ALT-RIGHTER: ‘GENIUS EUROPEANS’ NOT SLAVES BUILT U.S.

This clip is a reminder of what our brothers and sisters in the US are still up against. In it, alt-right leader Richard Spencer claims that America’s current economic prosperity has nothing to do with enslaved African labour - but rest solely on “European geniuses”!

He denies slaves in the cotton industry played a pivotal role in the development of contemporary American capitalism, influencing not just the South, but the entire nation's economy, propelling it to the top of global markets.

By the mid-19th century, cotton became America’s largest financial asset and its most critical export. The profits from cotton were fundamental to the North's industrial rise and, by 1860, the Mississippi River Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country.

Moreover, slavery helped establish financial tools such as credit lines and mortgages. A wide financial network involving bankers, lawyers, investors and traders in the North evolved for the sole purpose of streamlining the business of subjugation.

According to Edward Baptist, professor of history at Cornell University and author of 'The Half Has Never Been Told,' the financial systems of North America were directly tied to slavery in the South, with the wealth generated by enslaved labor being funnelled into global markets, creating a kind of financial empire centred around the whipping, beating, killing and sexual abuse of African people in America.

Video credit: TV One TV (YouTube)

SOURCES:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsCbHwZn3qE

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/09/baptist-book-relates-slaverys-role-shaping-america

https://nature.berkeley.edu/agroecologylab/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/How-slavery-became-the-building-block-of-the-American-economy-Vox.pdf

https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy#

https://equitablegrowth.org/new-research-shows-slaverys-central-role-in-u-s-economic-growth-leading-up-to-the-civil-war/