In an era when human beings were the most valuable commodities available to thieves and slave traders, greed occasionally trumped the crucial myth that there was a strict dividing line between the races. One had to become physically or socially accepted as black to be legally sold into chattel slavery and enter into the full degradation of American bondage. When I finished my research, I wanted to know why this odd history had been forgotten. But apart from Rogers' obscure book, and one right-wing tract, discussed below, that was it. Some historians I approached were initially shocked.
People have to come to a better understanding of how the slave trade corrupted everybody.
Writer and academic Shelby Steele took the news more calmly. It makes the point that slavery as a compulsion of man is bigger even than race. But now it's probably blacks who want to suppress it. Those who are grounded in the idea of black victimization may feel that this weakens their argument. When, months before, I had told Jon, a white college friend, what I was working on, he laughed nervously.