I think we have a racism problem in this nation. It's a white problem. Too many whites think their skin color makes them superior to African Americans (and other people of color). It's scientific bullshit, but it seems to make some whites happy to believe this hateful (and Hitleristic) racist crap. (Yes, really. Hitler believed such things also -- white racial superiority (Aryans) was what he and the Nazis were about.)
So these whites cannot face the truth of our history. Let's start with what should be a non-controversial proposition: slavery was an evil system. You know, Abraham Lincoln and all that, the Civil War. Slavery was bad. Ending slavery was good. I learned this as a kid in grade school in the early 1960s. Of course, these were non-Southern Schools (Chicago and St. Louis).
My point? An attack on the move "12 Years a Slave" (which won Best Picture in the Academy Awards) by a conservative in a conservative magazine, The American Spectator:
If ever in slavery’s 250-year history in North America there were a kind master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have been, here and there, we may be sure that Mr McQueen does not want us to hear about it. This, in turn, surely means that his view of the history of the American South is as partial and one-sided as that of the hated Gone With the Wind.
snip
Yes, there was much cruelty and hardship in the slave-owning South, as there has been in most of the rest of the world most of the time, and Mr. McQueen’s camera is all over that. But it strains ordinary credulity to suppose that there was nothing else.
James Bowman, PROPAGANDA IS NOT ‘REALITY’ OR ‘TRUTH’
Just like Schindler's List failed to show the contented Jews in Auschwitz and kind concentration camp guards.
One of the things that the movie showed is that even people with a shred of decency were bound in an evil system. By definition, there are no kind slavers. They are enslaving human beings.
This is the modern conservative movment. Defending evil in order to hold on to dreams of racial superiority. If there is a just God, he will damn them all.
We have much work to do to overcome our racist heritages. Whites can start by looking at the truth and accepting our history.