Commentary
One of my most vivid memories from my student days at Dartmouth in the 1980s was when the Afro-American Society organized a film presentation of the horrors of slavery. I viewed the film, which was gruesome in its depiction of whipping, maiming, and even murder of slaves. In reality, such murders were extremely rare, for obvious reasons: Slaves were counted as property, and relatively expensive property at that. So why would a master want to destroy his own property?
Despite the obviously exaggerated portrayal, I watched the film with empathetic interest, because I knew slavery was a worldwide phenomenon that had been widely practiced in all known civilizations. But I also noticed that the black students in attendance were mesmerized, almost in a reverie, and the more intense the brutality, the more they got into it. It’s almost as if they wanted American slavery to be even more horrific than it was. Their attitude, if I could sum it up, was: More! More! More!
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