I read some powerful excerpts from Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals."

Specifically:  "No one thinks of war, famine, or decimating epidemics in such localized terms."

"It is those who are most critical of a "Eurocentric" view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race."

The author of Roots essentially admitted making up the historical background of his book:  "I tried to give my people a myth to live by."  That myth is of the uniquely evil European culture (or uniquely evil white people, perhaps), when history shows the truth is nearer to the opposite.

To wit, it was happenstance that the British both had the world's mightiest navy in the 19'th century and developed, along with other European countries and the United States, a deep antipathy to a universal human institution which had been going along, unquestioned, for millennia. 

Where is the gratitude for those brave British sailors who died trying to free Africans from Ottoman slave ships?