Additional thoughts on Dr. Gates' Op-Ed

His explanation runs unfortunately close to one of boys will be boys. "You know how those Europeans are. That's just what they do."

Assigning equal responsibility would require the people in Africa who sold other people to place conditions on their sale, i.e. "You must treat them lower than animals," "Please whip and rape them," "Do not allow them to practice their cultural traditions," "Do your best to keep them as uneducated as possible, and make sure that they die young." No, Europeans created that system all on their own. Ridiculous.

Were there not a single native slave trader in Africa, Europeans would have gotten their slaves anyway. It likely would have taken longer and perhaps the numbers would have been lower, but European kingdoms and nations and militaries, especially around that time, were not ones to take no for an answer. They simply found an easier way to do it - they got other people to do much of the dirty work. Taking all those people by force would have been such a messy venture and cost many European lives. They would have been facing the military resistance of whole societies. When they employed some African people to do it for them, they saved themselves a whole lot of work. Those are some cunning people, aren't they? And they promised riches, technology and power in return. Who could resist?

There was no equal footing here. The mere fact that Dr. Gates mentions European "military outposts" on African soil should tell us something about what was going on.

Also, the European slave trade in the Atlantic world was a streamlined, well-devised, state-run scheme. The profits from it were obscene. Those profits built up Europe and the settler societies in the Americas (both North and South) and Caribbean. Of course, slaves also literally built the settler societies in these places. And this slave trade and its effects, including the physical colonialism that eventually came to Africa from Europe fucked the African continent into right now. So many people stolen (well over ten million, perhaps upwards of thirty million, whether by Europeans or Africans) from their societies, systematically, over hundreds of years, will have an indefinite effect.

"Complicit alike," he says. How?

Racism just isn't racist anymore

A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a "banana-eating jungle monkey" has apologized, saying he's not a racist.

Officer Justin Barrett told a Boston television station on Wednesday night that he was sorry for the e-mail.

"I regret that I used such words," Barrett told CNN affiliate WCVB-TV. "I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist."

...In Barrett's e-mail, which was posted on a Boston television station's Web site, he declared that if he had "been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent non-compliance."

Barrett used the "jungle monkey" phrase four times, three times referring to Gates and once referring to Abraham's writing as "jungle monkey gibberish."

It's getting so hard to be racist these days. Nobody's racist anymore. All these people who publicly say and do things that used to be considered racist, like the above pig, like Don Imus, like the pig who arrested Gates, or pigs who use the letter "N" to denote black people's race on traffic tickets, they just aren't racist now. Sure, they hate black people and everything, fuck with them based on their skin color, but I guess they just don't mean it. Maybe they're accidental racists. Unwilling racists.

Anyway, when I call someone a banana-eating jungle monkey, I want them to be offended, in a serious way. And they used to be. Unfortunately, they won't anymore, since it's no longer a racist term. I get it all the time these days. When I go out to eat, the person waiting on me often says, "Do you know what you'd like to order, you banana-eating jungle monkey?" When the UPS guy comes to our door, he frequently tells me, "Hey banana-eating jungle monkey, I've got a package for you." At the health food store, where they know me, most of the staff greets me with, "Hello banana-eating jungle monkey, how are you today?" And I'm not even black. I get it all the time though, you know? What a bummer.

What's it gonna take? I think we need new terms. The old ones are played out and have long since lost their sharp edge due to constant use. Who would have thought that banana-eating jungle monkey would become common, non-offensive parlance? I guess everything changes with time. It's like how "bad" started to mean "really awesome" in the 1960s.