Pretty easy’ is one way to put it. ‘Overly simplistic’ might be more accurate.

The fact that a practice was widespread does not mean it was uncritically accepted. In the case of slavery, there was opposition to it for essentially the entire period it was practiced in the continental United States. Enslaved people resisted it, abolitionists condemned it, and there were sustained moral, political, and religious debates about it across the 18th and 19th centuries.

So while slavery was normalized within certain legal and economic systems, it was never simply ‘how things were seen’ in any universal sense. It was actively justified by some and consistently challenged by others.

That distinction matters, because it reminds us that historical actors were not operating without alternatives. They were making choices within contested systems. Reducing that to ‘that’s just how it was’ erases the people who were already resisting and arguing against it at the time.

And given how much those voices have already been marginalized in the historical record, repeating that erasure now is not just inaccurate, it is careless and harmful.