Held to answer

News flash: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has discovered that white Americans are not the only ones who owned black slaves. So has NPR’s Terry Gross.

“There is so much in your book that I did not know,” the host of “Fresh Air” told Gates. “I did not know I was so uninformed about slavery south of our borders.”

Maybe she didn’t want to know.

According to Gates, from 1502 to 1866, 11.2 million Africans were brought to the New World on slave ships. Only 450,000 of them came to the United States. The rest went to the Caribbean, Latin America and South America.

“The average American – and even the average academic and the average journalist – has no idea of the huge number of black people who landed south of the United States over the course of the slave trade,” Gates told Gross.

What’s next? Will he and Gross learn about the history of white slaves brought from Britain to the American colonies, which predated black slavery? Or will they discover that they don’t have to reach back into history to find slavery?

Portland attorney Chris Kitchel returned a few months ago from a sabbatical to Kenya where she found that girls and women are regarded as property. Men rape with impunity. Girls as young as 13 can be married off to much older men.

Kitchel found slums full of women who fled villages to avoid “widow inheritance” – when a woman’s husband dies, her brother-in-law can take her as his wife, according to The Oregonian.

This slavery is going on right now and probably has been since Adam raped Eve.

Gates, a black Harvard historian, might consider the cumulative damage that he and others in education have done to promote the stereotype of the white oppressor and black slave.

How many black children in America have it branded on their psyches that they have been deprived, that their very existence represents special circumstances? How many have been sold the myth that they are descendants of African kings and queens, and were it not for white Southern plantation owners, they would’ve been raised in tribal royalty. (With so many African kings and queens, who did the scut work? Slaves, probably.)

While Gates is pitching his book, “Black in Latin America,” black journalist and former NPR analyst Juan Williams is hustling his book “Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate.”

Just as Gates has only recently discovered the full history of slavery, Williams discovered political correctness when he was fired from NPR for saying that airline passengers in Muslim garb made him nervous. Williams insisted he was not engaging in racial profiling; NPR management believed otherwise.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page pointed out, Williams has a two-book deal, a newspaper column and a three-year contract with Fox News. That’s hardly being muzzled.

If you want to see muzzled, walk into a daily newspaper (what’s left of them).

Classic case: While Williams was rising up the ranks of the Washington Post, Paul Teetor, a white reporter at Vermont’s Burlington Free Press covered a forum on racism. When a white woman attempted to speak, an aide to the mayor told her only “people of color” could speak. She was removed. Teetor reported this, and the aide demanded the reporter be fired and the paper apologize, or blacks would march on the paper.

Teetor was fired. After he filed a wrongful discharge suit, it was revealed that the newspaper was under pressure to improve its “All-American” scores, a Gannett corporate mandate on how to cover minorities. A lot of newspaper chains (Gannett is the largest) have such mandates.

Now that Williams and Gates are more enlightened about slavery and political correctness, maybe they could open their eyes to something else that isn’t dealt with honestly in the media: Racial profiling.

Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, which is why blacks arouse more suspicion from everyone – including blacks. If a young black male in jeans and a hoodie robs a store, and you happen to be a young black male in jeans and a hoodie, don’t blame the police if you’re stopped for questioning. Blame the young black male who robbed the store.

For a truthful look at racial profiling, though, we may have to wait for Williams’ house to be broken into by a black man – while police fail to intervene for fear it might be Prof. Gates.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons