Let’s talk about history for a second.
Freak shows or side show attraction.
Today they are universally condemned as cruel and barbaric.
But before the days of Social Security Disability, large charities, and modern hospitals and hospices, what did you do with people who had severe birth defects and were unable to work?
Many suffered in poverty. Some became dependent on the charity of local churches, some begged in the streets.
Others joined the circus and became rich and famous, with the circus paying for the best doctors to care for them.
If you went back in time and eliminated the side show without creating all sorts of other social safety nets, all you did was condemn these people to suffering in destitution.
There are clearly many things in history that were pure atrocities with no redeeming characteristics.
Other things are a mix of good and bad.
This is an almost impossible circle to square by the aggressive application of modern absolutist morality to past time.
Understanding that history “is complicated” isn’t a euphemism. It’s fact. How to address it will require wisdom and nuance, not the blunt tool of bumper sticker rhetoric.
We see the same sort of side shows today and the left defends them whole heartedly.
If some women is cursed with a beautiful body and face and she is poor, she can put herself on display in many different venues (sometimes called strip clubs) and earn lots of money by taking it from the rubes that gawk at her.
The left defends these women as “strong and brave” as “sex workers.”
The side show has always existed. The freak show has always existed. What we consider freaky and what we are willing to pay to “see with our own eyes” changes over time. It still exists.
It is complicated or it is complex or you have to evaluate in context applies.
Some white dude screaming “Get the F$## back!” at some black dude is a racist asshole. The same dude screaming the same thing while holding a gun and retreating from the mob is an entirely different thing.
As a different example of “context”, my lady was watching the video of the violent asshole in Flint beating the shite out of a white dude. The headline screams that the white dude used the “N” word and that is the justification for the beat down.
But in watching the video, they bleeped it out so often that you came away from hearing/watching it with the feeling that the white dude on the floor was using the N word, not his attacker.
Context matters and the media of the time gets to frame that context.
It’s complicated. Agree totally.
Yes, slavery is an atrocity. Yet, in the early days of the US, many slaves were extremely well taken care of. Most were well fed, a lot were considered members of the household. There were certainly abuses, murders, rapes, etc… but those appear to be a relative rarity, not the norm. (which makes sense, as most people would not knowingly and deliberately abuse the very tools they require to earn a living.) (Sorry to be so base with that analogy, but let’s be honest here. Slaves cost a lot of money to purchase and maintain. Why abuse them and reduce their usefulness?)
A lot of former slaves had it worse when they were freed. But to say so makes me a racist/white supremacist/whatever. Acknowledging that history shows not all freed slaves were better off is somehow verboten.
So, yes. it is complicated.
One of the things people miss is that much of the “history” of the time was actually fictional. So “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a play/story written to tug at the heart strings of Northern People to help end slavery. Was it an accurate portrait of slavery? No.
On the other side of it, there were horrible cruelties above and beyond the simple enslavement of another human. That is part of history also.
Context matters and understanding the driving force behind the histories we read is a part of that context.