I’d like to throw a little cool water on this. Morgan has some good points. CC, you are conflating events that are centuries apart, which is the whole point of my original “how to view the morality of people in history” post. You are doing the exact thing that I pointed out, judging people who are attempting to view history objectively, to figure out why people did the horrible things they did, and seemed to go about their daily business as if it was normal. We will be judged, for driving our cars and heating our houses while the world burned.
I didn’t read the whole NYT Mag article, but I’ve studied the history of slavery beginning with college courses. Search that article for Bacon’s Rebellion. That’s the point where white and black indentured servants aligned themselves against the government. To quell the rebellion, that government gave freedoms and protections to the whites and tightened the laws to enslave blacks for life, and it got worse for 200 years. We are feeling the repercussions of that still. It’s a complicated bit of history, and this article barely touches on it.