[rayiner]

No, I'm trying to correct a poisonous misconception. Many people try to justify affirmative action based on the premise that "white people" continue to benefit from slavery economically, and that's just not true. The profits accrued to a small elite, and other white people were economically worse off than they would have been with an economy based on free labor.

The ChatGPT summary accurately captures the expert consensus on this: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a58046380288191b946198c5de72ce7 ("Most modern economic historians conclude that slavery enriched plantation owners but constrained the South's broader economic development. While non-slaveholding whites gained social status from the racial hierarchy, they likely had lower wages, fewer economic opportunities, less industrial development, and slower long-term income growth than they would have had in a Southern economy organized around free labor. In other words, economically they were probably worse off, while socially and politically they enjoyed privileges that would not have existed in a society without slavery.").

I’m citing ChatGPT here because I think it’s pretty good at summarizing the literature on this sort of factual question.