LogFAQs > #964687868

Tom Bombadil posted...

I feel like there's a wide spectrum between "we need to name things after them and their voices count the most in politics 250 years later and let's build statues and only ever talk about how great they were and if anybody ever says anything negative about them they hate America" and "we need to pretend they never existed like the scum of the earth they are" that you're kinda leaving out here- most of us aren't asking for the latter, we just want to chill out a bit on the former. Which I think is about how we already treat ancient Rome and Egypt and stuff? History is history but I don't think we have to treat some of these people as infallible heroes the way we were brought up to do.

Slavery in the ancient world generally was not the same institution we are familiar with. It wasn't so racialized, and slaves had greater rights and legal personhood than they did in New World slavery from the 1500s on.