So if you're non-black and live in the U.S., you owe reparations.
I know this claim is made, over and over. But most of the "wealth" built up with slave labor was destroyed during the Civil War.
When you look at the Capital accumulated in the South, most of it was in the form of slaves. So, if you claim the wealth of the USA was created by slave labor, you are saying the wealth of the USA existed in its black population.
After the War Between the States, the black population only did a little more than feed itself.
Some more, but not huge.
If you go back to the 16th-17th century, the whole world pretty much had slavery of all races (slavery-Slavic). Thus everyone owes reparations, so it is a zero sum game. Also, white societies were the ones that stopped slavery before the other racial societies. In fact, there is still slavery in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This whole issue is designed to create friction, not solve anything.
Case on point. Slavery in the "America'" can be focused on the 10% of African slaves that were received by the United States.
The other 90% were received in the Caribbean, Central and South America. With 90% settling in other regions, shouldn't
those other regions be 90% wealthier than the US?
Simply not true. There was much commerce in America carried on that didn’t involve slaves. Most of the wealth of the south was spent fighting the civil war. Northern inventions and industry wasn’t based n slavery. The West ward expansion profited freed blacks as well as whites.
Yup. Some Irish immigrant fresh off the boat building a railroad by hauling ties by hand? The coin they paid him was from SLAVE money!
The wealth of the West was built on mining and ranching. The wealth of the East was built on industrialism. Only the South relied on slavery because it was largely agrarian and suited to slave labor.
You can’t put a slave to work in a factory and get any meaningful production out of them and they will sabotage your machinery whenever they can. That’s why slavery died out early in the east not because of any humanitarian reasons.
Picking cotton and tobacco and loading and unloading bales of the stuff onto ships is ideal work for slaves. Most slaves were owned by the big southern plantations. Hence the low percentage of people who owned slaves. They were expensive, you had to feed them, clothe them, doctor them, coerce them out of every hour of work you got out of them and then worry if they were going to slit your throat at night while you slept. Most people simply couldn’t afford to pay for slaves or didn’t want the hassle of it or didn’t believe in it.
Most whites in the US today had ancestors who came over to the US during the heavy immigration period from the 1880s to 1920s or so.
Obviously they had nothing to do with slavery.
You left out the sarcasm tag.