How bad was slavery, or, was slavery bad?
By 
Views actually do differ, because a significant portion of the voting public is made up of people who are either conscious or unconscious white supremacists, or at a minimum unconcerned with the fact that their political allies are in these two categories. Collectively, these are the people who elected Donald Trump president (again):
President Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday of focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America as his administration conducts a wide-ranging review of the content in its museum exhibits.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
Mr. Trump made the comments a week after the White House told the Smithsonian that its museums would be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic in “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” within 120 days. Taken together, the administration’s examination and Mr. Trump’s post on Tuesday were the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to impose his will on a cultural institution and minimize the experiences and history of Black people in the United States.
Trump is a big advocate of what could be called the Dunning-Kruger School of historical revisionism in re the War of Northern Aggression.
Once again, the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.
It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It looked and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, huge, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big—too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it, too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. He seemed to see it entire with a child’s complete divination before he ever laid eyes on either—the doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, through which ran not even a mortal animal but an anachronism, indomitable and invincible, out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life at which the puny humans swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant: the old bear solitary, indomitable and alone, widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and having outlived all his sons.
Faulkner, “The Bear”