As a kid in the UK one of the main ideas I had of the US was Cowboys vs Indians either as a show or a game, and the establishment of the US was largely that - white guys killing the native Americans and taking the land.
Well only a couple countries participated in the creation of the Atlantic slave trade, and very few in history have engaged in chattel slavery to the scale the USA did.
Seems like a very Americentric perspective. There's still plenty of chattel slavery out there right now[1]. In that respect, the idea that the US is uniquely bad is like the "evil twin" version of American exceptionalism[2].
It's hard to find other examples of it (or at least the inherent natural inferiority of one group of residents) being written into the country's foundational legal document. We are indeed exceptional in that regard.
It's time to get off your high horse. If you eat meat, future humans will regard you the same way as we regard the slave owners of yesteryear. Perhaps even worse.
Judge people by the ways in which they push their society's morals forward, not retroactively after hundreds of years of morals evolving.
No. Slavery is a unique evil and people knew it was a unique evil since the time of the ancient Greeks.
I refuse to accept "it was just the way things were at the time" when there were people opposed to slavery thousands of years ago. Aristotle wrote about them:
> others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.
There were abolitionists in the first days of the United States through to the civil war. People knew it was wrong or had ample opportunity to hear it argued that it was wrong, and furthermore, the inherent wrongness of it should be obvious to anyone that encounters it, and I don't give a moral pass to anyone that brushes it off because it was common any more than I do for American politicians that brush off school shootings because it's common.
Incorrect. There were some people that understood slavery to be a unique evil. The vast majority of humanity understood it to be "just how things were."
Really, not much different from how we view factory farming today.