Other than the concepts and precepts of personal liberty as modernly understood have absolutely no connection to the african continent at all, and are purely a product of western civilization.
Seem like pandering to me.
“Other than the concepts and precepts of personal liberty as modernly understood have absolutely no connection to the african continent at all, and are purely a product of western civilization.”
You have a point and if it was merely about an academic discussion of political theory I would agree with you.
But the actual history of the United States isn’t simply about political theory, there are historical facts and one of those blindingly obvious facts is that for all the high-minded claims for liberty and freedom the founders of the nation (or at least a very sizable chunk of them) openly denied that freedom applied to fellow Americans based on their race.
You may claim that Africa and Africans added little of value to the concepts of liberty, and you might have a point, but the fact remains that Americans of African descent were very much part of the population of the United States and their enslavement amid a people claiming liberty for themselves is a historical fact.
The ancestors of most African Americans were living in the United States long before the ancestors of many Americans of western/European descent.
African Americans are very much part of the history of the United States going back before even the Declaration of Independence, they are part and parcel of the United States, they aren’t some kind of interlopers who arrived recently and decided to leech of a society they had no part in building, they were there (unwillingly) from the start and have been an integral part of the American story from the get go.