This is simply untrue. America went from a backwater collection of colonies to an economic powerhouse during the Industrial Revolution because of slavery. Without slavery, those cotton plantations would not have existed.
They ought never to have existed. Any industry that is profitable only because slaves produce the product ought never have existed. If cotton were uneconomic without slave labour, then it was a terrible product and an immoral waste of resources.
Without King Cotton (and his little sister tobacco, and their good friend sugar), the USA would never have risen to become a major player in the import/export world. And slavery was essential to the profitable large-scale farming of all three.
If slavery were essential to the profits of these industries, then these industries were a gross misdirection of human capital and a grossly immoral use of human capital.
Even before the rise of cotton, slavery made the Americas a profitable trade destination, via the Trade Triangle: Slaves from Africa were shipped to the Americas and sold, then sugar (farmed by plantation slaves) was purchased and shipped to New England, where it in turn was sold and rum (and other goods) shipped from New England to Europe. Had there been no slavery, there would have been no profit in trading with the New World, and thus no American exports to Europe.
Had there been no slavery anywhere in the world, goods would be priced at their true cost. Goods priced at their true cost, even if there are fewer of them, are better for the world than goods subsidised by a grossly immoral practice.
But even though a select, specialised group may have benefitted from slavery (slave-owning Whites in the South), that does not mean America benefitted overall. Nor do we have a counterfactual to compare against: if Americans had never owned slaves, we don't know what the situation and productivity of cotton and tobacco would have been. Even slaves had a cost (feeding them and quartering them and preventing their escape), and it is possible that the production of cotton could have increased overall if a different model had been chosen.
Your last link shows the
exact opposite is true of what you believe
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=diversityinc]
If you go back to people being created equally, it is just math that a percentage of our country’s greatest minds were eliminated from the competition simply by fact of skin color,
No: every time you eliminate someone from a competition merely because of skin colour, and that person would have been the best candidate,
you have made the world poorer. This cannot seriously be denied.
Every single Black person who, but for racism, would have succeeded, or would have been able to contribute more to society than they ended up doing, has made America poorer. How can you believe otherwise?
And no: the article does not in any way address how White people 'directly' benefit from slavery today. They don't. They're worse off, both economically and morally. Everyone is.
