Enslaved Americans did not benefit black people.

The question we should be asking ourselves is not, "did enslaved Americans benefit from being enslaved?"

The question we should be asking is, "why are so many white conservatives in America so invested in believing and propagating this claim?"

It's part of a much broader and extremely widespread cultural and historical worldview among white Americans about the relationship between white and black people in America, and about the meaning of racial injustice and racial power in our history.

The belief that black folks caught some benefits from slavery is of a piece with "well, they should be grateful that at least they're not back in Africa." It's still a deep-seated eurocentric, colonialist worldview that says that abused and brutalized populations under colonialism ultimately still benefited from it. That colonialism and slavery were forms of "tough love" that dragged backwards peoples into modernity, that black Africans were given access to participating in modern civilization via the slave trade.

These people would never in a million years argue that a white person who was kidnapped and forced to mow lawns for the rest of his life ultimately benefited from at least learning how to mow lawns. The implication is that the tasks that enslaved people had to be proficient in in order to not be beaten or killed were somehow highly valuable skills that they otherwise wouldn't have had if they had remained free, that they wouldn't have figured out or acquired on their own.

"Slavery benefited black people" is processed on the same neural pathways as the disgusted anger toward black people who are viewed as insufficiently patriotic, insufficiently grateful to be here (don't stand for the pledge or the national anthem, etc). These are the same people who want CRT out of classrooms because they believe it is deeply unfair to whites in that it dramatically overstates the scope and the severity and the moral repugnance of slavery, Indian removal, settler colonialism, Jim Crow, redlining, police brutality, the drug war, and racism and racial Injustice generally.

This isn't just DeSantis trying to stick his thumb in the eye of woke liberals. This is him appealing to a deep American sensibility. It's much easier for white Americans to continue to believe that America is the most morally just place in the history of the world if they believe that ultimately all the people on the receiving end of colonialism and the slave trade are actually reaping the benefits of it now, that there was something ultimately benevolent or providential about the whole thing in the biggest picture sense. This isn't DeSantis telling black people that being stolen and enslaved gave them the gift of civilization; this is Desantis telling white people: "we civilized them, and we won't forget it and we won't let our children forget it because we will make sure they learn it in schools."