Welcome to Karen Hunter's awesome. I got to talk with the great Howard W. French. She's got a new book called The Second Emancipation. And in it, he kind of lays out not just Kwame and Krumah and the liberation of

Africa, but also how people have been commodified, how there's always kind of been this exchange.

And the value, what do we value? Do we value gold or do we value people? Well, Howard French and I

talk about it. Take a listen. My dad had visited Ghana, and he went to to one of the villages and he talked about a king sitting on a block of gold.

But the village was poor and people were hungry.

But he was sitting on a block of gold and he asked him like, why don't you sell this?

And the response was, this is only worth what somebody is willing to pay me.

And if they want us to starve, they won't pay for it, right?

So I often think when you talk about Guinea and Ghana coming together,

Kwame and Krum was spending millions.

Who was trade?

Like, we have to, this is something people need to understand.

Supply and demand, yes.

But if people decide,

and this goes both ways, as Target is finding out, if people decide they're not spending the money,

what you value, what they have valued in the past, whether diamonds, which are not very rare or very special, they marketed those so that people buy them.

If we decide we're not buying them because they're not very rare or special, that industry

changes immensely. Where do the millions of dollars come from? If the conspiracy is we don't

want Africa to rise, who are they trading with to get money?

So gold and diamonds, what do we call them? We call them valuables, right? Yes. You like words, right?

This is really important. What this means is that we are injecting, we are attributing value to these things.

There's no objective basis to that value.

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