I find the woke rhetoric about the USA being built on the backs of slaves to be partly baffling and partly revealing.
Those statements run contrary to most economic scholarship. The idea that the USA became an economic superpower as a result of forced labor rather than slavery actually stifling growth is fairly controversial. The fact that the largest, most rapid economic expansion in human history came after the Civil War seems to stand contrary to this idea.
The motivation seems to be to permanently saddle American institutions, particularly capitalism, with the stain of the evil of slavery in order to manipulate gullible people into supporting a complete overhaul of our systems. Still, that's an incoherent position, too. There are still an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide who are mostly living in planned economies and poor countries.
Still, why make the claim that slavery is an economic good when most economists insist otherwise? Well, it's because the woke movement is socialist. They have to promote the idea that slavery is good for economic growth because that's what socialism is. The only thing that they see immoral about forced labor is the component of racial discrimination.