LIf blacks never came to America and stayed in Africa, I'm sure the whites would have just gotten mexicans to do the same work.
No, actually black slaves were an even better value because they were free, minus room and board. They were actually investment property in that you could sell them if times got hard, which is something you couldn't do with other employees no matter how cheap they were willing to work. And if a couple happened to have a baby, your investment property paid off dividends.
This immense free work force- not cheap work force, but virtually free work force- was the battery of this country's pre-industrial economy.
Today, wipe out all blacks and seriously the results would be less murder, less crime, less poverty
Now is this their fault? Not at all. Blacks have been oppressed for a long long time so they had no choice of what happened.
Not sure if you are waiting to drop the other shoe, but I agree with this (even the bolded, which I did lightly edit) and this is the point I tried to make to pellius that drove him to start this thread. If you were drawing up plans to create a permanent underclass, you would be hard pressed to come up with a blueprint more perfect than the US one related to black history.
He believes that the purpose of the civil war was to give blacks equal rights and that racism directed at blacks pretty much ended at that time. There has never been any suggestion that that's what the civil war was about, but if I point that out, it's me dodging. If I point out that there were still huge systemic challenges following the civil war, that's me being ungrateful and dwelling on the negative.
Not that long ago, I was listening to this podcast about an economic paper that was essentially about tracking innovation through patent law and social forces. (For the sake of brevity, I'll try to whittle it down to most relevant points) So, the way the paper tracked this was by looking at the number of blacks who filed patents during periods following the civil war and dominant social events happening at the time. So, the thing is there was a huge level of black participation in innovation happening in the period immediately following emancipation. But everytime there was major discriminatory legislation passed or major social upheaval that magnified blacks place on the social totem pole, there was a huge drop off in blacks filing for patents that didn't show up in the general population. One of the biggest tremors was the aftermath of the Black Wall Street Attack (which has been talked about here before, so I won't go into it.)
The point I was clearly trying to make with my earlier posts is that there were still massive hurdles that blacks had to overcome during reconstruction and afterwards. They were specifically designed to impede black progress and many were successful.