The answer you’re supposed to give to children—one I heard myself as a child—is “That’s just the way things were.” You’re supposed to say, “Lots of good people owned slaves,” or, “It was legal then.” You’re supposed to pretend that historic injustices have either been resolved or that they were never that bad, that they didn’t linger and structure the politics of the present. You’re supposed to normalize cruelty, and in doing so exonerate those who practiced it.
