A good example of the Motte and Bailey technique: the only way this statement is even approximately true is if "actually built" is interpreted narrowly to mean unskilled physical labor in the sun, but the writer hopes the reader will unconsciously become sympathetic to a broad interpretation of "actually built" to mean something like "wealth creation" even though most wealth creation over the last 200 years was the result of inventing things, explaining those inventions to others and organizing labor (through professional corporate managers, finance and government policy) which of course in the US was done mostly by white protestants.

They built the legal, political, and cultural structure that enabled America to flourish.

Wonder why Africans didn’t build many Washingtons back in their home countries..

P.S: I’m African (Nigerian)

FFS, that's asinine and obviously incorrect. The counter-examples are obvious: look at all the areas in America where (especially historically) the population is pretty much 100% "white European protestants." Would you expect to find everyone there living outside, exposed to the elements, with no cities or towns anywhere?

How did you come to believe what you wrote? You should check your learning pipeline for bugs.

Gonna strongly disagree with you there. Look, many people don't like it, but the truth is that many of those myths you just proffered are only half true. Many Chinese participated in building railroads, but so did many, many white protestants. And guess who designed the rail roads and surveyed the routes. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire system was kicked off through the labor of blacks who built the rail system in the east long before many of either the Chinese or the poor white protestants even got here. And did most of the dirty work to extend it west so that the Chinese you're talking about could connect it.

Canals, again, were definitely designed and organized by white protestants. And, also again, blacks did the majority of the early work there too. Why? Because everyone else, from the native americans we tried, to the Irish, tended to die from malarial disease doing that work. Horrible as it sounds to say, it's more accurate to say that many Irish, um, "made sure blacks were working hard to build the canals". But to write white protestants out of that story? When they literally conceived and designed the whole thing? Nonsense.

And on and on. I mean really? Italians built New York? Where do you think the harbor came from that the Italian immigrants sailed into? The infrastructure fairy? Where do you think the engineers who conceived those bridges, harbors, ports, Ellis Island, etc etc came from? Out of the butt of a rainbow colored skittles pooping unicorn? It was white protestants. (I'll make you even madder, most of them were male.) Oh, by the way, guess who the protestants had doing the work in the caissons? It wasn't Italians. Slavery was horrible. Especially for blacks. But it got $#!t done.

You can believe your origin myths if you like, but please, don't try to make your space in America by attempting to write other people out of theirs.

I hate how you get racial with your comment, but since you want to go there: literally 90% or more of America from the 1700s through the 1900s was physically built by on the backs of Protestant white labor.

Your view seems to be narrowed to a few isolated railroads or tunnels built by the Chinese or Irish near the coasts. You’re forgetting the development of the entire vast interior of the United States.

Hundreds of thousands of miles of roads carved and built from nothing. Fields cleared and plowed. Irrigation and drainage ditches. Towns and cities along with their infrastructure built up out of the dirt, essentially none of it done with slaves or indentured labor.

The Midwest really gets screwed in this retconning of US history. They didn’t have slavery like the south; they didn’t have banks that profited from the slave capital like the northeast. Half of them came over as indentured servants themselves, and then tons of them died fighting in a war that didn’t have anything to do with them because they were morally outraged by slavery. Now they’re lumped in with all the other “white people.”

Arguably, the bulk of the "raw resources" which have accumulated to US business interests came from eg Latin America, from which Europe and later America pulled rubber, silver, beef, copper, chocolate and a thousand others. Neither have we stopped; where do you think Nestlé's palm kernel oil comes from? Not the raw resources within our borders.

I recommend everyone read "No Wall They Can Build" and "Open Veins of Latin America".