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:
Dude reviews book about slavery. Complains “almost all the blacks…are victims, almost all the whites villains.” http://t.co/eftRit9nSr
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) September 4, 2014
Read a book about the Holocaust. Must be unfair because it painted all the Nazis in a bad light.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) September 4, 2014
You spend years writing a history, and a magazine responds by basically saying, “Yes but your history hurts my feelings.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) September 4, 2014