That’s a lot of maybes....
The maybes are to account for specific people, but the fact that history will render harsh new verdicts on old actions is pretty close to ironclad; it happens over and over, and no generation is spared. You have your glaring blind spots, right now, and I have mine. Guaranteed. It would be pure vanity to think otherwise. If we survive history's censure it will probably be incidental, and not down to our great virtue and historical foresight.
The standard you're advocating leaves it impossible to safely admire anyone who you share a general culture or time period with. Maybe you're okay with that, but that's what I'm trying to figure out, since you haven't really addressed it directly: whether you understand this implication, and accept it, or whether you actually believe that current generations are going be the only ones without moral blind spots, and the only ones to escape the wrath of hindsight.
And all I’m saying is that it humanizes slave owners.
A very odd objection, that we might inadvertently humanize...humans.
I don't think there's much downside to depicting slave owners as complicated and imperfect people. I
do think there's a danger in treating them as sub-human, though, because it lets us feel as if we're of a different moral genus as them. It lets us imagine we're not capable of similar levels of inhumanity, because they weren't human. But they were, and we are.
Whether or not it glorifies them, I don’t really have an interest.
So, to be clear, you haven't seen it and don't really know if (or how much) it "glorifies" them?
Either way, I kind of posted a preemptive counter to this, so I guess I'll just highlight it:
I'm also not sure why admiration is a prerequisite for watching or enjoying the play or film. There's a lot to learn from flawed people. Maybe more than the (seemingly) purer ones.
I assume you've watched films about horrible people before, yeah?
Pulp Fiction's protagonists are hit men!
I totally get it if people enjoy it though, and I get that I’m probably missing the bigger picture.
Hard to say. I'm not really clear on what your reasoning is, and how (or whether) you grapple with the objections that have been mentioned. I'm mostly just trying to figure out what the thought process behind this is. I assume/hope it's at least a little more sophisticated than "slavery is bad so I don't want to hear any story about a slave owner."