Yet, except in areas like that, bordering the Sahara, where blacks were traditionally enslaved by lighter-skinned desert peoples, slavery and the slave trade left no socialstratification, and they figure little in popular consciousness today.
All too often pundits and policymakers seek a single cause for socialstratification when they should accept that in a nation where inequality in real monetary terms is increasing - and has been doing so for quite some time despite the so-called boom years - the reasons for being at the bottom of the heap are manifold.