Did Only 1.4 Percent of White Americans Own Slaves in 1860?

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Did Only 1.4 Percent of White Americans Own Slaves in 1860?
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Just because a statistic gets cited a lot in memes doesn’t make it correct.

of memes and social media posts that attempt to downplay the severity of white America’s historical complicity in slavery:The earliest instance of this statistic entering the digital lexicon with the purpose of minimizing white culpability for slavery appears to be aon Vice titled “Hey Kids ... It's Time For Some Dumb Myths And Smart Facts About Slavery!” which opens with this premise:

If you're white like Uncle Jim, your teachers will try to convince you that you're responsible … for a bunch of bad, bad things that happened a long, long time ago. If you're a black schoolchild, I'm sure your parents will have plenty of excuses for why your ancestors were enslaved. But chances are that you're white — at least for the next generation or two, those are the chances — so I've collected a bunch of DUMB MYTHS and SMART FACTS about slavery that you can use to clown your teachers and everyone else at school!phrased in much the same way the viral memes currently make use of it over a decade later:

At the peak of black slavery in the South, only 6 percent of Southern whites owned slaves. If you include the white people in the North, it means that only 1.4 percent of white Americans owned black slaves at the HEIGHT of slavery., the actual number doesn’t really matter. The point, these memes argue, is that the number is small, and therefore black people should not hold animus toward white people for the crimes of their ancestors. The message stays the same, even when the numbers do not.

Among the data collected were the total population of each state — both free and enslaved — as well as family and household statistics. These data can be found in the state-level population

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