re: taking down General Lee statue in the CBD?

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Besides the fact your quotes numbers are wrong the citation of said data belies the fact that non-slaveholding whites benefited greatly from slavery. People often quote that a small minority of whites owned slaves but that hardly matters. Even if only 1.4 percent of whites owned slaves, slaves accounted for 33% of the Southern population and were the backbone of the economy. In 1860, 89 percent of the nation's African Americans were slaves. That's the entire nation not just the South. Sure some people want to say oh but some colored people owned slaves but inconsequential to this point. If you were a poor non-slaveholding white the fact negro slavery existed meant there were always someone lower on the social and economic ladder. It meant that some poor black girl was being whipped to pick the cotton. It meant if you were a poor white that couldn't afford a slave you could find a job to whip that girl rather than the one picking the cotton. It meant there were jobs available where you could be paid to hunt down that runaway girl after she couldn't take the whippings of the overseer and the sexual abuse of her owner. You could find a job on a steamboat that transported slaves down river as they were sold from Virginia and the Carolinas to the Deep South. You could work as a clerk in an financial office who insured the transportation of the slaves or work for the bank that loaned money for the purchase of slaves. You could sweep the floors of the slave auction house. And why would you work all these jobs? Because maybe one day you could save up enough to buy your own slave.

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