ome people recommend a colorblind approach to racism in America by insisting that it will go away if we stop talking about it. One problem is that the U.S. Constitution was encoded with colorblind racism in the beginning.1
Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, of the Constitution contains what’s commonly called “The Three-Fifths Compromise.” The purpose was not to grant 3/5 personhood to enslaved people (elsewhere the legal system referred to them as property without any personal rights). The clause leveraged the presence of the enslaved to give slaveholding states more congressional representation and Electoral College votes than they would otherwise have.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, is sometimes called “The Slave Trade Clause.” It prohibited Congress from limiting the importation of slaves for the nation’s first 20 years. It did allow for taxation of these human imports.
Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, became known as the “Fugitive Slave Clause.” It prohibited one state from providing refuge to an escaped slave from another state. States’ rights were a one-way proposition in favor of slaveholding states. This clause was strengthened by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the 1842 SCOTUS decision in Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, and another Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
These three clauses reveal the founders carefully avoided the words “slaves,” “slavery,” “negroes,” and “blacks.” They knew the world was watching how they would align their new nation with the revolutionary liberties they had just fought for. They also knew slavery violated those values, so they used legalese to lessen the dissonance.
Lest we be accused of presentism, here are their own words:
“We must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us. . . and. . . will make us as tame, and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” George Washington, 1774.2
“He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere. . . this piratical warfare. . . of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.” Thomas Jefferson, Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence.3
Don’t be conned by colorblind cures.
