Ummm... Are you serious? The economy of the early usa was heavily dependent on slavery. It has had a far reaching impact on our demography, our culture, and our politics to this day. Every american, even today, feels that impact.(black people are still facing discrimination, unequal treatment by police, generational poverty, and the lingering effects of white flight and urban decay) The existence of abolitionists alone does not erase the stain of slavery, as you say. You can't tell the story of America without slavery. And if youre american, its part of your history.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/historical-context-was...
Just a couple of references I found with a quick search.
Your second link has this paragraph
"The answer is "0"; slavery did not create a major share of the capital that financed the European industrial revolution. The combined profits of the slave trade and West Indian plantations did not add up to five percent of Britain's national income at the time of the industrial revolution."
So I am confused about what I am supposed to take away from the links you gave.
The quote you cite explicitly talks about the _European_ industrial revolution. The _very next sentence_ says:
>. Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor
Even more to the point, a couple sentences later:
> In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.
Given that we're talking precisely about "the economy of the early usa", this is the relevant perspective.
Again, shame on you
The demographics are not in dispute: at no point in time did the US have more than 23% of the population be African Americans.
So even assuming they all worked exactly as hard as all others (and that 100% were enslaved), the share is "23%".
So is that "heavily dependant" given that 77% of the output is not from that source? I would point out that cotton was a raw material crop, while the Northern development was a mix of agriculture and industry.
>thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.
These two quotes prove my claim. Slave grown crops were a large part of the usa's exports and even in states without slaves, industry depended on the plantation system in some way. I think its reasonable to say the us economy heavily depended on slavery for that reason. Either you are expending an extraordinary amount of effort nitpicking the semantics of "heavily" or you're knowlingly deluding yourself to avoid facing the truth.
As an american, who lives in an area where enslaved people once walked, i know its hard to accept that the country i love was founded on opression. But it's something we all must acknowledge. It's a dark chapter of our history, and it continues to impact us today.
Maternal side: has been in the USA since 1727. In those nearly 300 years, no one ever owned slaves or benefited from slavery. In fact, it is possible that they were even harmed by it; because as free farmers they had to compete against slave labor.
Paternal side: arrived in 1920s, well after slavery ended.
Edit: of course I realize that another way to interpret the statement "black lives matter" is to see it as more of a slogan and a constant reminder to address the issue as opposed to an accusation that someone or some group of people thinks otherwise. The fact that this statement is open to alternative interpretations is a problem for this movement, though.
All white people as individuals were not responsible for slavery, and some even opposed it, but all still benefited from slavery by virtue of being born into the race, society and class that the slave system was designed to benefit. That is unfair, but nonetheless true.
This is false. Many benefited, true, but not all. And even if it was true, I don't see why people should be made responsible for the actions of others that under some definition are from their same "group", even if they benefited from them. This is collectivism/racism at its finest, it bothers me tremendously and I'm not even white.
There are indirect benefits and direct benefits to an unjust system - implicit as well as explicit power that comes from membership in a privileged class. Having legal rights and protections that other classes don't enjoy is a benefit. Being allowed to read, having autonomy over your own children, being able to walk freely, being allowed to maintain a connection to one's ancestors, religion and emigrant homeland... these are all benefits granted to white people as a group during slavery.
> I don't see why people should be made responsible for the actions of others that under some definition are from their same "group", even if they benefited from them.
Well... I did concede that they shouldn't, and weren't. But if one group of people are considered property, and another group of people are legally capable of owning the first, then the latter group benefits from that system if only because they aren't the former.
It just happens that, at that time and place, the necessary selector for privilege was "whiteness." In another time, it might have been religion, or ethnicity or culture or following the wrong King. There were plenty of societies that practiced slavery that discriminated along many lines.
Irish Catholics and many other groups had no special place as immigrants, they didn't get positive points for not being African. That's the unfortunate truth with all forms of discrimination, it's hardly something limited by class, race or time.
Sure, slavery didnt literally benefit every white person. But youd be hard pressed to find a white person today who never experienced any form of white privellage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_nativist_riots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment
https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish...
I find nothing ahistorical about what I said.
If you go further back and see what Cromwell and others did to the Irish (the first British colonization was in Ireland), and then extend that to the US, where that kind of hatred was shared by Nativists, it is certainly not inaccurate, even if the discrimination is of a different from than what Africans faced.
I dislike the notion that because people aren't African they weren't victims, too, which gets bandied around a lot. We all have tragedies and I see no reason to ignore the plight of one to make the point about another (which the parent post does, wrongly).
Maybe "whites are responsible for slavery" is a deceptive statement for all i know. But nobodys saying that.