The Economist retracts its racist slavery book review

The unbylined review complained that Cornell professor Edward Baptist failed to write “an objective history of slavery” in his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. “Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains,” wrote the critic about a system that brought more than 12.5 million black slaves to the Americas to produce profits for white slaveholders.

Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates was among the first to draw attention to the review on Twitter, where, fittingly, his avatar appears as Ulysses S. Grant:

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