> Maybe the “central novel claim” of the essay. All schoolchildren know Jefferson was being a hypocrite in declaring “all men are created equal” while owning other people.

I'd encourage you to ask that question of modern Republican leadership.

> But claiming that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery” is demagoguery.

No. Its a critical response a commonly held romanticization of the founding and early history of the US (an incredibly stupid romanticization given the amount of criticism the founders had for each other).

It's also a response to work by a variety of groups to erase the impact and negative stigma around Slavery. To re-romanticize it as heritage and something to be proud of.

I'm also not sure that you're correctly quoting the article (or perhaps it changed, but it currently reads)

> Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.

I'd be curious to know which of those things you believe didn't grow, in some part or another, out of slavery. And whether the moon landing, silicon valley, or our many nobel laureates weren't in turn influenced/attracted/created by our economic might and industrial power.

> America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery. It didn’t become the most successful immigrant country in the world because of slavery. Silicon Valley, the moon landing, and our raft of Nobel Laureates didn’t grow out of slavery.

Directly? Perhaps not. But are you really going to claim that the immense wealth among white Americans didn't grow out of the subjugation of slaves (and native populations) and theft from those groups? Slavery jumpstarted the US economy, and much of the early US economy (even that of the North) was only successful due to slavery as an institution. That wealth still, today, hasn't really trickled back into the hands of Black Americans.

> America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery.

You're correct in that slavery was not the impetus for rebuilding Europe. But to ignore slavery (and, by the 1940s, the various post-slavery racist policies to subjugate and extract value from Black Americans, whether sharecropping or reconstruction era prison slavery in the south), yes there's a fair argument to be made that much fo the accumulated wealth of the US is due to that wealth not being distributed to slaves in the early years.

Consider the raw numbers: 1/6 of America's population in 1860 was slaves. That means that, as a reasonable guess, 20% of America's workforce wasn't compensated for their work on a national scale, and that was true for decades. Think about what a massive transfer of wealth that would be, compounded over the century and a half since.

> Silicon Valley

This is particularly ironic given Shockley's views on eugenics and race.