Since people are so concerned with “erasing history” these days, we absolutely should be teaching the truth that slavery was a conscious choice for slaveowners in American history. I’ve heard many people make excuses for it and act like slaveowners had no choice in the matter, but that is a lie. Like @red3blog says in this post: “Slaveowners made a choice every single day to treat other human beings like their property. Plenty of people in their own time knew it was wrong, but they did it anyway. Teach THAT.” There are tons of famous abolitionists and resistors who fought against slavery, teach their stories. Oh and George Washington was a dick. When he died he owned over 100 slaves and he didn’t even free them like this post says, he left them to Martha Washington who freed only one when George died.
(via: Vellum and Vinyl)
A lot of good people throughout history appear a lot less good when you look beyond the areas for which they were praised. Yes, there was an economic and social pressure to own slaves; and absolutely yes, many of those doing so knew that it was wrong. Many of them felt that, for whatever reason, this was a necessary evil. Many of them also did not, but for whatever reason chose to keep slaves anyway.
Washington may have found a political cachet in being a slave-owner, and maintained his legal claim over his slaves in order to maintain that political benefit. Or, he simply may have justified his ownership in the belief that it gave him a politically useful benefit, even though he had every reason to believe otherwise. Either way, he was fully conscious that he had a choice, and he chose to maintain his hold over slaves because it gave him what he wanted. Which showed that, however good he was in other areas, he was quite evil in this respect.
We like to believe that we’ve eradicated this tendency in humanity by and large; but that just isn’t true. There’s plenty of illegal slavery going on all round the world; and without vigilance, we’re just one bad day from seeing slavery return as a legal evil somewhere in the world once again. And of course, there’s also a kind of proxy slavery going on that’s fully legal – the will by certain employers to overwork their employees to death for a mediocre or worse paycheck. Chinese overseer syndrome, for example, is infamous enough for the term to be universally recognized.