Even if everyone accepts responsibility for the slave trade, don't expect to see any money.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.--whom I once admiringly described as a blend of W.E.B. Du Bois and P.T. Barnum--has a genius for stirring up controversy, even when he doesn't mean to. It was Gates, the editor-in-chief of The Root, who last year provoked the most embarrassing racial moment of Barack Obama's young presidency by managing to get arrested for breaking into his own house. So it's no surprise that his latest op-ed piece for the New York Times has the black blogosphere in a tizzy.

The over-heated reaction is par for the course when the nation's arguably most prominent black intellectual suggests that if we want to extract reparations for slavery from the U.S. government, we must first persuade the descendents of the African tribes that sold our ancestors into slavery to cough up their share as well. Gates' idea seems to be that if the Africans admit their ancestors' complicity--as the heads of Benin and Ghana already have--it will set a moral example that puts pressure on white folks to follow suit.

As he explained to me in an e-mail exchange, he wanted the piece to suggest that, ''we should get some sort of symbolic reparations from the African governments from whence most of our ancestors were captured, and then use that to get concessions (affirmative action, etc.) from the U.S. government. If African governments can do it, then there would be no excuse for the American government not to. And I am thinking of things like symbolic citizenship, opportunities to buy land, long-term tourist visas, etc., whatever!''

I wish that Gates had included that notion in his piece. Though the idea is completely unrealistic, mentioning it might have precluded his vociferous critics from misinterpreting his article as an attempt to get the United States off the hook for its debt to the slaves and their descendents. That impression was deepened by a poorly chosen headline--''Ending the Slavery Blame-Game''--which suggested that there is some kind of debate over who is responsible for slavery.

There isn't. Nor, despite what Gates suggested, is there any serious debate about who ought to pay reparations for it. Anyone who has spent any time at all studying the roots of this historic crime knows that various African groups rounded up and sold millions of our forebears to European and American traders. And anyone--and this certainly includes Gates, who is a serious man and a careful scholar--who has given any thought to the moral aspects of the issue knows that the complicity of Africans in no way absolves Europeans and Americans for their role in this centuries-long offense against humanity--or vice versa. In criminal law, both the buyer and seller of stolen goods are violators and deserve punishment. Arguing about which is the more guilty is pointless.

For African Americans, the only worthwhile debate about reparations is whether we can force the United States, the country which enslaved our ancestors for centuries and then subjected them to eons of second-class citizenship, to pay up and how much we should get. The sum involved could be staggering--as much as $24 trillion, I wrote in a column I did for Time many years ago. The size of the settlement alone means that the United States is never going to pay it, no matter how strong a case we make. We're never going to see any cash. The most we're ever going to get is a belated apology like the 2008 congressional resolution expressing regret for ''fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow.''

Which brings me to the part of Gates' piece that puzzled me most--why would he want to stick Barack Obama with this hot potato? Gates writes that Obama, because he is the nation's first African-American president, is ''uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic,'' but, in reality, it's the other way around. I can't imagine him lecturing Africans about their inherited collective guilt for the slave trade. At home, Obama has shied away from hot racial issues. He has been especially wary since he caught hell for saying that it was ''stupid'' for the cops to arrest Gates in his own house.

The truth of the matter, as Gates and Obama know, is that championing this issue would be instant political suicide for Obama--or any liberal president, regardless of race. As Obama has made clear in the past, he agrees with the arguments for reparations, but he does not believe they are practical. He's dead right about that. The prospects for shaking them loose from the United States won't get any better even if some Africans finally 'fess up about their ancestors' sins. Gates' thesis is provocative, but as a strategy, it's going nowhere.

Jack White is a regular contributor to The Root.

Become a fan of The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.