I agree with a lot of what you have to say and a lot of what naraht has to say also! I sometimes feel like the fragility of knowing how contingent my own moral beliefs are, how much they're formed by the society I live in and my family, peers, and friends, is the most helpful place to stand -- and that comes with knowing how contingent everyone else's moral beliefs are, too -- but I think nobody's excused from trying to be better than their society is. I definitely think of myself as a product of my time! And part of that is also being a product of listening to what my friends had to say about ableist language, and gendered language, and thinking, and changing.

But the real question is, why do we have to praise or condemn people who are already dead? I can't go back in time to scold H.P. Lovecraft or give Heinlein a course in Social Justice 101 (yet!). If we're really talking about how we look at their works -- then the only eyes I have to look at a book or a movie are my own eyes. So whether you can excuse someone's beliefs or not, I think it's always legitimate to say "There isn't room for any meeting of the minds here, I can't get anything out of this." Or even "I was really caught up by the storytelling, but I also winced at the misogyny and the racism."

Not sure if you read this Ta-Nehisi Coates piece on Thomas Jefferson, but it really gave me a lot to think about on the subject! Thomas Jefferson was more than a man of his times