The Economist slams the new book on slavery by Edward Baptist and then apologizes for it — and takes it down
Related Link: History, Hashtags, and the Truth About Slavery (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
When Mr./Ms. Anonymous of the Economist reviewed my book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism on Sept. 4, they didn’t much care for it, and that didn’t surprise me. In the last couple of decades, the Economist and its suspender-wearing core readers have usually been reliable allies of market fundamentalism—the idea that everything would be better if measured first and last by its efficiency at producing profit. I, on the other hand, argue in the book that U.S. cotton slavery created—and still taints—the modern capitalist economy which the Economist sometimes seems to prescribe as the cure for all ills. I’d like to think we all agree that slavery was evil. If slavery was profitable—and it was—then it creates an unforgiving paradox for the moral authority of markets—and market fundamentalists. What else, today, might be immoral and yet profitable?
The review was harsh—even embarrassing—but not, as it turned out, for me. The reviewer proclaimed that slaveowners probably didn’t mistreat their slaves so much, since enslaved people were actually valuable capital. Then the reviewer illustrated that point with a (flippantly captioned) image of actress Lupita Nyong’o, although the brutal treatment of Patsey, her Oscar-winning role in Twelve years a Slave, actually completely disproves their point.
Almost as soon as the Economist posted the review online, it came in for massive criticism. On Twitter, people ridiculed its claim that by depicting enslaved people as “victims” and their exploitative rapist/torturer enslavers as “villains,” I was somehow abandoning “objectivity” for “advocacy.” Parodies began to collect under the hashtag #economistbookreviews, mockingly suggesting future review titles like “Samantha Power’s Dissection of Kurdish Genocide Would Benefit More from Saddam’s Point of View,” as Paul K. Adler put it. Even the Economist had to concede that the review was a disaster—after less than 24 hours, they took it down, saying: “We regret having published this, and apologize for having done so.”