I couldn’t agree more with your basic premise and conclusion, but where did you get your figures for Africans killed during the transatlantic slave trade? And who was counted and under what circumstances? Records I’ve seen put the total bought and shipped at 15 million, the passage deaths at 4 million over 350 years.
And you might want to think about this: the trans-Sahara slave trade has been going on for four times the years as the transatlantic, is probably still going on under the law’s radar and has cost to date, according to John Azumah Adembillah, up to twenty-five times the human cost of the transatlantic trade! Does this excuse us? No, not according to current standards, nor should it. But it does at least point out that our sins are not horrifically unique. Nor is our ‘forgetting’ them; the vast preponderance of the Arab/Muslim world doesn’t even acknowledge its crimes at all. What is unique to us is the degree to which our crimes are mixed with, to quote Lincoln, ‘the base alloy of hypocrisy’’. What is also unique to us is the extent to which we at least try to know, and at least think about atoning for (time will tell if we do and do it right) our civilizational crimes. That last makes us a civilization with an unusually strong tradition of self-criticism. I defy anyone to find a civilization with a stronger strain of that all-too-necessary target. Your writing is an estimable part of that worthy tradition, Marley. Keep it up!.