CLOSE THE SCHOMBURG’s GATES FIRMLY ON PROF

SKIP GATES.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

July 2010

by errol m harry-London, uk

In the interest of transparency, and with reverence for the SCHOMBURG

Centre and all that it has stood for down all these years -as a repository of
the African contributions to Culture Civilisation and History, please accept
in good faith my humble but serious concerns about the suitability and role
of Prof Gates in the recruitment process for a new Director of the centre.

I regret having to write this, but I simply have no confidence in him and
consequently none whatsoever in any candidate he is likely to support for
such an important post.

Like many black people in Britain familiar with his ‘post-racial’ writings in general and
in particular his recent attempt to re-write the history of Slavery itself and force-fit it into
his post–racial ideological box (Op-ed New York Times –April 2010 ) I take great
exception to his historically untenable and flawed attempt to place equal co-responsibility
for Slavery upon African Chiefs /Collaborators as upon the Europeans.

Whatever the pros and cons of the current post-racial debate may be, we can agree to
disagree on this, and disagree agreeably at that.

However, it’s quite something else to ask anyone-black and white alike, to suspend our
critical and common-sense faculties in order to kneel together at the altar of racial unity
worshiping the God of post-racialism-. all bonded together with bitter sorrow over our
‘collective’ guilt and our joint responsibility for African slavery.

So the received wisdom of a history which once informed us that the Europeans ‘were
all at it’ (slavery) must now be revised or set aside completely as ‘racist blame-game one-
dimensional’ history. Slavery is now rather more ‘complex’ than this.
Now viewed backwards through the prism of Prof Gates’s Academic Pirate’s compass,
for centuries African Chiefs and Europeans jointly traded, brought over and enslaved our
African ancestors: in Africa, at Sea in Slave ships and on land in New World
plantations .We too ‘were all at it’. Blacks and whites are now all united in this Slavery
business.

So after wishfully proclaiming, with Dinesh DeSouza the ‘Death of Racism’ in the
West, and perhaps fearful of a resurgence, this Post-Racial project has now decided to
carry death to the root of Racism itself: Slavery and its history:

NOT by challenging, confronting denouncing and helping to dismantle the

vast superstructure of racist ideology imbedded in the culture, society,
empires of learning, and the economy..

BUT by reinforcing it and rewriting the History of Slavery in such a way

that equal opportunities for Blame and Guilt is now generously extended to
the victims as well. Thanks very much for not ‘excluding’ us!

One is reminded of the immortal lines from the Mighty Sparrow’s ‘Dan is
the man’( in the van)- a 1960’s calypso ridiculing the brain-washing
English education Black colonial ‘subjects’ were exposed to in Trinidad and
the British West Indies-(see on You Tube):

‘..If ah was bright ah would have been a damn fool, but you see-mi head
was duncie an’ up to now ah cyaan’ read ’

Presumably, Prof Gates and his ‘post-racial’ brigandage and fellow travellers for hire
are already feverishly excavating the evidence which will establish beyond all doubt that
these African Chiefs and collaborators actually travelled ‘first-class’ on slave ships to
help manage their New world plantations with their European co-partners so as to protect
their Joint investments in my ancestors.

As a lifelong non-smoker and teetotaller, someone better pour me a drink quick (a

Carlsberg special brew or ‘a drew’) because Skip Gates has now ‘totalled’ my mind.
Which way is up? I desperately need strong doses of credulity and patience. This is not
only offensive but excruciatingly painful.
Paroxysms of rage and anguish would certainly flow from any similar
irresponsible and grossly offensive suggestions-academic or otherwise, to
the effect that the role of Jewish collaborators in German concentration
camps, the Kapos, rendered them or Jews as a whole, equal co-partners with
the Nazis in their Final solution and the Shoah of six million murders.

This anguish is greatly compounded for Blacks and Jews alike and their
descendants, when such revisionism armed with great contortions of
proportionality and responsibility, flow from the pens of one of our own, or
from one of theirs.

When the wood-cutter entered the forest with his axe, the trees said
’Don’t panic, look at the axe handle he is one of us’.

(Persian proverb)

Prof Gates who enjoys high status at Harvard, an elite ivy-league

University, has taken an academic axe to our sensibilities.

’UNTIL THE LIONS HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS, TALES OF HUNTING

WILL ALWAYS GLORIFY THE HUNTER- (AFRICAN PROVERB)

Consequently our pain and anguish will go thermonuclear if, as is being suggested Prof
Gates should have even considered accepting any role in the selection process of a new
Director at the Schomburg being extended to him by those who could only be described
as either uninformed or insensitive , or both.

On the Geiger counter of insults to the dead and insensitivity to the living, the professor’s
role at the Schomburg generates ratings almost as radioactive in the Black Diaspora
world-wide, as would be expected in international Jewish communities if Prof. David
Irving , a known Holocaust denier, was asked to co-chair the recruitment panel to select
a new Director for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

And then had the ‘Chutzpah’ to accept the mistaken invitation….

...

The only marginally mitigating factor here is that Prof Gates’s mission
could be interpreted as, not so much designed to offend black people, as to
assuage and massage the guilt of white elites and the ruling classes who
regularly read the New York Times.
It is also true nonetheless, that for all his considerable talents, Prof Gates
did not in fact invent this’ blame the victim ‘revisionist history. This
predates the establishment of the Schomburg Centre, and is as old as
slavery itself.;

‘If these blacks are human, we cannot be Christians’ (and since we are
Christians..)-Montesqieu-French philosopher.

