Usually I think of something as moral or ethical because it's close to home. Grand moral themes, especially about things like "the global community"...these I am tone-deaf to, by and large.
But in light of my friend's response the other day to my attempt to associate him with Thomas Jefferson (He only saw him as a slave-owner)...this thought.
Europeans who brought vast numbers of slaves from Africa to the Western Hemisphere over a couple of centuries...where did they get them? How did those millions of people get to the western coast? Did Europeans constantl invade the interior of West Africa and do it? Nope. All the evidence shows that the Europeans usually remained quite close to the coast and mostly bought Africans from other Africans. They were the ones who had captured them for sale.
Now if there is some kind of "debt" owed to the descendants of slaves by "America" ...what about the debt, in guilt and shame at least, of all the Africans descended from the Africans who sold their own people to aliens? Century after century after century. That strikes me as a particularly ugly truth.
I wonder, too, how many of those who found themselves on slave ships were once themselves in the business of raiding other tribes for that purpose and got caught up by back luck or a shift in local balances of power.
I mentioned this a friend --himself a man not allured by moral issues--- and he reminded me that the Africans who did this were usually selling people outside their own tribe or clan and that they did not consider them "their own people." A reminder that racial solidarity usually only arises in the presence of another race. But here, no sense of Black solidarity stopped these many people --for centuries--from feeding the European desire for slave labor.
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