Whites Owe You Nothing

The claim that no American today has wealth without the labor of slaves simply isn’t true. Most white Americans descend from immigrants who arrived after 1865—Irish fleeing famine, Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews escaping pogroms, and millions more who came with nothing and built lives in factories, coal mines, and tenements. Their families never owned slaves, never inherited plantation money, and often competed directly against slave labor that undercut their wages. Holding their descendants collectively responsible is neither accurate nor just.The idea that 45% of the entire U.S. GDP came from slavery is a misreading of antebellum data. That figure applies only to the export value of cotton in certain years, almost entirely in the South. By 1860 the free-state North was dramatically wealthier per capita than the slave South. Slavery enriched a tiny planter class while keeping the broader Southern economy backward and technologically stagnant. Nations and empires that relied most heavily on slavery—Rome, Brazil, the Arab world—never produced an industrial revolution. Sustained wealth has always come from free labor, secure property rights, and innovation, not from unpaid forced labor.Tea in the Boston Tea Party came from China, shipped by the East India Company. The trade routes were complex and global, but they were not primarily driven by African slavery in the Americas. More importantly, the Revolution itself was fought for principles of liberty that later turned against slavery everywhere those ideas spread.America was not “built by slaves” in the singular, zero-sum sense the argument implies. It was built by millions of people—farmers, merchants, inventors, immigrants, free black craftsmen, indentured servants, and yes, tragically, by the stolen labor of enslaved Africans as well. Acknowledging one group’s contribution does not require erasing or demonizing everyone else’s. It’s not “either/or.” But it is also not true that every modern American’s citizenship or prosperity is a direct unearned fruit of the plantation system.Real empathy doesn’t demand that people today feel personal guilt for crimes they never committed. It asks us to face historical evil honestly, learn from it, and ensure it never returns. The United States did something almost unprecedented: it fought a civil war that ended the institution forever on its soil and then led the world in abolishing the global slave trade.Gratitude and truth heal. Inherited shame and collective blame only divide. America’s story is big enough to honor both the horror of slavery and the courage of those who ended it—without turning descendants of one group into permanent moral debtors and descendants of another into permanent moral creditors.