Wesley Yang points out several points found in the NYT article, but leaves out others.

Was conciliatory thinking along the lines of “racists aren’t ready for that” in your head in 2009 when you were dealing with the incident with the Cambridge police?1 Oh, yeah. President Obama made an innocent comment that the arrest was stupid, which it was. Then all of a sudden all these racists are beating up on him. My whole attitude was channeled through the desire to protect our first black president. But there was another motivation. I thought that it would be hubristic and dishonest if I compared what happened to me to what happens to black people in the inner city. I thought, If I didn’t have the protections of class and status —The outcome would’ve been very different. Right. When the policeman, Sgt. Crowley, and I met, I said, “Why did you arrest me?” He said, “I was afraid that I wasn’t going to be able to go home to my wife, because I was convinced that your partner was upstairs and he was going to come down and blow me away.” He told me he had gotten a call: “Two black guys are breaking into this house.” One of them answers the door — me — when he rang the bell, and I’m stepping over suitcases, because I’d just come back from a trip. Unbeknown to me, one pattern of thievery is bringing empty suitcases to a house. So the officer saw a black face, he saw the suitcases: That’s part of a profile. I was what Barbara Johnson2 calls “an already-read text.” He couldn’t hear me, couldn’t see me. Well, that might be related to police excesses and abuses, but it’s a far end of the scale, and I was able to reverse what happened to me, unlike an Eric Garner. So my whole reaction to my arrest was determined by two things: The attacks on President Obama and my own determination not to claim too much for my own victimization.

Gates downplayed his situation because he knew inner city blacks had fewer resources to fight back. He also was concerned about further inflaming the racist attacks on Obama.

The sale of Africans to Europeans by other Africans is of no importance.If a black person kidnaps another black person and sells the kidnapped black person to a white person, it does not mean that the kidnapped black person should have no redress, especially if the children of the kidnapped black person remain in captivity.

It should also be noted that there was a battle to prevent kidnappings on the ground in Africa.

While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention. But our picture of the slave trade is incomplete without an examination of the ways in which men and women responded to the threat and reality of enslavement and deportation.Fighting the Slave Trade is the first book to explore in a systematic manner the strategies Africans used to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it.It challenges widely held myths of African passivity and general complicity in the trade and shows that resistance to enslavement and to involvement in the slave trade was much more pervasive than has been acknowledged by the orthodox interpretation of historical literature.Focused on West Africa, the essays collected here examine in detail the defensive, protective, and offensive strategies of individuals, families, communities, and states. In chapters discussing the manipulation of the environment, resettlement, the redemption of captives, the transformation of social relations, political centralization, marronage, violent assaults on ships and ports, shipboard revolts, and controlled participation in the slave trade as a way to procure the means to attack it, Fighting the Slave Trade presents a much more complete picture of the West African slave trade than has previously been available.

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/7037

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