It is strange to still read of such genuflections, after all these years, simply based on race. For if one race of people should be expected to make them, how could any race avoid them? Not just the peoples who traded but the peoples who sold. What answer can there be, even after all these centuries, to the challenge Voltaire utters in his Essai sur les moeurs, where he made the observation that while the white Europeans were guilty of buying slaves, far more reprehensible was the behavior of those Africans who were willing to sell their brothers, neighbors, and children (“On nous reproche ce
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