The decision to make the slave masters not as physically brutal as they could have been was so smart. It forces the reader to confront the fact that slavery wasn’t evil because of the rampant physical and sexual abuse, those were corollaries of the true issue: the dehumanization and deprivation of autonomy. We even see Kevin coming to this realization (Kevin I have words for you, wtf).

I wish I could say this is an obvious fact, but we need this book now more than ever given the current attempts to erase history and the backlash to critical race theory (whose detractors have no idea what they’re actually fighting).