Apologies for getting back to this late. I don’t approve nor have I EVER approved of Gates’ project. I’m not sure what I wrote that would give you that opinion. Further I think Clarke’s had a tremendous influence on Africana Studies. I just don’t think in this instance it was big enough to generate a NYTimes sponsored backlash.

Although I have found this post and comments late, the gist of your comment (@kspence) provokes a reply. Henry “Skip” Gates is definitely a tool. He is the Establishment Negro, gate-keeper for the newly recognized area of scholarship at the flagship academy of the USA. He is their boy, and he continues to exhibit his loyalty as such. The NY Times piece is illustrative of that very fact, supporting a mainstream mantra against the rising consciousness of African peoples. Your apparent affinity with Gates’ overly free-market approach to Africana Studies lends itself to a strange and misguided (certainly misleading) assessment of the knowledge “movement” that Dr. Clarke and others had/have led now for nearly a century. Indeed, the ire of the Times and other major news outlets has been registered through the years in denials, attempted refutations, and outright whiteout– a reaction to something much larger than you claim. The ruling elites of this empire, including the directors of its academies and communication media– intend to control the definition and perception of reality, and it is for this that Skip Gates is employed and deployed. The courage and wisdom of John Henrik Clarke should be heeded.

As we all know it was more than that. Gates was used as a tool to attack the entire Afrikan-centered movement, and he was promptly ripped apart by Dr. Clarke.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/20/opinion/black-demagogues-and-pseudo-scholars.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/henrik22.htm

Obama’s 2015 NAACP speech was driven by safety, expediency, and vanity. Conscience is never a factor with this politician. He recognized the problem when he spoke to the NAACP in 2009: “We know that even as we imprison more people of all races than any nation in the world, an African American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a prison.” Obama did not offer any policy or legislative solutions in 2009. Apparently it was neither politically safe, nor politically expedient, nor politically popular for him at that moment.

When Congress debated what became the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 Congressman Bobby Scott presented a bill that would equalize the crack to powder cocaine sentencing ratio 1:1. The Obama Administration accepted a compromise bill which reduced that ratio from 100:1 to 18:1. Given the opportunity in 2010 to push for equality in cocaine sentencing, Obama did what he does best–expediency.

However, the decision by his administration in 2013 to oppose a ruling in Blewett v United States was nothing less than an “illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.”

“Last month (May 2013), President Obama quietly did something that should shake every American to the core. Seeking to enforce federal crack cocaine laws that have since been repealed, the Obama administration asked a federal appeals court to ensure that thousands of human beings, mostly poor and mostly black, remain locked in prison – even though everyone agrees that there is no justification for them to be there.” –By Alec Karakatsanis / The Guardian July 23, 2013

Let us not forget that Radley Balko identified “7 Ways The Obama Administration Has Accelerated Police Militarization.”

What changed between 2009 and 2015? Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” thesis (mass-racial incarceration) gained a lot of traction. The Ferguson Rebellion spurred consciousness and activity which called the entire criminal justice system into question. Clearly Obama was on the unjust side of the criminal justice equation. Bipartisan support for some criminal justice reforms provided him with enough cover to politically shift his position. Does anyone believe that these bedfellows who periodically engage in illicit intercourse will produce anything approaching true justice?

Obama isn’t becoming anything other than the opportunistic mirage he is. The next time he starts singing to Afrikan people they should sing this Smokey Robinson classic back to him.

“You only filled me with despair

By showing love that wasn’t there

Just like the desert shows a thirsty man

A green oasis where there’s only sand

You lured me into something I should have dodged

The love I saw in you was just a mirage”

I just added a link (and the cover). You should be able to order it through the usual online suspects as well as through Punctum’s website during the Fall.