Just saw 12 years a slave

[Mira]

129. He was not just "one man"

I understand your words and find them simplistic. It cramps my gut to think that after seeing that film, and knowing it was a true story of the lives of many as he describes what he lived, you would think paternalistic treatment of a person who is your slave could be OK.

Many Germans shied away from facing up to what their country did in the Holocaust (the Third Reich lasted 12 years)
and soft pedaled what they heard without trying to really educate themselves about it.
Fear of the truth makes many shallow, i. e. those who continue to watch the Fox channel even after hearing they are being lied to.

Many Americans are doing the same thing about slavery (which lasted about 200 years)
and think that the patronization, head patting that some house slaves received was "good treatment".
They were all not free and all owned like chattel and like livestock, and that's the bottom line.

There is a lot of good literature that could help you expand your knowledge. The one I recently read was about the Great Migration, why and how it happened, "The Warmth of other suns" by Isabel Wilkerson.