410,000,000,000
A number which should be *taught* to every American citizen.
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The Number
410 billion. Remember it. For the rest of your lives.
What is it? According to the National Institute of Health, 410,000,000,000 are the total number of hours worked by the near 10,000,000 slaves which existed in the colonies and the US from 1619-1865. And while it is a number which should be taught in American high schools as a denouncement of the evils of slavery, if you mention it in a Texas school, you will then have to (a) frame it in a way which is not negative, or (b) offer a countering, positive, connotation to this number.
That’s 41,000 hours of labor from each human being, for which they received merely sustenance. Not ‘sustenance-level wages’, but sustenance. 20.5 years of as cheap labor as one can get, per person. While being beaten. While being bred. While being raped. While being kept purposely ignorant. While living like this:
So why is it that I, and most people reading this far, am hearing of this number for the first time? 410,000,000,000 hours is a vast amount of time - 47 million years of enslaved labor went to enrich their white owners. Black citizens in this country lost 47 million years of productive earnings, hell, African-Americans lost 47 million years of savings and compound interest!
No… wait. It wasn’t lost. It was stolen. By, let’s just be frank here, by white people like my own ancestors. 47,000,000 years of productive capacity just poured into the pockets of the white slaveholders, not the workers themselves. No… their reward was being whipped. And raped. By white people who told themselves that they were doing all the work.
So… why can’t we just say this? Why are laws like Texas’s HB3979 being enacted to ensure that the phrasing of history is not emotionally jarring to the historical narrative we white people like to tell themselves?
Because to admit the true scale of slavery, the 47 million years of stolen labor, would cause legitimate damage to the American mythology, a system of beliefs which depend upon these assumptions being bought by the masses:
America was a pristine, undeveloped land (it was not – 15, 20 million lived on this continent when Columbus arrived, and they weren’t foragers.)
White people came over and discovered it.
By our own rugged individualism, white people tamed the countryside.
Through grit and hard work, white people civilized a continent
The American (white) ideals of freedom and capitalism propelled this country to greatness, a shining city on the hill
In America, anyone can be a success
In America, you will be rewarded for your hard work
In America, you are free
However… you cannot reconcile the above assumptions with 47 million years of stolen labor. You cannot reconcile the above with Jim Crow. You cannot reconcile the above with 19th century labor conditions… or even the labor conditions of the first half of the 20th century. You cannot reconcile the above with 100,000,000 indigenous lives lost post-1492. You can’t even reconcile the above with indentured servitude, a moral horror which white people subjected themselves to.
Hanna, turning 15 years old in the months after the Civil War ended, did not know what to do. For her entire life… and the entire lives of everyone she knew… she had been a slave, responding to the rhythms of the plantation. And now, with the war over and the Confederacy defeated, she is… ‘free’.
A reason to celebrate just a few months ago, the cold hard reality of freedom is that she, and her people, have little understanding of the white man’s society. Born into subservience to the white man, it was impossible to visualize joining their world of wages, savings, investments,… the world of money, the one thing (beyond their color) which defined their servitude. Maybe her child, James, born after massa Tompkins’s son took his way with her when Hanna was 12, will be wealthy, but it’s impossible for Hanna to understand what she never had: Wages. Money.
And then there was the simple impossibility of going to the man who once held the whip, or his son, the rapist, looking them in the eyes as equals, asking them for fair wages. Massa Tompkins, never an easy man, now hated Hanna and her people with a fervor they didn’t have before the war, hated them his loss of wealth and status, hated them for his Godforsaken country’s loss, hated them even as he needed them, and Hanna worried for the days the Northern troops were gone, leaving the freedmen at the mercy of their… at least this word didn’t change as they transitioned from slavery to capitalism… bosses.
The scale of Slavery, explained
So, what is the scale of American slavery in today’s terms?
When one measures something like this, there is a lot of digging through financial data, a lot of factoring for inflation, etc. But for this little essay, let’s try something different. Instead of moving the financial data to current times, with requires a lot of math (trust me), let’s move the slavery to the current day:
Starting 1-1-2022, you will own enough American slaves to provide you with 410 billion hours of labor (47 million years worked) by 12-31-2022, at which time they go back to being free citizens. You get to cut their wages all the way down to sustenance levels, while putting the surplus (the difference between their pre-slave wages and their post-slave wages) in your pocket.
