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Distinguished notwithstanding, your take on Gates is spot on. I am convinced in his subconcious he wishes he were of different hue than what he is now. Hope he finds his Irish DNA and get the acceptance he craves so much. His recent arrest by thet police in Boston hopefully has thought him something about the everyday trials and tribulations of the underclass black male in America and other modern capitals of the North whom he has been bashing for quite a while.

Below is part of a response by Late Professor JOHN HENRIK CLARKE to an op-ed where Gates called BlacK Academics dissecting the lies and distortions of what is perceived as standard history in relation to the African peoples contribution to world culture, literature, sciences etc as demagogues and pseudo-scholars. Gates attack was mainly on people like Carunthers, Diop, Clarke, Rodney,Molife Asante, and others who question the so-called established narration of world history in which Africans are only slaves, canibbals, tribalists devoid of nationhood. I may add Kwame Anthony Appiah author of In my father's house who is a mix of Ghanaian and European blood is in good company with Gates and West. To the likes of Gates and his friends the idea of exposing the true history of African peoples (to some Afrocentrism) is nothing but racism or anti-semiticism. Of course one is mindful of some of the utterances of Afrocentrist such as Leonid Jeffries which do sometimes verge on romanticism and hyperbole.

Here goes Professor John Henrik Clarke (emphasis added)

"Professor Gates, Cornel West and other Black conservatives use beautiful words, sometimes to say nothing, sometimes to say what has already been said and sometimes to say what is not in debate. They display their ignorance of European history and history in general. They decry any form of Black nationalism and often call it racism without knowing that for the last 500 years the world has been controlled by European or White nationalism.

African self-assertion, the demand for a proper curriculum in the schools ... threatens an apparatus of European control set in motion by the Atlantic slave trade and continued with colonialism that ultimately laid the basis for present-day monopoly capitalism. No matter what Europeans say they believe religiously, politically or culturally, their main objective in the world is control. Everything that has ever been developed in the European mind was meant to facilitate mind control of the world. There are no exceptions, Left or Right politically.

Black conservatives are really frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation, figuratively, letting their master know that they are willing to go back into bondage. One needs to question their words because, as slaves and enemies of their people, they will say what they are told to say and do what they are told to do. The Black conservatives have nothing to conserve except their miserable obscurity and their tragic cowardice. These pathetically lost creatures and avid White-behind kissers don't have the nerve to be African or Black.

To be African or Black with the understanding of all of its ramifications is, in itself, a commitment to the unification and uplift of all African people on the face of this earth. It is a commitment, also, to take Pan Africanism beyond its narrow base of Black nationalism to a concept of an African world union."