History tells us blacks in Africa practiced slavery for more than 6500 years. Early records indicate Egyptians were purchasing "excess" black slaves from African kingdoms to help support the massive building program at the time.

Several African empires built their wealth on slavery using slaves as currency. So, if you are black, you are likely descended from slaveowners and slaves. The attempt to position, American slavery as something unique in a world where slavery as an institution existed for thousands of years is simply a product of 1950s "woke" thinking. More white European slaves were taken to African, than black slaves to America during the time in history where slavery was practiced in North America. That's how common slavery was.

The vast majority of white people in America today have no link to black slavery and more Americans can link to ancestors that fought to end slavery rather than fought to preserve it...

After they fought to end slavery in the US, they went on to fight and die to end slavery in Africa, Asia, and South America. One would think you are proud to be a citizen of a country that more than any other besides Great Britain has a history of using its people and resources to try to stamp out slavery everywhere in the world. Sadly, in spite of those efforts, there are more slaves in the world today, than at any other time in history and most of them are in Asian and Africa! Think about that. Isn't better to identify as someone who belongs to a country that fought to end slavery, then identify with people from a continent that still practices it?

History as taught these days does a very poor job of presenting slavery as it really existed in the context of history and how it continues to operate in the world today.

Meanwhile, the truth is that most of America's wealth was built on the "backs" of immigrants not imported slaves. To give you some perspective over 72 million immigrants came to America less than one million slaves were brought to the United States. It is true the number of slaves increased over time due to the nature of chattel slavery, but so did the number of children born to immigrants consigned to work underground in coal mines or die in dangerous factories up north and in the south.

The South had a relatively small economy, which is one reason they were crush by the North in the Civil War. No number of slaves and descendants of indentured servants could produce enough to war with the northern immigrant driven economy.

In other words, if you harbor ill feeling to how the "elite" in South treated blacks and how the "elite" in the north treated immigrants and how they used skin color to divide people to prevent them from uniting, you are getting closer to the truth, than if you let yourself be persuaded that skin color was the issue... the "elite" viewed "poor whites" as "white trash" and the recent comments by Hillary Clinton referring to them as "deplorable" and Biden referring to them as "garbage" shows these views persist among the "elite".

The elite in this country has used race to divide us as far back as the 1600s. You sound like you bought into "race", hook, line and sinker and I agree with you, white racists who tend to be poor have also bought into skin color division.

For workers to have any chance of collectively improving their lot in life, they must stop allowing skin color to divide them. Instead, they must act together to elect politicians who will ensure they get access to a good education, prevent the elite from flooding the country will migrants to keep labor cheap, and prevent the wealthy from using the ability to move jobs overseas as a club in wage negotiations.

The wealthy are essentially the people that control the "capital" that the world needs to create jobs and opportunities, but more than most people they are focused on personal profit. These is nothing inherently wrong with that, but they are too greedy and don't know when to stop.

So, we need politicians that understand the "value" of Americans as consumers to buy the stuff the wealthy are selling. If they want to access US consumers, they need to employ them and pay them fairly and not force them to compete with people willing to work for low wages.

Do working blacks really have more in common with Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Barrack Obama, and Kamala Harris than they do with the white factory worker working alongside them on the factory floor? Real Americans are those people who put their fellow Americans first and not those who want to sell out their fellow Americans for personal gain.

I support capitalism and free markets, but that only works when workers have enough leverage in the economy to demand a fair wage for their time.