The only thing my negro ears hear when a white person says “Umm actually, my family was too poor to own slaves” is “The only thing preventing us from owning slaves was a lack of wealth. You best believe if we were rich, we’d have owned them"
Exactly. Also, plenty of poor families “rented” slaves, helped “catch” them, kidnapped them, and rioted against them. They definitely helped lynch them and befitted from assistance programs black “slaves” couldn’t. Every white person in the U.S. benefited from slavery in some way because it was such an essential part of the U.S. economy, even in the North.
Also, whenever (white) people say slavery would have ended “naturally” because it wasn’t economically profitable, what I hear is that white people still wouldn’t have “abolished” slavery for moral reasons, but because they could no longer benefit from it at large. In each reality, either the one we live in or that one, white people didn’t have/wouldn’t have had a large social awakening on why slavery was wrong, but would have come to the realization that they could no longer reap the awards of it in a way that benefitted them significantly.
Additionally, slavery and its after-effects wouldn’t have just poofed out of existence similar to our current condition because of the social benefits it posed for white people in that even if they were poor, they still had an “edge” over black folks due to not being able to be subjected to American chattel slavery. They still would have fought to keep it on those conditions alone.
