Washington Post columnist watches "12 Years a Slave", and is surprised to discover that slavery was brutal:
Quote:
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.
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Part of the story is in what a (probably deliberately) horrible job the school he describes did when describing slavery.
But the other part is that he's not fresh out of that horrible primary education. He's a Washington Post columnist with pure white hair. How could he have made it to his age, in the journalism field, and still have to unlearn THAT?
I guess there are plenty of people his age who hang on to that view, but still.