“For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from ‘Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was’ and ‘Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane’ or, in a bizarre version of ‘The devil made me do it,’ “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

—Henry Louis Gates, in his New York Times op-ed, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” confronting the complicity of Africans in American slavery by selling their own people to slave-traders.

Harvard professor Gates, a respected authority on race in America despite his problems with the Cambridge police, has made an admirable effort to take the issue of reparations out of the context of racial guilt-mongering and forcing advocates to deal with facts rather than emotion. The fair starting point for discussions, Gates points out, is that the ancestors of white and black Americans profited from slavery.

Does this rule out any fair and coherent allocation of slave reparations, which were conceptually problematical already? Probably, and if so, we should move on to more productive debates. Gates is brave and responsible for shining light on a genuinely “inconvenient truth.”