I understand that. Believe me, as someone who teaches US history to university students, and who also takes more than a passing interest in popular representations of history in movies and other areas of cultural life, i am grimly aware of the fact that many Americans walk around with a rather simplistic version of history as part of their worldview.
On the one hand, this is not the end of the world. Despite the fact that i love history, and think it has important things to teach us, i’m not self-centered enough to believe that everyone should share my level of interest. Also, despite the fact that we historians often argue that historical understanding makes for better citizens, i’m also willing to concede that most Americans can get probably through life just fine with the unsophisticated understanding of history that they get from high school and TV shows.
On the other hand, though, i think that a more complex and sophisticated understanding of history is a good thing, because it not only makes us better informed about how we got where we are, but develops the critical thinking and analytical skills that help us become more productive and thoughtful people.
My main concern with this thread is not just with the question itself. It comes from my own historical experience with this question. And in my experience, while this question is often couched in ways that suggest that the main aim of the exercise is to arrive at a more sophisticated and accurate historical understanding, the actual aim behind the question is very simple: it is usually an effort to de-emphasize, and deflect from, the historical role of Europeans and European Americans in the Atlantic slave trade. That’s it.
The OP of this thread is a perfect example. He starts a thread complaining about one particular (alleged) imbalance or inaccuracy in the historical scholarship, but in making his points, he demonstrates a set of historical understandings that are just as imbalanced and inaccurate as the thing he supposedly concerned about. The simplistic and misinformed nature of his posts about the African kingdoms suggests that it’s not so much historical inaccuracy as a whole that is important to him, as it is to correct this one aspect of historical understanding that paints white Americans in a less-than-flattering light. It’s an exercise in self-serving selectivity.
The OP blames popular historical representations of slavery for misinforming us about the role of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. He might be right. Popular historical representations like TV and novels and movies often over-simplify history, sometimes because the producers lack the right sort of historical understanding, and sometimes because (as entertainers) they understandably focus on the need to create a compelling and exciting narrative.
I understand that a TV show or a movie is not the same as a historical monograph, and i’m willing to give popularizers some leeway in their portrayal of history. So are many other historians. One of the best-known scholars of the way that history is represented on film is Robert Brent Toplin, and all of his essays and books demonstrate an understanding that we can’t always hold popular media up to the same standards of historical rigor as we do scholars and historians.
But if the OP really is concerned about historical accuracy, and about popular portrayals of history getting it right, then why is he so selective in his concerns? Here is a thread he started about a year ago, on the TV show Texas Rising. In this thread, he demonstrates a complete willingness to swallow whatever feel-good version of the Texas revolution that Hollywood is willing to throw at him. When people point out that the simplistic, Americans=good guys and Mexicans=bad guys representation in the show is historically inaccurate, he basically poo-poos their concerns, saying:
“They paint a large picture reasonably accurately.” It seems to me that, if you replace “Texas Rising” with “Roots” in the above paragraph, it would work just as well.
Why is the OP willing to give such a pass to a TV show that portrays Anglo-Americans as the heroic good guys, the Mexicans as a bunch of evil cowards, and the Indians as blood-thirsty savages? And why doesn’t he give the same historical leeway in the case under discussion in this thread? It’s because the main purpose of the question in this thread is not really about “historical accuracy,” per se; it’s about the reallocation and deflection of responsibility.
Personally, as a historian, i’m less interested in assigning “blame” or “responsibility” in history than i am in understanding what happened, in all its complexity. For that reason, i do think it’s important that we understand the role of West African kingdoms and empires in the Atlantic slave trade. But if your main agenda, in focusing on these things, seems to be to minimize or downplay the responsibility of American slaveholders, i will probably find it hard to take your argument very seriously.
Leaving aside the history for a minute, and focusing on moral culpability, here is how i would allocate the blame if i were forced to make a ruling on the subject: everyone responsible for the slave trade is 100 percent responsible.
The catchers; the traders; the agents; the buyers; the final owners. The culpability of any one person or group is in no way mitigated or diminished by the involvement of other persons or groups. And if that means that responsibility adds to more than 100 percent, it’s a mathematical conundrum that i’m willing to live with.