The "west" was not founded on slavery, this is incorrect. This is the kind of "woke revisionism" that things like the 1619 tried to push through and were inaccurate.
I don't know if I would consider the early colonies as "the founding" of the modern western powers. If you look at the founding of the USA it absolutely is accurate, many founding fathers were slave owners. Slavery also had influence within Canadian territories until it was outlawed. Both waged genocidal war on First Nations and Native Americans from the beginning.
The USA continued to perpetuate slavery and compromise with slavers for decades/centuries to come, after Canada and Britain had long since moved on.
Failing to acknowledge the failures of others and focusing on scapegoating problems onto a specific group(when others are guilty as well) is also not a valid position.
But stating the reality that as a human there are other human beings who have things in common with them(skin color, national origin, culture, ethnicity) who also enslave and mistreat other people; helps people see the bigger picture of predatory behavior that were all potentially capable of.
A better understanding a human nature and what we're all capable of is certainly useful. Much of philosophy and psychology is devoted to this very idea.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Okay but states, classes and parties are made up of men, and one individual often has limited impact, while groups can have much larger and longer lasting impact. Typically the best and worst of humanity has been achieved through a collective, and not through the individual alone.
> NA was rather slow at coming to terms with these issues
But so were other parts of the world. Many countries in the Middle East continued to have slavery far beyond North America (Saudi Arabia did not outlaw it until 1962) and the Middle East is certainly culturally and historically very different from NA.
This was a critique on American Exceptionalism and its failure to actually apply "all men are created equal" in spite of better examples existing in the world. The US still legally allowed segregation into the 60s.
So many people rushing to use the "other countries were also horrible as well" defense. That's not really a defense.
We're pointing out that the problem is not particularly American, this is not a defense. Trying to make America seem worse then most of the world is warping the reality of the problem.
Enslavement and mistreatment is a problem that many cultures, countries and creeds have struggled with. Not admitting this and factoring this into your explanations shows some bias against America.
I am not trying to make it look worse, I am stating that its factual history is very problematic. There were many victims that came out of that history, and still exist to this day. Again, you sound like you're saying "stop picking on America, other people were bad too". That's little comfort to America's victims.
"If things seem crazy, they're usually crazy for a reason."
I underestimated how important missing context is to understanding why certain things are the way they are. It's easy to be "Captain Hindsight" but harder to have empathy for the decision makers who made things a certain way.
Sadly much of the implementation is still missing to be audited, things like schematics and hardware design need to be more robust before we can really call this open source hardware.
