![]() ![]() ![]() And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them. A groundbreaking history demonstrating that Americas economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire-this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. ![]() From those who survived, it stole everything. It faulted Baptist’s study, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014), for exaggerating the brutality of bondage based on. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. The inciting review appeared in The Economist magazine. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. “Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. ![]()
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