1500s–2000s CE: (The Persistence of the Lie: The Horrific Rationalizations of Slavers and Enslavers Living on as Unexamined Assumptions in the Minds of Far T…

1500s–2000s CE: (The Persistence of the Lie: The Horrific Rationalizations of Slavers and Enslavers Living on as Unexamined Assumptions in the Minds of Far Too Many, the Failure to Fully Integrate Africa into World History as No Oversight and a Structural Condition, and the Urgent Necessity of Eradicating These Modes of Thinking): The horrific rationalizations of slavers, enslavers, 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 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 information exists. 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. They are not innocent ignorance. They are active instruments of a global order that continues to benefit from African subordination. These are modes of thinking that must be confronted and, soon, eradicated from all our cultural understandings.