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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRichard Cohen discovers (gasp) that slavery wasn't so great for the slaves
Apparently he missed Roots. And, incidentally, the last fucking 150 years of American history.
Like Digby sez: This guy is considered a Liberal Pundit.
Steve McQueens stunning movie 12 Years a Slave is one of those unlearning experiences. I had to wonder why I could not recall another time when I was so shockingly confronted by the sheer barbarity of American slavery.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-12-years-a-slave-and-arts-commentary-on-the-past/2013/11/04/f0e57a92-4588-11e3-b6f8-3782ff6cb769_story.html
CTyankee
(63,926 posts)What I can't figure out is how he gets away with this sh*t for all these years!
grasswire
(50,130 posts)raging moderate
(4,317 posts)I am almost 66 years old. Many books and movies such as "Gone with the Wind" spread a mostly false view of the antebellum South as a place of "peace and plenty for everyone" with benevolent slave plantation owners supposedly acting as noble aristocrats gently lifting lesser beings (black slaves and white paupers)out of savagery, guiding, teaching, and caring for them. And then there were a whole bunch of movies made in the twenties, "Birth of a Nation" and movies about white explorers in nonwhite countries, etc. These movies all feature vignettes in which Black people say and do stupid things that would be cute in preschool children. Maybe Richard Cohen has to squelch the same internal tapes I have running in my head from these movies. I was only a kid when I saw them, and had no black people living nearby. Fortunately, my own father, a mentally ill alcoholic, was so dysfunctional during these years that the Amos and Andy series backfired bigtime in my case, with fathers who went to work, came home sober, and sat politely at the supper table, and did not throw three-hour tantrums, screaming foul words, throwing things, and punching wives and children. And perhaps Richard Cohen's family had passed down a general acceptance of the racist cant. (my family, mostly descended from abolitionist sympathizers, already viewed these books and movies with skepticism). Still, all of us who grew up in this sea of lies continually find remnants of it clinging to us. These nasty little phrases are a little like leeches after you've been swimming in a mud-bottom lake. They're hard to pull off, and they leave a mark.