Cornell University professor Ed Baptist told TPM last week that the criticism lobbed (and subsequently retracted) at his new book on slavery by a reviewer at The Economist magazine — that the book portrayed all blacks as victims and all whites as villains — was nothing new. He had heard it for a long time in history circles.
Well, here is another bit of evidence of the pervasiveness of The Economist’s line of thinking. Slate’s Dave Weigel turned up Monday (thanks to historian Rick Perlstein) a 1977 quote from soon-to-be-President Ronald Reagan discussing the television miniseries “Roots.”
“Very frankly, I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive,” Reagan said, according to the Washington Post.
That sounds oddly familiar.