Transcription
You couldn't have built the biggest economy in the world without us, right? It was actually built because of us. This is true.
The largest reverse transfer of wealth, arguably in world history, in modern history, is black slavery. That's not me making an emotional statement. I'm not throwing darts. It's a fact. I love math because it doesn't have an opinion, right? Um, and the fact is we're the largest economy in the world.
The fact is the first millionaire in America came from cotton financing it out of uh New York City, right? Uh the fact is that black slaves were worth more than railroads. Our railroads were arguably the most valuable asset in 19th and uh part of the 20th century, but blacks were worth twice that. Um the fact is that we uh work for free for 270 some odd years. Um nothing better than free labor. And and the fact is that we couldn't create uh wealth. We couldn't create assets because we were assets. Bought, traded, insured, financed, underwritten.
We were literally, whether if you were a bank, if you're a finance company, if you're an insurance company, if you were a trading company. I mean, one out of five people in the world at a certain point in the 1800s were involved or connected to cotton. Well, where did cotton come from? In the world. Came from us, right? Uh slavery was dying as an industry until the cotton mill came along and they needed us to work it.
But this perception that we were these sort of simpletons that were brought from Africa halfway around the world just because we were free labor, that's also a fallacy, right? The reality is we were agricultural geniuses. No one understood land like we did, right? If you have this sort of these products that require a certain soil and the environment for that soil make it hard to operate in that environment and it's hard to re-nurture that soil to get it to work again. You need people who understand harsh environments and who have successfully taken soil and brought it back to life. Mhm. That's Africa. That's Africa. And that's African. Mhm.
So it was very intentional for folks to go halfway around the world, get us and bring us halfway back around the world and put us to work. But they had to, they didn't like the attitude. They didn't like the, we had too much hutzpah. We had too much uh too much energy, too much esteem. So they needed the brains and they needed the brains, but they didn't need the, they didn't need all that energy we brought with us. Well, it was an attempt to destroy the spirit, not the body.