Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Wonders of the African World. Knopf, 1999.
What is interesting is that when he cites the dreadful facts about American slavery, he never points out that the American slave traders rarely raided the villages and captured the slaves themselves. Most often this was done my Khamenei’s Muslim brethren slave traders who dominated the slave trade in Africa. Nor does he point out what after realizing the evil that Americans perpetrated with slavery, we ended it in the 1860s. Saudi Arabia, the central nation of Islam, did not make slavery illegal until 100 years later, and even today, there are many Saudi’s who get caught practicing slavery with household servants and forms of indentured servitude. And while Christians and the Bible tolerated slavery, the Koran and the Prophet never once condemn the practice of slavery. Democracy at any point in time is not always morally right, but it is a process by which under pressure from the people it improves over time because the people can change it and do.
Often referred to as “The Dean of Black Historians.”
This quotation distressed many ultra rightists who otherwise were avid followers of Mises. See {632407} for another quotation that distressed many European conservative devotees of Mises.
Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
