On Friday, after outrage spread, The Economist published an apology and withdrew the review, while archiving its full text “in the interest of in the interests of transparency.”
“There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so,” an unnamed editor writes. “Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so.”
As Coates noted on Twitter, the apology itself is an extraordinary step: “I know I am old, because I am shocked they apologized. I read much much worse isht all through the 90s. No on ever apologized.”
Meanwhile, the unfortunate incident generated a mocking Twitter hashtag: #EconomistBookReviews, proposing similarly tone-deaf responses to historical atrocities: