Skip Gates runs from Africa

Just finished watching the slimy Skip Gates (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) and his venture, "Black in Latin America." I suppose some information is better than none - like why he limited his production to some countries, not others, or not all, where Africans were stolen to build, literally, the wealth of the so-called New World - but as George Bernard Shaw is not famously fully quoted "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing BUT SOME MINDS CAN ONLY HANDLE A LITTLE."

Skip gives us a little because, unlike the Boston Police Dept, I know who he is.

Like any servant of the corporate class, this Harvard endowed professor has a very light touch when it comes to crimes committed by former imperial masters in the creation and maintenance and endurance of the African underclass. He romanticizes Spain's and France's relation to their Africans versus the English white settlers supposedly more brutal, and I recollect no mention of the still-cited Monroe Doctrine justifying USA interests and interventions (and murder) in the Western hemisphere.

Gates leans heavily towards speaking mostly with academics and only depicting images of Black poverty (social exclusion). Academics are good squirrels at amassing nuts and dusting off relics; they rarely indict their masters for current crimes, barely ancient ones. And the persistent of an African or First Nation underclass should be a prima facie indictment of any political system, never to be romanced.

African peoples exemplify in their shared low-caste status that the West is devoid of a religious morality, only a Wall Street one, which is full of brazen lies about how things trickle down to the "least of us": having been to Mexico and seen the racism against African-Mexicans there I wondered if Gates connected the dots between, say, South-Central and Yanga.

I was eager to see his treatment of Cuba, but girded my loins when he set his gauge outright on this alone: whether the Revolution had ended racism. I found this high minded and hypocritical because he sets no such gauge for the Dominican Republic, Mexico, or Peru, whose African populations might fare as worse. As a professional endowed by corporate foundations, he must discredit Cuba's revolution as a renegade from the Wall Street sphere of influence.

Until a National Geographic explorer funded by the Ford Foundation ventures into the marshes of 21st century Great Britain to see if sexism has been eliminated I cry foul.   

Those of us robbed of the knowledge of the African diaspora will come away from this series a bit more knowledgeable: but Gates is no Ali Mazrui. Mazrui was the Kenyan-born historian who gave us the 1980's series, "The Africans: a Triple Heritage," which was aired once, stirred controversy for his criticism of the West, and never, ever seen again. PBS doesn't even sell the DVD.

We are left to feed off the trash of Skip Gates.

Gates is not one to show the West as a macro institution united in subverting Africa and its children. Being Brazilian or Peruvian, Mexican, Dominican, or even Cuban nationality is an irrelevance. In the final analysis, if these nation-states keep you, your kin, and your African homelands in constitutional misery it is hardly worthwhile to compare which refugee camp suffers hunger less, does it?

Gates fails to show any of this. A "Top Chef" judge would lament that missing "sauce" that would give the dish an "elevation" and "tie it all together."