know that such conclusions—say, about an entity called “Jewish intelligence”—could deleteriously affect me as a black person because it could reinforce stereotypes about Jewish people being genetically superior and black people being inherently less intelligent than other groups. If such differences in intelligence were purported to have a genetic basis, all of the social intervention in the world could have only so much effect. Why bother with costly compensatory education programs if, after all, nature is fundamentally to blame, severely limiting what these programs can achieve? Sooner or later, members of these supposedly “lesser” ethnic groups or genetic populations could find their life possibilities limited and perhaps even regulated.
I worry even more that Watson confessed to me that “we shouldn’t expect that [ethnically] different persons have equal intelligence, because we don’t know that. And people say that these should be the same [that is, all ethnic groups] . . . I think the answer is we don’t know.” Later, he remarked that “we’re not all the same,” by which he meant genetically, across ethnic groups. Soon, some scientist somewhere will claim to have proved this, and that claim could be deeply problematic for the future of black people in this society, even if my rights to equal treatment under the law are not predicated upon the hypothesis that all human groups have the same genetic endowments. Watson’s tendency to theorize about groups—a very human tendency—undermines his declared belief that humans should be judged as individuals.
Afterward, I realized what fear my conversation with Watson had confirmed: that the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society, and that the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA. That is where we, as a society, will resolve the contentious claim that groups are, by nature, differently advantaged in the most important way: over the degree of reason or intelligence that they ostensibly possess.
SOURCE: The Washington Post, July 11, 2008.
PART VIII
INTERVIEWS
AS A CONTRIBUTOR to The New York Times and The New Yorker, as editor-in-chief of The Root, as publisher of the Du Bois Review and Transition, Gates has a number of public platforms for his writing. Over many years, Gates has used these public platforms to conduct interviews with world leaders and thought leaders, artists, writers, filmmakers, and politicians.
The two interviews that frame this section are both about migration, about black people opening one door when race has seemed to close another. Although the two interviews were conducted forty years apart (he spoke with James Baldwin and Josephine Baker in the early 1970s and with Isabel Wilkerson in 2010) and with figures who in time and profession were far removed from each other, similar themes emerge about the migrant experience of blacks. For both the expatriates and the Great Migration travelers, America holds great promise—unrealized and sometimes corrupted, but promise nonetheless. The interviews that come in between these two—with Wole Soyinka, Condoleezza Rice, and William Julius Wilson—all pick up similar themes of self-determination, collective action, and potential—and the paths to fulfill them.
In the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, perhaps it is an odd choice to end with the voices of others. But what Gates elicits from each of his interlocutors is the same thing that has guided his writing over the years: each subject, like Gates himself, creates a narrative to help make sense of the world around us, to understand institutions and the individuals within them, and to create an environment for the free and ferocious exchange of ideas.
Abby Wolf
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPHINE BAKER AND JAMES BALDWIN
In 1973, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was in Paris interviewing black American expatriates. He sought to know why, after the “gains” of the sixties, so many black Americans still found it necessary to live abroad. In addition to interviewing Leroy Haynes, proprietor of a Parisian Soul Food restaurant, Beauford Delaney, painter, and Bob Reid, musician, Gates interviewed Josephine Baker and James Baldwin. Although some twelve years have passed since these interviews, the observations and comments of Baker and Baldwin offer us insights into the expatriate experience then, and America now.
The interview with Josephine Baker began in her home, “Villa Maryvonne,” in Monte Carlo. Later, while she and Gates were dinner guests at James Baldwin’s home in St. Paul-de-Vence in the south of France, Gates concluded his interview with Baker and interviewed Baldwin. Although all of the conversation over dinner that night was not preserved, Baker’s and Baldwin’s responses to Gates’s questions were. The individual interviews I have edited to read as a single conversation so that the genial ambience of that evening in St. Paul could be captured. Gates speaks of that evening and the events that led up to it in his own introduction to this piece.—Anthony Barthelemy
SO MANY QUESTIONS that I should have asked that night, but did not! I was so captivated by the moment: under the widest star-filled evening sky that I can remember, in the backyard of Baldwin’s villa at St. Paul, drunk on conversation, burgundy, and a peasant stew, drunk on the fact that James Baldwin and Josephine Baker were seated on my right and left. It was my twenty-second summer; a sublime awe, later that evening, led me to tears.
Those few days in the south of France probably had more to do with my subsequent career as a literary critic than any other single event. At the time, I was a correspondent at the London bureau of Time magazine, a training that is, probably, largely responsible for the quantity of my later critical writing, and for its anecdotal opening paragraphs. I had just graduated from Yale College in June, as a Scholar of the House in History. Time, to even my great surprise, had hired me to work as a correspondent during the six month collective vacations at the University of Cambridge. I figured that I would “read” philosophy or literature at Cambridge, take the M.A. degree, then join permanently the staff at Time.
So, I sailed to Southampton from New York on the France in June, 1973. After a week of pure fright and anxiety—after all, what does a Time correspondent do?, and how?—I decided to go for my fantasy. I proposed doing a story on “Black Expatriates,” perhaps every young Afro-American would-be-intellectual’s dream. To my astonishment, the story suggestion was approved. So, off we (Sharon Adams, to whom I am married, and I) went by boat, train, and automobile to Europe, in search of blackness and black people.
In the Paris bureau of Time—Paris was the only logical point of departure, after all—I dialed Jo Baker’s phone number. (Time can get to virtually anyone.) She answered her own phone! Stumbling around, interrupting my tortured speech with loads of “uh’s” and “um’s,” I asked her if she would allow me to interview her. On one condition, she responded: “Bring Jimmy Baldwin with you to Monte Car
lo.” Not missing a beat, I promised that I would bring him with me.
Baldwin agreed to see me, after I had begged one of his companions and told him that I was heading south anyway to see Jo Baker. Cecil Brown, the companion told me, was living there as well, so maybe I could interview him as well? Cecil Brown, I thought. Def-i-nite-ly! (Jiveass Nigger had been a cult classic among us younger nationalists in the early seventies.) So, off we went.
Imagine sitting on a train, from Paris to Nice, on the hottest night of August, 1973, wondering how I could drag Baldwin from St. Paul to Monte Carlo, and scared to death of Baldwin in the first place. It was a thoroughly Maalox evening; to top everything else, our train broke down in a tunnel. We must have lost twenty pounds in that tunnel. Finally, just after dawn, we arrived at Nice, rented a car, then drove the short distance to St. Paul.
After the best midday meal that I had ever eaten, before or since, I trekked with great trepidation over to Baldwin’s “house.” “When I grow up . . .,” I remember thinking as I walked through the gate. I won’t bore you with details; suffice it to say that if you ever get the chance to have dinner with Jimmy Baldwin at his house at St. Paul, then do it. “Maybe I could write Notes of a Native Son if I lived here,” I thought.
I am about to confess something that literary critics should not confess: James Baldwin was literature for me, especially the essay. No doubt like everyone who is reading these pages, I started reading “black books” avidly, voraciously, at the age of thirteen or fourteen. I read everything written by black authors that could be ordered from Red Bowl’s paper store in Piedmont, West Virginia. LeRoi Jones’s Home and Blues People, Malcolm’s Autobiography, and Invisible Man moved me beyond words—beyond my own experience, which is even a further piece, I would suppose. But nothing could surpass my love for the Complete Works of James Baldwin. In fact; I have never before written about Baldwin just because I cannot read his words outside of an extremely personal nexus of adolescent sensations and emotions. “Poignancy” only begins to describe those feelings. I learned to love written literature, of any sort, through the language of James Baldwin.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 75