The Economist defends America’s enslavement of Africans
…except that’s not really what happened. They printed this review, then they retracted it, then they renounced it.
To paint this as some sort of secret neoliberal dog-whistle is to ignore the much, much, MUCH more plausible explanation: that they outsourced this review to one of a hundred un-vetted freelancers, got the bottom-dollar product they probably deserved, and then spent no more time editing it than was required to hit the spell-check button.
Shitty journalism? Absolutely. And it’ll happen again. And they (and the great majority of for-profit journalistic entities out there, new and old media alike) ought to be given no end of grief for it. (The freelancer who crapped this out is another story, but is probably beyond shame anyway.) But to conflate what the Economist did in their crapulent negligence with defending slavery is just a silly overreach.
In approving and printing this review, “defending America’s enslavement of Africans” is exactly what The Economist did, even if they later realized that doing so was a bad idea.
No there should not be one journal that is objective. Objectivity cannot exist, and if it could exist it would be utterly immoral (not amoral, but immoral). “Objectivity” is at best shorthand for “we all agree here, right?” and is at worst a sell job with a true cost in blood.
As a scientist I would much prefer people simply honestly state their assumptions and values up front, and then get on with their message. Doing so makes both the effort of understanding and the exercise of critiquing an author so much more fruitful.
Did they not read and edit the review before they published it? The reviewer called it “advocacy” at the end… what the hell does he even mean there? How else is that supposed to be read, except that he’s complaining that the author of the book is condemning slavery? The reviewer used the review to argue that “slavery wasn’t that bad” and he ignored the premise, that slavery was an engine for capitalism in the US - if he had address the books’ argument, people might have disagreed, but I doubt they’d call it a slavery apologia… Even if that’s not how he meant it, that’s how it came out and the editor should have been able to see that when reviewing the piece for publication. The fact that they didn’t is sort of telling.
If someone uploads a Klan rally to YouTube, and then YouTube takes it down two minutes after it’s first flagged, I guess we’d all agree that YouTube didn’t really do anything bad.
If YouTube changes its front page to celebrate Klan Heritage Week, spotlighting Klan-produced videos, I guess we’d all agree that YouTube was pretty fucking racist.
In between, there’s negligence, which is a totally different kind of malignancy. This is pretty awful; people ought to be fired. But because they were shitty gatekeepers, not because the gatekeepers thought this was a valid sentiment in the cold light of day.
I get that there are excellent reasons to hate what the Economist actually does stand for editorially. But to say they’re defending (American, chattel) slavery when that’s obviously not the case is like calling someone a fascist or a Nazi. It might feel good to spit those words in someone’s face, but if they’re not actually fascists or Nazis, it kind of undermines the point you were actually trying to make.
Doctorow wants to know why they did something so “fucking dunderheaded.” Allow me to suggest that it’s because they’re fucking dunderheads. And if retracting and renouncing a story means you believed it all along, every word, then what are we to make of the various times that BB has disappeared stories of its own (or its guest bloggers’) when readers have complained about the factual or editorial content? It’s happened, you know.
I had to read the post several times to make sure I was reading right. Jesus. The weird thing is that I’d swear- swear that a couple of months ago I was reading an article on the Economist that just eviscerated that kind of thinking - I think it was on the subject of reparations, and the absolute immense harm done by slavery and racism to Africans and African-Americans.
Neoliberal european insanity. Imagine the reviewer’s anxiety level as he tried to reconcile his beliefs with the facts. It is extremely hard for people to face their own culpability in perpetuating and benefitting from Evil, however sowed. His soul must weigh heavy in his chest. (If it isn’t a HE, then doubly so)
YouTube is completely different from an edited magazine. The Economist has an editor who is supposed to vet what goes into the magazine. Where is your proof that the editor did not know what was in the article?
The Economist as a whole has to own every word within its pages and eventually it did, to its credit. And it was an article in the main magazine, not any kind of monetized reject pile blog section. On an individual level you can debate who among those who didn’t write it but could have stopped it shares how much of the blame, but that’s a different question.
This isn’t something that just “slipped by” the editorial board at The Economist. It’s an article that the magazine commissioned, reviewed, approved and published. Comparing that to an open platform filled with user-generated content like YouTube is absurd.
Even now they’ve only really apologized for the last line on “victims” and “villains,” ignoring other offensive parts of the review like how we should take all ex-slaves’ firsthand accounts of their experiences with a grain of salt, but it’s apparently OK to take the accounts of slave owners at face value.
If the Economist wants to use the “We’re too stupid to check what we publish as a paid article in our magazine” defense, that are more than welcome too.
The truly horrifying person is not without empathy: rather he demands that the subtlest and most generous flavors of it ever attributed to strawman bleeding-heart-liberals be extended, as an exclusive birthright, to the most monstrous actors a given time or place can provide. Whoever wrote this one is obviously pretty good at it.
Yeah yeah, racial blah blah, human rights, whatever, let’s get down to brass tacks here- How much money are we actually talking? I mean, let’s really put this in perspective. Can we get a dollar amount?
According to this article, we can. And it isn’t small, especially in the south which had minimal non-slave capital and a comparatively primitive economy propped up by cash crop exports.
I’ve read that the economy built in the South on slave labor wasn’t as lucrative as everyone thinks, because it supported a ridiculous amount of waste: of human life and dignity, first and foremost, but also of land use. Mono-crops of cotton or tobacco depleted the soil quickly; fresh land had to be used while the majority lay fallow. This meant that what we think of as a small family-owned farm – say the size of what was common in New England at the time – wasn’t big enough to support a family in the South. If they had been smarter about what they planted, they could have grown more of their own food and had a more general prosperity. Instead, they were lazy and relied on slaves to grow non-essential crops for export. It was a wasteful system, as well as inhumane.
