As for the second part of what you said, it's again a little vague. But lemme take a stab. The short version of how I arrived here:
My cosmology is different than yours, and generally the overlap I do share with many US Citizens, I have a different relationship to the concept. I use the term cosmology as a placeholder for the ideas we have to negotiate with as a society. Even if you do not believe in a Christian god, the southeast US largely forces you to negotiate this concept with your reality, regardless of your relationship with the concept.
I have a few different lists per ideological reach, but the base of most all western cosmology is:
Chorismos
Scala Naturae
Imago Dei
Dominium Terrae
Ego Conquiro
Terra Nullius
Homo
Mathesis Universalis
Res Extensa
Res Cogitans
Machina Mundi
Spatium Absolutum
Tempus Absolutum
Punctum Archimedis
Qualitates Primae et Secundae
Tabula Rasa
Dominium Sui
Subiectum Transcendentale
Progressus
Entzauberung
Bestand
The more material brass tacks explanation rest in systems analysis & generally I've always reframed things to be actionable when they are framed to dead a topic. I don't think you ever attended any of the racial reconciliation events and actions I hosted when I was working within the christian community, but this is very much on brand for me. Nonetheless, here's a slightly longer explanation.
This is a 30,000ft level analysis, as it's only really dipping into systems logic at the organizing level (agent definitions and mechanic observations informed by material outcomes)
When I approach systems (a structure that repeats itself, and/to produces a predictable outcome) in general I run 4 questions automatically to help me ID what's going on:
who/what owns the system,
what's the rewardable behavior within the system, what are it's enforcement points and mechanics,
and most important,
what's the story that's told to make it all feel normal?
After that, there's around 30 questions or things I look for in relation to the system(s) I'm looking at, before drawing any conclusions beyond the initial 4 questions.
Basically game theory.
For reference, a cup is a system, so is a river, so is a society, a government, a culture, etc.
I can't remember if it was Fanon or Grimsci or both but they wrote about a concept called "cultural hegemony" (the truest aspect of culture or cosmology) kind of like common sense. What is culturally the most true and unquestioned thing that contextually legitimizes whatever systemic element we are seeing. Usually we align these ideas with like... Natural thinking. "Of course you shake hands with your right and not your left, are you crazy?" "What do you mean you don't use salt?" "Y'all don't wash your legs????" π Cultural hegemony π
So with history I look at the narrative, then I look at the inputs, output, true emergence, system response, it's peripheral elements, etc etc.
Prime example, I write "The US Captured slavery away from private owners" quite often, and people challenge that but usually from cultural hegemony, and not from examining the source material. But, it's literally written into the amendment itself:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"
So it SHALL exist, but only for crime. Also indentured servitude (which is NOT for Black folks π€) also passes through the same gateway. But who retains ownership? The government. Which begs a deeper dive. Was this intentional? Because materially, it if it's not intentional it's a critical failure of abolition, based on actions taken by states to re-capture their enslaved populations through legal means. And if it IS intentional, for the administering body, does this mean their relationship to the Black position remains static? The answer is in how the relationship plays out between today and this amendment.
This is baked into my positional analysis on Blackness specifically, but it challenges the narrative that Ole Abe freed the slaves, which is one of the most controversial but even so accepted cultural truths we hold. It just doesn't materially hold up under scrutiny.
So when it comes to how I arrived at conclusions, often it's through deep research and critical thinking. To stay with the 13th amendment example, I use my specific language because of how deeply impactful Karl Marx was to formative American political theory which most people don't really take note of.
I have an article on this, but real quick
In 1850 he began writing for the New York Tribune, even though he wasnt in the US (largest distributed US Newspaper of the era btw). He was recruited by Charles Dana, a furrierist editor of the tribune who he met in Warsaw during labor riots. He wrote over 500 articles on formative industrial political theory for them across 13 years. The NYT was the newspaper of the north, so for 13 years Marx literally educated Americans about politics surrounding industry in an era where the plantation and it's structure was actively and historically being exported to the rest of the world through the industrial revolution. That's not miniscule π anyways, Charles Dana went on to be recruited as Lincoln's Assistant Secretary of War during the civil war. He directly made the appeal to make Ulysses S Grant the main general of the union. Dana also was Lincoln's middleman who bribed 3 members of Congress to get Nevada statehood and the 13th amendment passed.
Does that mean Marx helped the US retain slavery? No, he even exchanged letters with Lincoln appealing to him to set enslaved people free, (as a labor issue) but you can't divorce his teachings from the era. That's why I use the phrasing the US Captured slavery from private owners, because essentially the US seized the direct means of production, and never let go. In a way, they simply optimized slavery.
I make a similar synthesis about the white position & the Black position, that's also uncomfortable but historically accurate. Both were crafted over 30 years of Colonial policy in response to Bacon's Rebellion. The nobility and planting class weren't negotiating with enslaved people during this aftermath, but they were negotiating with their European peasant indentured counterparts, who were rebelling with enslaved people. White wasn't even invented by white people, it was established by nobles and rich Englishmen who didn't associated with the term, as they literally didn't need it. It's a benefit class that set up the ability to bootstrap, with an agreement of domination and a promise of better treatment built into the designation. And guns. Also, Black people can't testify against you so do as you wish in your management, just don't rebel again lol. If you read the documents and write them out in plain language it's impossible to not see it as white being the formative caste category of class traitors. It's also impossible to ignore that European families who held power pre-1705 are different from the later post-1705 diaspora, especially in VA. This is where the First Family's of VA concept comes from, and those who arrived post-1705 were mostly shit eating bootstrappers who arrived into the early middle class, aka "white".
Last example, and a brief conclusion
A lot of us were educated to believe European settlers were dying at an 80% mortality rate because of diseases pre-1705. No, the INDENTURED EUROPEAN SERVANTS were dying at an 80% mortality rate because the labor was so extreme and the planter class didn't feed them, and the land they would earn at the end of their contracts pending survival ended up being frontier Indigenous land and they weren't allowed weapons to begin with so they got packed up by indigenous folks regularly. Half truths.
I'm not the first person to land here btw, but to be clear, I am not a Marxist. This whole thing is a structural understanding, not a guide to executing anything to various ends. Some people want revolution and to capture the system to reorganize, some want exit, some want something different, but I'm not identifying methodology to ends, just capacity of position.
I fundamentally don't believe in industry, profit, or coercision as legitimate or productive organizing principals for society, resources, or continuity. This informs how I filter information and process it.
Some contemporary reads, I may come back and add stuff if I think about it but off rip
White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race - Ian Haney Lopez
Caste: the origins of our discontent - Isabel Wilkerson
Mohawk Interruptus, Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States - Audra Simpson
Hawaiian Blood - J. KΔhaulani Kauanui
The color of Law - Richard R.
Earlier books
Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B Dubois
The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B Dubois
The Black Jacobins - C. L. R. James
The invention of the White Race - Theodore Allen
Braiding Sweetgrass also lays out a wonderful framework to think think/work through.