Nonfiction: Inheriting the Trade, by Thomas Norman DeWolf

Amateur narcissism

Learning about your family’s slave trading empire must be hard to stomach, and the members of the family who undertook to study the facts deserve credit for facing up to it. Too bad they didn’t hire a qualified historian to write their story. Inheriting the Trade reminds me of those self-indulgent, melodramatic “encounter groups” that were so popular in the 1970’s. Let’s beat up on each other for things we never did, just for being who we are. And along the way, let’s read endless descriptions about the participants’ clothing, jobs, hair color, and denial. And let’s ignore the fact that people of all races have been enslaved at one time or another, by one culture or another.
Slavery is deplorable, but an avalanche of angst is useless and a waste of energy that could better be expended on finding solutions to the problems that separate the races in 2008. What did the deWolfs gain from the evils perpetrated by their ancestors? Well, among their apparently endless “privileges” is the right to write a book and make a TV program.