Why Does Ayanna Soyini Pressley Think America Was Built on Exploited Black Labor?

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Ladies and gentlemen, Ayanna Presley thinks she knows where America's wealth comes from.

[00:00:05]>> Not one promise has been kept to black Americans in this country when every bit of prosperity you enjoy was built on our backs. 400 years of labor. Uh so, uh we are long overdue for reparations. I'm proud to be the lead sponsor of HR40. Um black folks are certainly uh deserving of redress and uh repairerative work.

[00:00:27]and one bill will not undo centuries of harm.

[00:00:30]>> I'm Rich Lowry of National Review and that was a congresswoman from Massachusetts and a member of the squad in good standing make the case for reparations based on the idea that our prosperity was built on the backs of black labor for 400 years. We hear this claim a lot in various forms. We've heard it from the 1619 project. We've heard it from Tanahesy Coats, formerly of the Atlantic magazine. Is it true?

[00:00:53]No, it's not the least bit true. I'm going to explain why in some granular detail in a moment. But before I do, couple caveats up front. Nothing I'm saying is meant to deny the contributions in all sorts of ways, profound ways to this country from black Americans. The United States of America would not be what it is today without African-Americans. So, I want to acknowledge that upfront. also want to acknowledge the grievous injustices that have been done to black Americans over the centuries in this country, slavery, Jim Crow, other forms of abuse. I am not in any way defending any of that. I just want to knock down this claim that is total nonsense and it is used as a support for a pernitious idea which is reparations for black Americans. So this claim usually begins with the cotton economy in the pre-Ivil war south. So the basic idea is the cotton south was very important to the American economy such that if you took it away the rest of the economy would just collapse in a heap. As you might gather this is a ridiculously oversimplistic depiction of the reality. The fact is it's the north areas that didn't depend on slavery that were the most economically dynamic in the country.

[00:02:12]They were growing most rapidly. This is why immigrants who were coming into the country at the time tended to settle in the north which created a demographic problem for the south that would play into the civil war. Now there are very rich people in the south because slavery obviously is an exploitative system based on stealing really the labor of a bunch of people to make a very small group of people very rich and this beyond the question of the justice of it was just not a very rational economic system. So the south was stagnating compared to the rest of the country. Now let's consider some of the numbers.

[00:02:49]Let's just consider population. In 1790 the black population was pretty large in this country. 19.3%.

[00:02:58]That's a substantial number. But 80% is much more than 19% or 81% or whatever it is. Right? So it's inherently implausible to think it was that 19% driving everything. And the number actually goes down over the longer term because of immigration trends. So in 1930 it's 9% something. Now it's bounced up to around 14% but the rest of the country was 80 or 90% of the population.

[00:03:25]So there's just no way that everything they had depended on this relatively small minority. Then there's the GDP contribution of the cotton south itself.

[00:03:37]The economic historian Phil Magnus has done wonderful work pushing back against the 1619 project and his estimate is that the cotton economy was about 5% of GDP in 1860 United States. That's an important sector of the economy, but it's not obviously everything. And again, what would you rather have? Would you rather have an economy dependent on enslaved people doing the most manual type of labor or would you like to have an economy with a growing industrial sector and lots of railroads etc. That's what you had in the north in contrast to the south. Now there have been efforts to inflate that 5% number and get it much much higher for ideological purposes. Magnus has written about this.

[00:04:23]He points out how Tanahesy Coats, again a big reparations advocate, testified in front of Congress several years ago and coats maintained by 1836 more than 600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million odd slaves. This extraordinary claim came from a book called The Half That has never been told by an author who did not have a good grasp on economics. What he did was take the value of the cotton economy about 77 million and then multiply it several times over by including all the intermediate purchases and goods etc that went into that economy when the way you calculate GDP for good reason only includes the final value of goods and services because all the intermediate goods and services that went into that are included in the final value and if you took the logic of how he went about calculating this to its end point. You could get the cotton economy constituting more than 100% of the value of the US economy at the time, which would plainly be absurd. Magnus quotes one of the foremost experts on the slave economy, doubling down on this point, a guy named Stanley Angerman, who says this, the author of the book, by the way, in question is named Ed Baptist.

[00:05:42]Baptist economic analysis intended to demonstrate the essential role of the slave grown cotton economy for northern economic growth is weakened by some variance of double and triple counting and some confusion of assets and income flows to go from value of the southern cotton crop in 1836 of about 5% of that entire gross domestic product to almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836 requires his calculation to resemble the great effects claimed by an NFL team when trying to convince city taxpayers that they should provide the money to build a new stadium because of all the stadiums presume primary and secondary effects.

[00:06:14]In other words, complete and utter nonsense. Now, there's another related claim that says modern capitalism is dependent on slavery or was dependent on slavery. Wouldn't have come about without slavery. This is meant of course to serve the ideological project of discrediting modern capitalism. But this claim is just preposterous on the face of it. Slavery unfortunately has been an endemic feature of human existence. If it was the predicate for modern capitalism, well the Romans should have created modern capitalism or the Vikings or the Spanish or you could go down the list. Instead, it just happens that it comes about in the Netherlands and Britain and the United States. And that's because slavery was not fundamentally driving it. There was an influential 19th century advocate of slavery named George Fitzu. And what he argued correctly was that slavery was antithetical to less afair economics. He said this because he didn't like less fair economics and he liked slavery. But he was right about it. And then this brings us to the question of the civil war. Why did the north wage war on the south if the south was absolutely essential to the country's economy? Why didn't the South win the war if it was so economically dominant instead of getting ground down by a more financially and industrially proficient north? And why didn't capitalism end at the end of the Civil War at the destruction of slavery? Instead, it takes off like a rocket ship. And by the way, a lot of these illgotten gains that Presley is talking about in the slave South were destroyed during the Civil War. The plant plant plantation economy was absolutely devastated. Now after the war, you continue to get the exploitation of blacks through Jim Crow. But these measures were meant to exclude blacks from the mainstream economy. A terrible thing, a disgraceful thing, something that shouldn't have happened. But you can't turn around and say the mainstream economy was dependent on their labor. It just wasn't. In short, there are all sorts of things you can rightly say about racial injustice across the course of American history. What you can't say is that all of our wealth derives from the exploitation of black labor. That's a poisonously stupid thing to say in support of an unworthy cause of racial reparations in this country. Hey, by the way, comment, like, and subscribe. I guarantee you won't regret it. I'm Rich Lowry. Over and out.