"Dog whistling" implies subtlety. Black Panther...was a good movie? And people liked it? I'm a little confused about your "in the media" comment--wouldn't the

"Dog whistling" implies subtlety. Black Panther...was a good movie? And people liked it? I'm a little confused about your "in the media" comment--wouldn't the box office receipts represent, you know, what the market actually liked? I'm not sure what any of this has to do with revisiting _actual_ history, which (as https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-lost-kingdoms/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-... points point) had been often significantly misrepresented. There's a painting of the Congolese ambassador to the Dutch Republic in the Danish National Gallery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Don_Miguel_de_Castro,_Emissary_of_Congo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Don_Miguel_de_Cast...). The history of this painting reflects the significant political power held by West African kingdoms--I for one (having had a standard American historical education) was struck by how little I knew about the complex cultural and political institutions in sub-Saharan Africa before and during the early slave trade. In a way, it's not surprising; as David Graeber wrote in "Debt", it was culturally convenient for Europeans--who at the time in many ways appeared quite culturally backwards!--to misrepresent the power and cultural dynamics and justify their own barbarism. In that light, while we certainly should hold research everywhere to the same evidentiary standards, we shouldn't be surprised to learn about more sophisticated cultural histories in Zimbabwe as well, or other places skipped over by the standard history. (Another odd aspect of my American education: I was given the distinct impression that civilization went from Greece to Rome to Enlightenment Europe to America. Strange how nobody questioned who preserved the thinking of all those Greek philosophers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.) But just because you don't know something--just because the history you were taught must be revised--doesn't make it revisionist history.