Your slaves work in their current jobs for their current companies/governments/organizations, they cannot quit, and you get the entire difference between their current pay packages and what you decide to pay them. You’ve decided that they do not need a middle-class lifestyle, just paying them enough so that 3, 4 of them can room together in an apartment, taking the bus, buying food at McDonalds is just fine. So, minimum wage it is - $7 an hour, rounding up is for losers.
In addition, you receive all profits generated by the work product produced by those slaves. And, to make things simpler, your revenues and profits are an exact reflection of today’s overall American economy and not just one sector.
How wealthy would you be?
# of People needed: Slaves typically worked 10 or more hours a day, 6 days a week, except during planting/harvesting, when they would work up to 16 hours a day. For this exercise, let’s say 12 hours a day, or 72 hours of slave labor a week, for 52 weeks a year (3,744 hours). From a starting point of 410 billion hours, this means 109,500,000 American citizens will be enslaved for a year.
Appropriated Wages: Average hourly wages in America is $30 (rounded) according to the BLS. Given that we decided sustenance is a $7/hour cost, this leaves $23/hour to appropriate. Since we know 410,000,000,000 hours will be worked by the end of the year, just multiply 410B * $23 to get $9,430,000,000,000 in appropriated ‘surplus earnings’.
Profits: Since the 109 million represent 67.7% of the September 2021 labor force of 161 million, this means you pocket 67.7% of American corporate profits. According to the BEA, this means 67.7% of $2.2 trillion in 2020 profits, or $3.25 trillion, is yours.
We’re going to stop here – I’m sure there are other factors we can add to your profit - for example, as a slaveowner following the practices of the American South, you may have the right to sell any babies born to your slaves in the time of their enslavement. Or you could have had a fire sale of American slaves around December 1st or so. Unfortunately, since the slavery ends at a defined time, you are unable to collateralize your slaves via factoring loans as the American South did during the 1850s, securing loans against the future value of their slaves’ work product. We are taught that the British made the South rich because of cotton. What we are not taught is that the South treated their slaves as financial instruments in addition to working slaves – now black slaves not only had to work to maintain the plantation, black slaves had to work harder to pay off the debt placed upon their own backs.
We are also not going to calculate the impact of lost savings and interest/investment opportunities to go along with those savings, but that alone should have a trillion dollar impact, and even more importantly, a legacy impact: Where would white people be if we didn’t get paid for anything we did in America until 1866?
No, this exercise is already morally repugnant enough without adding financialization impacts. Let’s just finish it.
To recap:
# Enslaved Americans: 109,500,000
Appropriated Wages: $9.43 trillion
Profits: $3.25 trillion
(We didn’t sell any babies)
Total: $12.68 trillion, with 75% coming from stolen wages
I can imagine some of you thinking “$12.7 trillion? There is no way the South appropriated $12 trillion equivalent from the slaves! $12 billion? Easy. $127 billion? Likely. $1.27 trillion? Maybe. But not $12.7 trillion.”
To this point, $12 trillion is probably the upper boundary, but it is not an impossible number: after all, the British pulled $45 trillion (equivalent) from India. Cite. (And with a 200-year opium trade with China, I cannot imagine the trillions poured into English coffers by the dying (because the West is murdering it) Chinese civilization, but it must be equivalent. But I digress…)
Bill Gates has a net worth of $135 billion. $12.6 trillion is Bill Gates cloned 94 times. It is ~50% of the United States’ GDP for 2021. And $12.7 trillion represents, in today’s terms, the financial wealth stolen by white southerners via the 250-year appropriation of all surplus income and wealth of 10,000,000 black people.
And the above doesn’t even begin to calculate the financial damage caused to African-Americans by Jim Crow and systemic racism.
The War against Black Intellectuals
How do you frame the above in a manner consistent with Texas HB3979 which states (paraphrased):
“A teacher… may not… teach”:
That any race has ‘blame’ for racial actions.
