DeSantis signs bill limiting tenure at Florida public universities

[Old Guy]

It's really weird that so many people think that whenever a discussion of slavery in the United States comes up, it is somehow an attack on all white people. I never heard any of the people in this thread who were talking about the problems associated with U.S. slavery attacking all white people, and I never heard a teacher or professor in my many years of education attack all white people while discussing U.S. slavery. If someone says that "many white people in the United States benefited from chattel slavery," I don't assume that means that literally no one else could have benefited from it, and I don't assume it means that every single white person benefited from it--because that's literally not what the sentence said.

Chattel slavery is a major part of the history of the United States. The fact that slavery has existed in other parts of the world and continues to exist does not change that fact.

I'm sorry that some white people feel attacked by the fact that historians teach about history in their classes, but maybe they should just learn not to take it so personally. I'm white and it doesn't make me feel attacked to learn that many white people in the United States benefited from the fact that, for many years, the legal system treated enslaved Africans and their descendants very similarly to livestock. It's sad and it's horrible, but it's also a fact, and it had huge economic and social impacts that helped shape our history. A white person who takes that as a personal attack is a literal poster child for the phrase "victim mentality."

In 1860 1.7% of Americans owned slaves.  Slavery did not build the United States.  It was pretty much irrelevant in the northern states and much of the south.  It had economic relevance in large agricultural works growing cotton.  The downside of slavery was delayed industrialization in the South.  Cheap labor forestalled the need for labor saving technology.  Even in the South 2/3 of the families never owned slaves.

Slavery was the norm until about 200 years ago.  Turks and Berbers captured and sold millions of Southern Europeans over 1,000 years.  The US went to war with North Africa to free American sailors taken as slaves.  Even in the late 1700s Central Asian Turkish tribes were still capturing European slaves in Russia.  There was nothing particularly unique about slavery in America.  Europe had an almost universal form of slavery called feudalism where the serfs were bound to the land.  In the early days of industrialization in Russia, large estates were selling serfs to factory owners.