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Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 187
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, February 06, 2006 - 02:04 pm: | 
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Alex Haley was a Fraud!
By Stanley Crouch
IN the early 1980s, when Alex Haley, the author of "Roots," was speaking at Lincoln Center, investigative reporter Philip Nobile asked him a straightforward question. Since he had paid Harold Courlander $650,000 in a plagiarism suit, why shouldn't Haley be considered a criminal instead of a hero?
Haley had no answer. Well, what would you expect from someone who had pulled off one of the biggest con jobs in U.S. literary history?
Yet the "Roots" hoax has sustained itself. Every PBS station in America refused to show the 1997 BBC documentary inspired by Nobile's reporting on the book. And tonight NBC will air a retrospective on the 25th anniversary of the popular TV miniseries.
There are a number of reasons the truth about "Roots" is still ignored. One is that black Americans, primarily because of the influence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, became obsessed with being a "lost" people in America, people who had "no knowledge of self." Younger black people were told they were not Americans, but victims of Americanism. Their true identity, Malcolm X said, was African and Islamic. The truth had been hidden from them by the white man, who was the Devil.
Another reason the hoax has held is that Haley, riding on the success of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," for which he got "as told to" credit, knew how to hustle. He had already been accused of plagiarizing an interview with Miles Davis for Playboy.
So he traveled the country for years promoting a forthcoming book on the Haley family history, which he had miraculously traced back to Africa. Black college students, swept up in the black power movement and romantic ideas about "the motherland," were thrilled at the idea that Haley had proved it was possible to hold up a lantern in the historical darkness and find one's way home.
But the most important reason for the durability of the hoax is white folks. Those at Doubleday who published "Roots" had a best seller and were not interested in people knowing it was phony baloney. David Wolper Productions created the most successful miniseries of its time and was not interested. Federal Judge Robert Ward, who presided over the plagiarism case, protected Haley's reputation.
Ward urged Courlander - the man whose novel "The African" Haley pillaged - to be quiet about his huge settlement. Ward thought that Haley had become too important to black people to be torn down in public. As I said once before in this column a few years ago, that was paternalism at its very worst: Treat them like children; they can't handle the truth.
Haley called Nobile in February 1979 at New York magazine when he was reporting on the federal case. Haley said he shouldn't report on the case because the Ku Klux Klan could use the outcome against his people.
On another occasion, I heard Haley protest on the radio that "they" were trying "to say that black people have no history." At another point, according to Nobile, "He compared the truth about him to those people who attacked Anne Frank and said that there was no Holocaust. He would resort to anything."
Since "Roots" has brought millions of black tourist dollars to Gambia, one Gambian said to me, "Yes, it is a lie but it is a good lie."
The book remains an opportunistic insult to black people, and no amount of excuses will change that harsh fact.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 3768
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, February 06, 2006 - 11:30 pm: |
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"Roots" has ascended into the realm of myth. Let it be. |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 198
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, February 07, 2006 - 12:10 am: |
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Cynique wrote: "Roots" has ascended into the realm of myth. Let it be.
Sounds good to me. |
Shemika
Newbie Poster
Username: Shemika
Post Number: 2
Registered: 02-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, February 07, 2006 - 10:04 pm: |
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I don't know why the big deal about debunking Roots. Whether or not Haley found his specific family line, the story is still true because Africans were brought here as slaves and treated in the manner described, no doubt about it. He should be free to claim any Africans as his family even if he adopts them as his - what’s the big deal. Do you actually believe all the bunk whites living here for generations write about their background - how they are 100% or 50% Irish or Italian? What a JOKE! They reproduce all over the place and have no idea who all their ancestors are any more than blacks do. They just pick some European identity they admire and may or may not be related to (to some degree) and claim that as their identity. Bottom line is its all nonsense anyway. I’m not impressed by what percent if any that someone is German, Italian, Irish or any of them. Blacks can pick an African nation and claim it as our direct ancestry too. Why not? Blacks everywhere should be so united we act like one big family anyway. |
Kola_boof
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Kola_boof
Post Number: 1385
Registered: 02-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2006 - 12:01 am: |
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Shemika, I am from Sudan and I agree with you 100%
In fact, that's what I wish Black Americans would do.
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Kola_boof
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Kola_boof
Post Number: 1386
Registered: 02-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2006 - 12:03 am: |
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Well...the "authentic" blacks anyway.
Not the obviously mixed and mulattos.
The ones who look like US and not Arab.
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Barbersurgeon
Newbie Poster
Username: Barbersurgeon
Post Number: 18
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, February 10, 2006 - 03:45 pm: |
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Not the obviously mixed and mulattos.
You mean like YOU?
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