That one bears responsibility or should feel ashamed for actions committed in the past by members of the same race (“An individual, by virtue of the individual ’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”)
Concepts such as “hard work ethic” and “meritocracy” were created by one race to maintain superiority over another race.
“require an understanding of the 1619 Project”
“with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality”
“members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex”
But, that’s OK! Because if you do violate the above… for example, by noting that over 90% of all wealth appropriation due to slavery occurred after 1790… you get to save your career by:
“A teacher who chooses to discuss a topic described by Subdivision (1) shall, to the best of the teacher’s ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”
I want you to reread the above and please, for my amusement, please write a countering “diverse and contending (perspective) without giving deference to any one perspective” to the slave experience.
In short: Please, write me a piece of slavery-minimizing history which makes $12.7 trillion of stolen wealth go away.
Oh… oh, wait. We already have one! That slavery-minimizing history is contained in the narrative above, the one where…
America was a pristine, undeveloped land
White people came over and discovered it.
By our own rugged individualism, white people tamed the countryside.
Through grit and hard work, white people civilized a continent
The American (white) ideals of freedom and capitalism propelled this country to greatness, a shining city on the hill
In America, anyone can be a success
In America, you will be rewarded for your hard work
In America, you are free
This is why HB3979 exists. Without it, conservatives fear the narrative we white people have told ourselves about American history will be torn asunder.
HB3979 is a piece of thought control legislation enacted by frightened white people which is designed, purposely so, as to disallow the concept that white people may have some moral complicity in how the modern world developed. It is born out of the same slavery mindset which holds you’re not supposed to criticize massa. It’s just unseemly and churlish. It is specifically designed in reaction to the 1619 Project, a collection of historical essays which dared to suggest that slavery was far more central to the American narrative than the above myth allows, and it has launched a war against Black Intellectuals the likes we have not seen since the 1960s.
Anti-CRT laws are pathetic, frightened, weak-minded pieces of legislation. Imagine being so scared of your history you need to legislate how it is taught. Imagine being so scared of accepting the moral ambiguity of one’s ancestors and the origins of a country that you prefer, by supporting these initiatives, to brand yourself an emotionally and intellectually stunted weakling.
The very framework of HB3979 is itself racist - racist against white people like myself in its racist assumption that white people do not have the emotional or intellectual capacity to hear narratives of history which do not place us at the apex.
And to do this in the United States of America. Despicable. Deplorable.
So, I’d like to end this with a simple, racial plea to my fellow whites:
White people, we are better than this. Own our history, stop stifling the important voices of Nikole Hannah Jones or Bakari Sellers, and accept the fact that, from Columbus-onward, we raped this planet to the tune of 2 continents who had their populations completely replaced by white stock, 3 civilizations which were largely destroyed, 6 civilizations which were diminished, 10,000,000 dead in WW1, 30,000,000 slaves, 40,000,000-80,000,000 addicted Chinese people, 55,000,000 dead in WW2, 150,000,000+ dead in the North and South America Indigenous Holocaust, and a market-based economy which underpaid billions of people tens of trillions of dollars. And I didn’t even bring up the Partition of Africa!
We did the above too, in addition to railroads, symphonies, industrialization, and microchips. So stop fucking whining:
We want the credit? We take the blame.
We need to learn to teach ourselves a history which is FAR more inclusive to the peoples we ran roughshod and slaughtered over the past 500 years. Because, frankly, while the technology was nice, not too sure that the Capitalism/Communism/Nationalism trifecta did anyone any favors, and the slaving/murdering/conquering… all it did was cost us our souls.
It’s up to us to claim our souls back.
The above was inspired by something I saw online, quoted, in part, below:
“There is nothing wrong with being white. Whites founded this nation. Whites have created almost everything you use or own. Whites created the bedrock of civilization as we know it. Yes, whites are becoming a smaller and smaller minority on this planet and probably in a few hundred years will die out and probably before then subject to persecutions. Evolution of all things. But where will the rest of you be without us?”
I do not want to link to the source to prevent an internet pile-on (from the 3 people who read this far, lol), thank you.
Thank you. This was extremely eye-opening.