Alex Haley’s Fraudulent Roots ( at the intersection of faith and culture)
"For instance, “Roots has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero, Kunta Kinte [supposedly, Haley’s ancestor] was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage.” Moreover, even “the village elders” likewise appeared perplexed by the sight of these “white men” who were “carrying their people away.” In glaring contrast to this depiction, Sowell correctly asserts, the location from which Kunta Kinte was taken—West Africa—had been “a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there—and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.” He adds: “Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly” (emphasis added).
According to Sowell, Roots did more harm than good in fueling “the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people.” In reality, “the tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that."”
Yep. But my take is that the purpose of Roots was to essentially justify black radicalism, it was not necessarily willfully so in every respect but it fit the narrative because the narrative determined what was believable about slavery, and that was it was something whites were responsible for because anything less could undermine the we vs they aspect of the narrative and thereby black power or black solidarity etc.
Thus I called it mediocre history rather than diabolical history as if in crafting the TV show they intended to create this narrative of race imputed suffering (and on the other hand race imputed guilt) where none had been.