Slavery in the Americas was an unmitigated evil. Everyone who indulged in it, ok’d it or went to war to preserve it was a villain. Period. That fact shouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. But it should make you feel a certain way about how American institutions evolved because of it.
If you have slavery-based wealth, you have slavery-based wealth. You can’t expect the descendants of those who your people exploited to create that wealth to manage the emotional toll that fact takes on you. They aren’t required to make you feel better about that. Not their job.
And the descendants of the despoiled have no obligation to coddle and cuddle the descendants of the spoilers, or to make excuses for them, or to laud fake “heroes” (who in reality were villains) or preserve their statuary to boost your self-esteem. It’s literally not on them.
If you’re trying to outlaw teaching the history of American villainy, you won’t succeed. People know that they’ve been sold a lie by the confederacy/sedition defenders, and they want the truth. No matter what you try, they will find out the truth. Count on it.
And if it hurts you to hear that whether or not your forbears had anything to do with slavery, you benefit from the white supremacy that was baked into every American institution by slavery and the supremacist ideas that were the norm among even white people who opposed slavery:
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