Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe on the Racism of Gates

"In essence, my book, “The New Scapegoats” frankly and poignantly exposes two anti-African stances adopted by Professor Gates over the past decade, namely, that continental Africans, rather than Europeans and European-Americans, both unilaterally instigated and subsequently collaborated with Westerners to callously and massively enslave their fellow Africans; and two, that America’s post-civil rights dispensation, with direct regard to the implementation of Affirmative Action policies and programs were primarily tailored for the exclusive benefit of African-Americans who could directly and forensically claim ancestry from America’s “Plantation South,” and thus it constitutes the flagrant height of abject criminality for mainstream American academic institutions to extend the same favors to Africans of Caribbean and continental African descent. On both counts, as more amply discussed in my book, “The New Scapegoats,” I vehemently refute the “Gatesian” stance by detailing the collective and bilateral – or mutual – scourge that was the massive African enslavement by the West between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries."

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 20 books, including “The New Scapegoats: Colored-on-Black Racism” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.