A VIEW TO TWO PILLS

"every single person needs to go to Africa to experience [the African experience]"-- Boris Kodjoe, THE VIEW 12-19-19.

"....four hundred years, to assess something [slavery in America] so foundational-- it [an upcoming TIMES essay on that topic] had to be something really big."--Kodjoe's collaborator Nikole Hannah-Jones, same program and date.

Not long after Kodjoe extols the wonders of Africa and urges others to visit-- though it's hard to tell if he's talking about all persons regardless of race-- co-host Sunny Hostin mentions the famous slave markets in Ghana, which are still maintained today as tourist attractions. There is no discussion of who built the markets or who brought the slaves to the market; only the suffering of the slaves and Kodjoe's determination that slavery does not define the status of Africans.

Well, if the Portuguese-- the builders of the markets-- were also responsible for capturing and selling all of the slaves in those markets, then Kodjoe might be have something. However, it's common knowledge that the people of Ghana, as well as traders from other tribes, fully participated in taking and selling slaves in those markets. This online essay, in fact, makes the salient point that Europeans by themselves could never have harvested so many slaves, because whites were extremely vulnerable to African diseases like malaria.

Of course Kodjoe is not interested in Black African complicity in the slave trade, though one might ask what's so glorious about Ghana if so much of its history is defined by participation in the African slave trade. But at least he, unlike journalist Hannah-Jones, doesn't go so far as to claim that the character of the United States of America is defined by its participation in-- guess what-- slavery. Indeed, Hannah-Jones goes so far as to claim that slavery is part of America's very foundations, and that its heritage influences all sorts of modern ills, like the lack of universal health care.

But of course, if we're going to say that a country is defined by everything that happened in its beginnings, then why isn't slavery "foundational" in Ghana as well? Surely no one would assert that Ghana, or any other African realm, had no acquaintance with the African version of slavery. The standard progressive response has been to say that European slavery was a thing apart from old-fashioned tribal slavery in sub-Saharan Africa. So maybe that's how Kodjoe and Hannah-Jones would absolve Ghana of its complicity in the slave trade. They weren't doing the worst version of slavery from the very first; those evil white devils TEMPTED them into that complicity with filthy lucre. So Ghana started out with a lesser evil, and later embraced a greater evil-- and so their evil isn't as "foundational" as that of the United States.

Ah yes. Pull the other finger, progressives.