As I said, as one moves forward in time what is "fact" to those alive changes.
This fact did not change for the tens of millions enslaved and killed.
And it changes differently across geography. This discussion began being about the US in 1850 and democracy. There was a slow and steady upheaval, that included new "facts", in the world that began in the 16th C and continued through today.
Irrelevant.
Prior to that Most of what was "Fact" was local and regionally defined. Often the dominant power defined it with or without dispensation to other ideas. Pick your time and place.
The fact of non-Jewish personhood was well-defined in Central and Eastern Europe for a period from 1933 to 1945. Do you believe that Jews in Europe were no longer people because the regionally dominant power defined them as such? If you do, then there's really no point in bothering with this conversation.
In the US rich white men were dominant and defined the facts of democracy and humanity.
Do you believe Apartheid South Africa was a democracy?
Some of those were a growing power forging a new set of facts regarding slavery and humanity.
You keep saying "facts", but the fact of Africans being human beings actually does not change based on time period. I'm not a moral relativist on this issue.
We see our understanding of humanity as universal and therefore retroactive.
Africans, at the time, saw themselves as human. Why are you prioritizing the definitions and standards of the slavers over the enslaved?
The powerful rich white men of 1850 saw their "facts" on humanity also as correct and universal.
So?
They devised voting laws to fit their universal truth.
They devised voting laws to serve their material interests. Material conditions do not spring forth from the realm of ideas.
Democracy as you define did not exist anywhere 150 years ago.
Correct.
Railing against the atrocities of the past is kinda like saying, geez if the Donner Party had had cell phones, they wouldn't have had to eat each other. Why didn't those nasty slave owners know better? Why wasn't Genghis Khan nicer? They all should have known better!
My father was not able to move into the neighborhood I live in now until recent memory because of redlining, a policy that has been officially illegal since the 1970s but more or less in effect in this area until the last few decades. This is the result of "atrocities of the past" that, while they don't affect you obviously (no one whose family who was affected by this country's legacy of genocide and slavery would talk like you do), do resonate in my family
today and in our society
today. Who you choose to uphold as democratic and good, who you forgive because it was "the beliefs (of whites, because the opinion of non-whites implicitly do not matter in your telling) of the time", is the result of the material reality of these genocides and who "won" to write the history books.
It is better, in my opinion, to focus on how we can better the world today than to rail against those who are dead.
The present does not spring from nothing. History is a series of events, of cause and effects.
Edit: The only way to argue that the US was a democracy in the 19th century is by saying the opinion of the millions of enslaved Africans and displaced indigenous peoples must be weighted
against the opinion of the people enslaving and killing them. There is, functionally, no other way to make the argument.