Africa and Europe were jointly involved in the trade. Yet it is also true that Europe dominated the connection, vastly enlarged the slave trade, and continually turned it to European advantage and to African loss.

Pretty much exactly what I’ve been arguing?

Uhhhh

I feel like I’m just constantly doing an umm actually here because nuance seems lost on you.

Slavery was only possible because of European agitators? It existed all throughout Africa for thousands if years. In all fairness, it was nowhere near as bad as chattel slavery, and you could probably make an argument that a lot of if the africans selling the slaves didn’t realize what chattel slavery entailed, but it seems like the revisionism is not happening on my side. I’m not trying to excuse European atrocities here, just call out reductionist rhetoric.

The only part of your original statement that is accurate according to your article was that they were armed by the Europeans. People actually by the European-trained raiders making up a small part of the total slave exports as stated in your provided article.

Europeans slavers being manipulative doesn’t excuse the actions of those who sold them slaves, all it means is that human beings are all capable of great evil. It kind if reminds me of blockbusting in the US during the 20th century. Just because the real estate agents were playing on the racist fears of the white homeowners doesn’t excuse white flight.

I do kind of take issue with the original commentor trying to handwave reparations because of this fact, but we don’t need to try and whitewash (yeah I know) the actions of anyone involved.

“My source is I made it the fuck up” - you

I don’t understand why people just knee-jerk reply like this without actually researching what they’re denying. It’s a pretty well-known fact that most of the slaves in the Atlantic slave trade came from African warlords and slavers (or at least I thought it was). I don’t thin that’s a particularly strong argument against reparations though.

Educate yourself

Care to elaborate what you mean by that?

The problem is who gets to decide what the “good” and “bad” groups are. This is the rhetoric that leads to genocide

Very nice