(April 2, 2022 at 9:33 am)onlinebiker Wrote:(April 2, 2022 at 2:36 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: (bold mine)So you are saying that I am only culpable by virtue of my skin colour and not because of any action on my part or my ancestor's part?
Yeah, that bit's really not your call.
Boru
Gee... Isn' t that just racist as hell?
Your ancestors immigrated here to benefit off of the wealth generated by slavery. It would be like if someone robbed a person and gave you some of the money, YOU benefited from the robbery and can't claim zero culpability, at the very least you'd have to return what was taken. There's art that been looted during ww2 that's been either passed down to or purchased by people that didn't originally loot it, but it's understood that they have to return it back to the original owners if found out, same concept.
@Ranjr said I was overstating when I said that America wouldn't exist without slavery, which is 100% fact.
There were at least 10 attempts to colonize North America and they all failed with the exception of Jamestown. The first attempt to establish Jamestown FAILED because PEOPLE DIDN'T WANT TO WORK. It was such a failure that people had to resort to cannibalism in what is referred to as "The starving time". Jamestown obtained black slaves in 1619 and there rest is history.
@Rev. Rye was talking about 20 trillion was such an astronomical number, but according to an article on Bloomberg, in 1860 (keep in mind this is only accounting for ONE YEAR!), the economic wealth that slavery generated (adjusting for inflation and interest) is $42 trillion... again, that's how much wealth that slavery generated in one year would be worth now. If we just take those numbers and include all the years that slavery had been legal in the US (86, 1776 - 1865), not counting the years prior to the independence of the US, were looking at almost $4 quadrillion, 86 x 42 trillion which would be the wealth that slavery generated over 246 years, therefore, it's in no way an overstatement to say that slavery built America.
I reiterate, this is just a broad estimate based on the numbers of the article.
Four Numbers That Show the Cost of Slavery on Black Wealth Today
Quote:The racial wealth gap begins with slavery itself, which was a huge wealth generator for White Americans. The economic value of the 4 million slaves in 1860 was, on average, $1,000 per person, or about $4 billion total. That was more than all the banks, railroads and factories in the U.S. were worth at the time. In today’s dollars, that would come out to as much as $42 trillion, accounting for inflation and compounding interest.*emphasis mine*
Slaves didn’t just make slaveowners rich, they helped them get richer. “There were literally slave backed securities,” says Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Slavery was also the engine driving the cotton economy, which enriched everyone from banks, shopkeepers, and insurers, too. Meanwhile, slaves lost out on an estimated $20.3 trillion in wages for their labor.
