MidwestRoadie wrote:
If you're a white American whose ancestors were in this country more than 2-3 generations prior to your birth, you absolutely have benefitted economically from the system of slavery and the subsequent racist systems that followed in its aftermath. It's not just slavery, but the economic and "justice" systems that followed it. Anti-black systems didn't die off with the death of indentured servitude and they definitely haven't died off in the ~60 years following civil rights legislation. Whether or not economic reparations are the right answer to remedy wrongs is another point of discussion, but there's no doubt white Americans of all sorts have benefitted economically -- and unjustly -- from American racism going all the way back to our roots and continuing for centuries beyond.
I see this notion gaining traction a lot, but this is a not universally held position amongst economists. Furthermore, while you could possible make this argument for some people in a large urban areas (although I still think it's a stretch), I think you would be hard pressed to argue that rural whites in the much of the country probably had much benefit at all. For example, perhaps you could tell me how white immigrants in Minnesota's Iron Range benefitted economically from either slavery or "economic" systems that came afterwards, while they scrabbled out an existence in mines (with a lot of immigrants being seriously exploited by the mine owners) and on farms deep in the woods of Northern Minnesota. And one could take that argument to many different places in the US.
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