[philled]

if Obama's African relatives had anything to do with slavery, it was on the business end.

That's right. However, this point will be lost on those same people who dumped their "slave names" to adopt black power names like "Muhammad", "Kareem", "Malik" et al, never bothering to look too closely at the bill of goods they were being sold.

Nobody seems much interested in the Muslim merchant role in the slave trade. We've been told to believe it was entirely a white Christian enterprise where they'd cross the entire continent of Africa to capture the Zulu all on their own...

[Philo-Junius]

The Arabs invented race-based slavery, importing East Africans to the Iraqi marshes as the best way to keep their field hands from being able to run off and melt into the populace at large.

From there, African slaving in the West passed into the hands of the Barbary Pirates and Sally Rovers—both of whom were more-or-less colourblind—and from there to the Spaniards who started importing non-Christian North African slaves—predominantly, but not exclusively sub-Sarahan Africans to work their plantations in the West Indies after the Arawaks died out due to Eurasian diseases.

After the War of Spanish Succession, the English received the right to the Spanish slave trade with America as their reward for opposing the Bourbons. The English only dabbled in the trade of African slaves in significant volume from 1715—although they did import some from Spanish colonies before that—to 1807, when they outlawed the traffic while permitting the practice of slavery to endure in their colonies for another 20 years or so.

The history after that is pretty well known, but it was another brilliant Muslim contribution to world civilisation in conception.

[dennisw]

Plus no real African American comes from West Africa (Kenya)