Northern Wealth from Slavery: How Slavery Built our Modern Economy. Touch the hand of an African American elder born in 1927 and you are touching the hand of someone whose grandparents could have been born into U.S. chattel slavery. Their bodies were assets, credit, debt, capital. Generations of forced labor fueled what has become the world’s economic powerhouse through King Cotton to railroads to mines. State-sponsored slavery and today’s extraordinary personal and business wealth - concentrated among whites - are so interconnected that scholars say the U.S. economy as it is now would not exist without slavery. If you do business with Bank of America, Aetna, J.P Morgan Chase, Wachovia, New York Life, Lehman Brothers, Brooks Brothers, AIG, and USA Today, among others, you are doing business with companies whose wealth is built on predecessors that funded slaving ships, insured enslaved bodies, used enslaved people as collateral for loans and mortgaged property, rented forced laborers to railroad and mine companies, and sold enslavers clothes for their property. History is the present. As we build toward an African American Reparations Demand in Fall 2021, learn more about the wealth-building legacy of slavery through the Black Codes through Jim Crow to current anti-Black discrimination that has exploded the racial wealth gap. Let’s explore how some states and cities are forcing companies and vendors to disclose their slavery era activities if they want to do business. #justice #accountability #rjc #racialjusticecollaborative #dismantlewhitesupremacy #wealthgap #juneteenth #blackhistory #crt #criticalracetheory #slavery #enslaved https://www.instagram.com/p/CR9UPzQrs35/?utm_medium=tumblr