1500s–2000s CE: (The Persistence of the Lie — The Horrific Rationalizations of Slavers and Slave Owners Living on as Unexamined Assumptions in the Minds of F…

1500s–2000s CE: (The Persistence of the Lie — The Horrific Rationalizations of Slavers and Slave Owners Living on as Unexamined Assumptions in the Minds of Far Too Many, the Failure to Fully Integrate Africa into World History as a Structural Condition Rather Than an Oversight, and the Urgent Necessity of Eradicating These Modes of Thinking): The horrific rationalizations of slavers, slave owners, and all who profited from the traffic in human beings — their appalling, self-justifying myths about Africa as a continent of backward, uncivilized, and inherently inferior peoples — live on today, unexamined in the minds of far too many people around the world. Ehret does not treat this persistence as an unfortunate cultural lag, a residual prejudice slowly dissolving under the light of modern knowledge. He identifies it as a structural condition — a failure not of evidence but of engagement, a willful refusal by too many historians to reckon with the full sweep of African historical sources that have long been available. The problem is not that the information does not exist but that the intellectual traditions of the West have been constructed in such a way as to make African history invisible even when it is staring directly at the historian. Until we begin to fully integrate Africa into the history we teach everyone, these baseless assumptions will persist — not as innocent ignorance but as active instruments of a global order that continues to benefit from African subordination. These are modes of thinking that must be confronted and, sooner rather than later, eradicated from all our cultural understandings.