This dishonourable tradition of European intellectual acrobatics over slavery, with which
Prof Gates seems to have aligned himself, also manifested itself one hot summer night
on British Television in August 1971.

The BBC had flown James ’Fire next time’ Baldwin over from Paris
specially to be a guest on a programme to discuss the shooting death of
George ‘Soul on Ice’ Jackson and its implications for race relations in the
US.

The result was as incendiary and as notorious as the bust-up on US TV in

1968 between Gore Vidal and the Conservative William Buckley whom
Vidal called a ‘cryto-nazi’ –while discussing Mayor Daley’s police riot at
the Democratic National Convention in Chicago

. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li73RRLEyW8&feature=related -(see
Vidal incident),

Baldwin went ballistic and apoplectic when confronted by the aristocratic

Peregrine Worthstone, Editor of the Conservative Daily Telegraph
newspaper, who in a vain and desperate attempt to defend the indefensible-
racism in the US, adopted the intellectual posture of a contortionist, leaned
over to scrape the bottom of the barrel of history, and threw the involvement
of African Chiefs in the Slave trade straight into Baldwin’s face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbkObXxSUus-see

(see above James Baldwin debating William Buckley on US racism at

Cambridge University –Prof Gates’s old school)_

Even the Ancient Greeks, Founders of European Civilisation, would not have deployed
such arguments..

Shortly afterwards, this encounter was reproduced verbatim in a British ‘high-brow’

magazine called–‘Encounter’.
When many years later it was revealed that Encounter was funded by the CIA no one in
the black community here in Britain ‘raised an eye-brow’. This made sense.

Now it appears that African-descendant Prof Gates has not only accepted
the baton bestowed upon him by Mr Worthstone and those of his ilk- all
steeped in this ‘big disproportionate -lie’ revisionist tradition, but is running
with it faster than Usain Bolt.

As the late great Prof Walter Rodney observed in the context of the
Forbes Burnham Dictatorship in Guyana, History can and does repeat itself
first as farce and then as tragedy: Like Forbes Burnham, Prof Gate’s
contributions to this particular historiography are BOTH a Farce as well as a
Tragedy (see attachment for Walter Rodney on George Jackson)

Out of respect at least for those –Not us- who misguidedly but sincerely extended this
invitation to him, as well as his own awareness of his less than exalted standing in the
African diaspora, Prof Gates should have done everyone a favour and declined this offer.

It is not as if he is short of invitations generally. Indeed it is common

knowledge that the venerable Professor is in great demand in ‘other’ exalted
and rarified elite circles at home and abroad here in Europe..

This is why ordinary or ‘Drylongso’ (ie ole Black American parlance-see

the book of the same name) Black people in Britain are never afforded equal
opportunities as compared with the British elites and their Afro., Indo., and
assorted Third World-Saxons,- to see the great man in person.

To listen to him with all the rapt attention and bewilderment his notoriety
commands-in one of our less than congenial and salubrious Community
Centres which grace the run-down inner-cities in this otherwise green and
pleasant land.

Then, without a doubt we would have grasped the opportunity and privilege
to bestow upon Prof Gates –as was bestowed upon the late great Bernie
Grant at the West Indian Centre, Turnpike Lane London in October 1987
when he came to promote his Gay positive images school lessons for 5 years
olds:
the very warmest of Black British , African, Caribbean, West ‘Indian’, and
Jamaican ‘ole negar’ welcomes … all congruent and befitting our own fine
iconoclastic and verbal ‘rockstone’ traditions of course….

To Rawtit.

When one considers that the very reason for the establishment of the
Schomburg Centre in the first place, as with the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre, was precisely to collect, chronicle, document and preserve our
historical heritage and records and to make them available to all scholars, it
would appear that on the evidence available to me anyway (his blaming
Africans for slavery in particular,) that Prof Gates has had precious little
time for the Schomburg Centre and its contents.

The feelings are mutual and must be reciprocated . Certainly among the
spirits or ‘the shades’ (St. Africa) of our ancestors- Dubois, Garvey,
Nkrumah, Clr James, Biko, Yaa Asantewa , Sankara, Diop, Henric
Clarke, Chris Hani and all the others, (more coming)…who still inhabit
and roam within the Schomburg and patrol its immediate environs.

Even if I am wrong on this (Gates using the Schomburg), I know that I

speak for many black people in Britain, and all across the Diaspora, at home
in Africa and abroad, who are sincerely hoping and praying to the ancestors
that Prof Gates will now gracefully withdraw with as much dignity as he
can undoubtedly muster-and so save his ill-advised sponsors any further and
unnecessary embarrassment.

And if he dares to persist, we will have to fall back on ‘the shades’. They
can always be guaranteed to:

1. Chant Him Down, (Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Fela, Curtis

Mayfield, and Miriam Makeba leading) and to
 2. slam the gates of the Schomburg firmly shut- upon Prof Gates,
who along with Malcolm X’s ‘House Negroes’, abandoned their
minds a long time ago back home in Africa....

Final words to the great Jimmy Baldwin:

‘The principles upon which the English language have been constructed
form part of the Architecture of the black man’s-and of course Prof. Henry
Louis Gates’s- Prison’

ERROL M HARRY no copyright-but if printed anywhere, please inform errol

harry at (errolharry67@yahoo.com)

LONDON ENGLAND.-July 2010-free