Making America

Sometimes I feel like people don’t realize everything the slaves helped America accomplish. At least I never fully understood the extent they contributed to making America what it is today. When reading the article, The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery, in class I was shocked to learn that the labor the slaves put in caused the economy to grow exponentially due to the selling of sugar, which ”America provided for 1/4 of the worlds sugar”(Muhammad), and cotton. If it weren’t for the slaves, America would not be using the products to the abundance it does today, and the market would not be where it’s currently at. Although I think we would have still used the products today by getting them one way or another whether it was through imports or doing the labor ourselves, I think the quantity would be no where near what we have now. It wasn’t all the rich white men who made America what it is today, although they did have a crucial role in the making of it, so did the people of color who slaved away in the fields and the mills. They need to be credited for everything they did and accomplished. In school we learn about a bunch of old dudes who "made" America, but I think we need to focus a little less time on them and a little more on the slaves and all they did to make America what it is today. 

Comments

  1. Abby RizkOctober 20, 2019 at 12:20 PM

    I wholeheartedly agree that NO ONE realizes how much slaves did to build our country. It truly was built by them- not us...

    ReplyDelete

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