Richard Cohen discovers (gasp) that slavery wasn't so great for the slaves

[phantom power]

Apparently he missed Roots. And, incidentally, the last fucking 150 years of American history.

Like Digby sez: This guy is considered a Liberal Pundit.

I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life...slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children. Happiness could not be pursued after that.

Steve McQueen’s 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]

1. Cohen has been gone from the real world for a long time. I'm not surprised.

What I can't figure out is how he gets away with this sh*t for all these years!

[grasswire]

2. the comments section is delicious reading....nt

[raging moderate]

3. I think he is talking about the immense body of propaganda that surrounded us.

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.