Listen: I, too, am one of those dumbasses who got it into his head that Eli Whitney was black (although, my hand to God, I swear I saw this on a sign in the African-American History Museum in Detroit when I was a grade schooler–although that itself seems problematic, as it’s highly likely that the time period I’m remembering was when the museum was closed for construction )–and had also dwelled on the irony that the cotton gin (which I believed he invented to ease the labors of enslaved persons) single-handedly invigorated the slave trade by making it massively more profitable. I’m chagrined to admit that I may have even taught this “fact” at some point.
But that’s all trivia; read all the way through this article and meditate on the Mandela Effect, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds—because apparently there was never any Sinbad movie titled Shazaam!
What
the
FUCK‽