Mostly agreed. I’ve of course personally never owned slaves, and my family has mostly been poor since forever. It’s doubtful anyone in my lineage going back hundreds of years had anything to do with slavery — my grandfather on my mom’s side in fact grew up a sharecropper in rural Georgia, which is just a step or two above being enslaved.

Western societies get a bad rap for colonialism because those who can attempt to extract resources from where those resources exist. While there were some genuine evils perpetrated, most often, though, the civilizations already present were even worse.