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The gross misrepresentation and suggestion in textbooks and lectures is that slavery was a "uniquely American" practice done by racist white people to black people.My quotes.

The problem with WW's statement here is that slavery in America was racist. It had to be racist in a nation founded on "all men are created equal."

In a society like most thru history where there are many shades of privilege, extending from the King down through the nobles to the middle and lower classes and eventually to various categories of slaves, at some point the "line" between "freedom" and "slavery" is crossed, but which side of the line you are on makes little difference in your life.

In a society like ours, where "all men are free," there has to be some (seemingly) logical reason why some men obviously aren't free.

The answer was racism. Explained it perfectly logically, if you accept the premise. Black people are enslaved because they aren't really men.

So one can continue to believe in both slavery and the Declaration of Independence without one's head exploding.

Slavery in most parts of the world and down through history hasn't been particularly racist in character. Slavery in the New World and especially in American certainly was.

The problems with your argument are the facts that slaves weren't exclusively black and those asked to sign the Declaration did explode over it. The Southern states knew immediately that the principles of the Declaration were incompatible with slavery... so they sought concessions. The concessions in this document and the Constitution are what made the Civil War necessary... and our Founding Fathers knew it would eventually come to blows.

"I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for the unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery. If we cannot reduce this wished-for reformation to practice, let us treat the unhappy victims with lenity. It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion, to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants slavery.
I know not when to stop. I could say many things of the subject, a serious view of which gives a gloomy perspective to future times."
-- Patrick Henry

Nonsense. It had NOTHING to do with “racism” as we define it today. The reason slavery could be accepted in a nation founded on “all men are created equal” is that they (at least the majority who founded the nation) did not believe they were “men”. They believe blacks to be less than men. Now, I suppose you could make the case that that is its own form of racism, but it has nothing to do with how we use that word today. In other words, the people in those days did not hate black people simply because they were black. In fact, they did not hate them any more than they hated their mules or horses by “enslaving” them. I know that by today’s measure these are disgusting truths, but that is how people who tolerated slavery back then thought.

“Slavery in the New World and especially in American certainly was.”

How do you explain the number of black property owners who owned slaves then?

Less than 1% of whites owned slaves, but from an article I read a number of years ago, 7% of black free men owned slaves.