• AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee
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    16 hours ago

    If we were born 200 years ago in the US South, we’d be perfectly fine with slavery.

    This is blatantly false. Lincoln didn’t wake up one day and suddenly think “hey maybe slavery is bad”. Abolitionists had been fighting for centuries.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      12 hours ago

      Abolitionists were a growing minority. Lincoln didn’t just wake up one day and free the slaves…but we are still 18 years away from the 200 year anniversary of the emancipation proclamation.

      But society (US society) as a whole accepted slavery as a fact of life.

      Just like we accept suicide nets, sweat factories, “inmate labor”, ,Uighur camps, and North Korean “mercenaries” as facts of life today. We don’t want them, we just choose to forget they exist. Through our collective inaction, we passively condone them.

      Plenty of individuals oppose them enough to actively avoid supporting them in any way, but they are such an inconsiderable minority of consumers, in the eyes of the corporate lords.