What I've Been Reading - # 1

On the History of Liberia

As you probably know, I love reading books. If you listen to my podcast, Conversations with Coleman, then you will already know many of the books that I’m reading at any given time. But I also read books that never appear on my podcast, or at least haven’t yet.

So I’m beginning this series to let you know what books I’ve been reading, and what I think of those books. I may post one book at a time, or I may post several. I may do long posts or I may do short ones. In any event, if you like this, let me know and I’ll keep doing it.

Here’s a guide to how I will rate books and what my ratings mean:

5/5: Drop what you’re doing and read this book.

4/5: Read this book if you’re at all interested in the subject.

3/5: Read this book only if you’re extremely interested in the subject.

2/5: Read this book if you enjoy weak arguments and/or bad writing.

1/5: Read this book if you’re a total masochist.

Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It by James Ciment

There’s a certain kind of person who believes that only Europeans have done evil things historically. Some of these people still hold it against white people today. I remember debating a Native American chief who sincerely believed that only white people had ever killed for racist reasons, for example. As the filmmaker Michael Moore once put it, “Give it up! We [white men] have been running the show for 10,000 years!”

This kind of ignorance irks me. Have these people ever heard of the largest contiguous land empire in history (and no it wasn’t Europeans)? Or of the millions of African slaves taken to the Middle East by Arab slavers? Or Aztec slavery? Or slavery in Korea? Or the slave-raiding Dahomey tribe, depicted all-to-rosily in The Woman King?

If I dropped you anywhere on Earth before about 1800, odds are one group of people was doing unspeakable things to the people right next door: regardless of their race. The only thing special about Western Europeans in the 15th century and onward was that their technology gave them a temporary edge on the rest of the world––just like China and the Middle East had a temporary edge on Europe in the centuries prior.

In part, people can be forgiven for this kind of ignorance. After all, many American teachers selectively teach the crimes of Europeans post-1492 in a vacuum. They teach that slaves were snatched from Africa and brought to America, instead of the truth, which is that they were already enslaved by other African tribes and purchased by Europeans. There is something deep in the heart of progressives today which says “whiteness is evil” and “POC-ness is good”. And their version of history reflects that bias.

Implied in this view of history––the woke theory of history, as I’ll call it––is the idea that if non-white people had dominated the world, things would have been better. And by “better,” I mean more equal and less oppressive.

Studying the history of Liberia will cure you of this assumption. And James Ciment’s book, Another America, is a great way to do this.

It’s a scandal that more Americans don’t know about the history of Liberia. It is, after all, an America-offshoot nation. Imagine if most Britons couldn’t point to Australia on a map––and didn’t even know that it was an offshoot of Britain. Somehow, that is the state of Americans’ knowledge about Liberia. (“Liberian Girl,” in addition to being one of the most underrated Michael Jackson songs, is the only pop culture reference to Liberia that I know of, and that’s four decades old by now.)

So, a brief summary: In the decades leading up to the Civil War, slavery was the issue of the day. Some Americans wanted to abolish it and integrate society; some wanted to abolish it but keep the races segregated; others wanted slavery to continue forever. A fourth “solution,” however, was favored by some white Americans: sending all blacks, slave and free, back to Africa––ridding America of the “Negro problem,” as they would have seen it, once and for all. These people formed and funded an organization called the American Colonization Society (ACS).

Some black Americans liked this idea too, but for different reasons: they would get to leave America, where they were discriminated against at every turn, and return to an ancestral homeland to create a society run by blacks, for blacks. These various interests linked arms to send nearly 5,000 black Americans––some freemen and others freed slaves––to settle in West Africa between 1820 and 1847, when they declared independence from the ACS.

That’s the part that is taught in history classes. What is not often taught is what happened after black Americans got to Liberia ––in other words, everything that would answer the question, “How would black Americans of the past have governed society differently if they had been in power instead of whites?” The answer, in the case of Liberia, is that they ruled more or less exactly like European colonizers did.

As Ciment details in the book, Americo-Liberians (as they came to be called) made war on the Native population, excluded them from citizenship and the right to vote, profited off of their forced labor, and ran Liberia as a one-party state for over a century. Americo-Liberians even had their own version of Columbus day––called “Matilda Newport Day”––where they celebrated their military defeat of the Natives. As Ciment puts it:

“Freed slaves, given the chance to govern themselves, had turned out to be no better than the white imperialists who had descended upon Africa around the same time. If there was any lesson to be taken from Liberian history, it was a general one about human nature: an oppressed people could readily become oppressors.”

A certain kind of person would argue that black Americans’ oppression of the Native Africans was something they must have learned from Europeans, rather than a path they chose based on their own impulses–– “imitating whiteness,” as a critical race theorist might put it. But this assumes that conquest and out-group subjugation began with Europeans, when in fact these scourges have been going on since the dawn of civilization.

You could use the same warped logic to argue that the Spanish conquistadors must have been imitating their former Muslim overlords, rather than doing what came naturally. Why is that argument never made? Because the woke theory of history doesn’t bother with consistency. It works backwards from its conclusion: that whiteness is the source of all evil.

Liberia is a test case for the woke theory of history. And I suspect that it is talked about so rarely precisely because the results of this test come back negative. Put simply, the history of Liberia suggests that subjugation of the “other” was not some special character flaw of the European mind, but was a tendency shared by all pre-modern peoples.

Our modern values of tolerance and universal human rights were not obvious to the peoples of the past: black, white, and everything in between. The fact that so many of us take these values for granted today represents real moral progress. Instead of selectively condemning certain races of people for past misbehavior, we should study world history even-handedly and count ourselves lucky to have been born in a more enlightened age.

My rating: 4/5