Slavery and the displacement of Native Americans are genuine moral stains on American history, and any honest accounting must reckon with them. But the claim that America was "built on" these injustices — implying they were the sole or primary engine of American prosperity — is historically reductive and economically inaccurate.

Consider the economics. Economic historian Robert Fogel, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, demonstrated in "Without Consent or Contract" that while slavery was profitable for slaveholders, it actually retarded Southern economic development. By 1860, the South's per-capita income was 72% of the Northern average. The industrial revolution, technological innovation, mass immigration, and free labor in the North and West were far more significant drivers of American economic growth. After slavery ended, the formerly enslaved South remained the poorest region for a century, while the free-labor North and West generated the vast majority of American GDP growth.

The narrative also ignores what made America exceptional. The United States was not unique in practicing slavery — virtually every civilization in human history practiced it. What was unique was that America developed the philosophical framework, fought a devastating civil war that killed 620,000 people, and ultimately abolished the institution. The ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that all men are created equal with unalienable rights — were revolutionary. They were imperfectly applied, but they contained the seeds of their own expansion.

The treatment of Native Americans involved genuine atrocities. The Trail of Tears, broken treaties, and forced assimilation policies were moral failures. But the term "genocide" — the deliberate, systematic extermination of a people — is historically imprecise. The overwhelming majority of Native American population decline (an estimated 90%) was caused by diseases introduced before large-scale European settlement, primarily smallpox, which was not a deliberate policy.

America's history is complex — it includes both profound injustice and extraordinary moral progress. The abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and the ongoing expansion of liberty represent a trajectory of self-correction that is remarkable in world history. Teaching only the sins without the corrections, the failures without the ideals, produces a distorted picture that serves political purposes rather than historical truth.