this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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It was beneficial.
To white property owners. Much to the detriment of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Property? That's a bit broad...
It was beneficial to slave owners, specifically.
And their families should be paying reparations for the ill gotten gains.
WHITE slave owners.
You seem to be avoiding a certain adjective.
This is an incomplete view of the history of slavery. By the numbers, the vast majority of the people benefitting from chattel slavery were white. However, slave ownership reached similar per capita rates among some of the Native American tribes, and there were instances of slaves being owned by free people of color. Notably, there are a large number of black tribal members in the United States. The United States government signed a number of treaties with the tribes in the 1860s that required them to free their slaves and incorporate them as full tribal members.
None of this is said to diminish the fact that the American system of slavery was a product of colonization by European countries. But it is rather reductive to claim that only white property owners benefitted from the atrocity that was chattel slavery.
While vast majority were "white"... There were others who owned slaves.
All of their families should be held accountable and their profits and wealth should be dislodged to pay reperations to the decedants.
Allowing successors to keep these gains is a crime in of itself.
It's also basically the main reason that the US becamean superpower before WW1