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The problem with short excerpts like this is that I don't have enough context to know exactly what the mayor intended to mean.
If I want to go in giving him the benefit of the doubt, and I don't see why I wouldn't, there are some contexts that could make sense.
He might be referring to America in general rather than just Chicago. Or, he could be speaking broadly about how exploited people always do most of the work, and just said slaves and indigenous people as examples of exploited people.
I don’t have enough context to know exactly what the mayor intended to mean.
Likely entirely on purpose. I bet the full context of the speech does help it make sense, but someone deliberately cut out that context in order to make a quick 'gotcha' moment out of it.
That is my assumption as well. I was just considering how much better this country could be if we just taught children to use steel man arguments instead of straw man arguments.
No different from when people clip streamers out of context. There’s a narrative that the poster is pushing. Otherwise they’d come with receipts.
Chicago was founded and grew after slavery was effectively ended in Illinois..
Is he implying that there were not slaved people or is trying to give credit to white slavers for building the city?
Illinois was established by a free black man, and has never allowed slavery.
It's important to remember that all of America benefited economically from the slave trade.
Illinois had de facto slavery (indentured servitude) and initially, after the territory was acquired from the French, many slaves were kept in bondage based on prior treaties.
Chicago was built as a trading hub for shipping Southern cotton, sugar, and tobacco to Eastern markets and Europe. So while the value of labor was most apparently stolen in the south, middlemen in Chicago eventually got a cut of that stolen value.
Finally, Illinois farmers sold massive amounts of corn, pork, and beef to Southern plantations. Plantations in the South devoted essentially all of their agricultural capacity to cash crops so they needed to be fed by the Midwest to remain viable. This arrangement allowed the nation as a whole to maximize the export value it derived from slavery.
https://will.illinois.edu/news/story/illinois-issuesslave-state