Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a
important]presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence.
But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire others to have the same confidence in him, then you have the ingredients for national disaster.
His statement in about how white men went to Africa to “drag away the conquered in chains” betrays his ignorance of African history.
The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men.
European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases could the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the Atlantic slave trade was over by then.
When Obama wrote that many people “had been enslaved only because of the color of their skin,” he was repeating a common piece of gross misinformation. For thousands of years, people enslaved other people of the same race as themselves, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Western Hemisphere.
Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave” is derived from the name of a European people, the Slavs, once widely held in bondage.
September 4, 2012 12:00 P.M.
The Confident Ignorance of Barack Obama
The president has long been assured of his own vision.
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com/author/200445 more from his archive of articles
Obama's confident ignorance
