I am sorry for slavery. Part of the privilege of being white is that I don't often need to

[B2G]

25. Thank you Juror #4. You get it.

I abhor slavery.

But now it's racist to acknowledge history? African-Americans didn't just suddenly become slaves when they showed up on our shores.

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African participation in the slave trade

Africans played a direct role in the slave trade, selling their captives or prisoners of war to European buyers.[21] The prisoners and captives who were sold were usually from neighbouring or enemy ethnic groups.[9] These captive slaves were considered "other", not part of the people of the ethnic group or "tribe" ; African kings held no particular loyalty to them. Sometimes criminals would be sold so that they could no longer commit crimes in that area. Most other slaves were obtained from kidnappings, or through raids that occurred at gunpoint through joint ventures with the Europeans.[21] But some African kings refused to sell any of their captives or criminals. King Jaja of Opobo, a former slave, refused to do business with the slavers completely. However, Shahadah notes that with the rise of a large commercial slave trade driven by European needs, enslaving enemies became less a consequence of war, and more and more a reason to go to war.[9]

European participation in the slave trade

Although Europeans were the market for slaves, Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of disease and fierce African resistance.[50] The enslaved people would be brought to coastal outposts where they would be traded for goods. Enslavement became a major by-product of internal wars in Africa as nation states expanded through military conflicts, in many cases through deliberate sponsorship of benefiting Western European nations.[citation needed] During such periods of rapid state formation or expansion (Asante and Dahomey being good examples), slavery formed an important element of political life which the Europeans exploited: as Queen Sara's plea to the Portuguese courts revealed, the system became "sell to the Europeans or be sold to the Europeans".[citation needed] In Africa, convicted criminals could be punished by enslavement, a punishment which became more prevalent as slavery became more lucrative. Since most of these nations did not have a prison system, convicts were often sold or used in the scattered local domestic slave market.[51]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#African_participation_in_the_slave_trade