The reparations-for-slavery crowd had to be chagrined big time recently with high-profile commentaries by African-American author-intellectuals Henry Louis Gates and Thomas Sowell. Both underscored the point, often obscured by political correctness and white guilt, that the odious institution’s villains far transcend the West.
“Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in Roots,” said Gates. “The truth, however, is much more complex: Slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.”
Pointed out Sowell: “If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.”