That's my point, if you're going to be remotely fair when judging people from a radically different society you have to "grade them on a curve" so to speak. Otherwise, according to the prevailing modern social mores, not a single decent person existed prior to the 1960s or so
That's ahistorical. I'd say Martin Luther King seemed like a fairly decent fellow. Also Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Harry Belafonte, J Waties Waring, Andrew Goodman and so on.
But those people are all from the 20th century, historically speaking still quite recent and relatable. I think you'd be hard-pressed to pluck anyone from a truly different time/place (relative to the modern west) and have their moral standards hold up to modern scrutiny, and if you could they'd be a notable exception and not the rule
Well, you have Richelieu's famous quote about six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men and whatnot, but let's just say I think you're wrong.
You're simultaneously underestimating the people who were here before us and our ability to adequately scrutinize their moral fiber. Of course, if by "people", "person" or "anyone", you mean the powerful, wealthy elite of the US, it's another thing entirely.
Its possible that I'm underestimating our ability to fairly judge their moral fiber, but I did not mean to imply that the moral compass of all those who came before is genuinely worse than ours. Quite the opposite, I'm saying many great and noble people who's heart was in the right place are unfairly maligned by future generations for the moral failings of their society as a whole.
A lot of the world had hospitality rules and treated outsiders kindly. Lots of people were allowed to come and go as they pleased they actually provide interesting reads. Borders as we understand them today were invented in the 18/1900s. Mass slavery spanning multiple continents and racism on that magnitude hasn't happened since and hopefully won't happen again (except maybe Rome & Egypt but that wasn't trans continental)
One doesn't exclude the other. You / anybody could be most welcoming to visitors and have your slaves serve them the best you had and treat them very well. Norms change, sometimes shockingly, and even within one's lifespan. Now young generations will most probably realize this when they will become out of touch and rejected by new young generation in maybe 2 decades.
Right, but I'm not saying that these people believe racism still exists somewhere out there, I'm saying they believe that racism is in every person's heart. That would seem to make it ineliminable, which seemingly deflates the purpose to care about racism. Ironically, such people claim to care the most about racism.
I mean, every able bodied person is capable of murder, we cannot get rid of it, and yet we spend a lot of time and effort to make sure people aren't out there doing it.
This analogy fails because virtually everyone goes through life without becoming a murderer, where these people believe literally no one goes through life without being racist. A better analogy would be: is it reasonable to condemn people that refuse to stop being gay? If you really believe it's just something you are, that's part of your core and can't be eliminated...
"Wow, that guys wife is hot and I thought about having sex with her, oh no I guess that means I am an adulterer so I might as well actually have sex with her".
If you turn off binary thinking and start thinking in degrees of effect, the fact you may naturally have some aversion to people that are not like you isn't a fucking excuse to genocide a group of people because of what they look like.
Almost all the excuses worded like the ones above that I've seen are from hard racists on why they shouldn't have to change there harmful behavior to others by wrapping in infantile sayings like "Jon was born gay and I was born to burn crosses".
I mean, if you're trying to point out that the people who believe that everyone is racist is a silly belief because it leads to absurdities, then I agree, welcome to the club. My point is not to justify that thinking, but to point out that they exist and so, to them, moral progress is apparently a fiction and so claims of "who wasn't racist in the past?" is not persuasive evidence that we're better now.
