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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a fringe opinion. It is historical fact. The founders were mostly slaveowners [1]. The Constitution originally had slaves as three-fifths of a person. Oregon didn't like black people so much they didn't even want slavery [2]. A Civil War was fought to preserve chattel slavery.

The idea that white supremacy didn't run to the core of America's founding is demonstrably false and, well, laughable.

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/five-truths-about...

[1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/oregon-on...

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> The founders were mostly slaveowners

I keep hearing this like it means something, perhaps implying that the founders didn't really mean all that stuff they wrote about freedom and rights?

Including everything they wrote acknowledging that slavery was a wrong?

Why didn't they get right of it, then?

Maybe because oh I don't know, dysfunctional politics? Having to deal with the southern states who absolutely refused to go along with this??

And how does the cynicism of "they didn't mean it" help? Even if we, contrary to lots of evidence, assume they didn't mean it, maybe we, today, can? Maybe we can say "all people are created equal" means all people. Does it matter if our founders were able to perfect live by this, or is it more important that they gave us this as a goal?

How well do any of us live by our principles? Does this mean principles are bad or wrong? Or does it just stress the need for forgiveness, repentance, and redemption?

Do you know why the constitution counted slaves as 3/5 of a person? Because if they had counted them as whole persons, then the slave population would have enabled the South to dominate the House (and thereby protect slavery even more).

The Civil War was fought to preserve chattel slavery? By half the country, yes. Fought to end it by the other half. (Yes, I know, Lincoln's goal was to preserve the union. But go look at how many Union soldiers' graves say "He died that all might be free".)

On to the problem with your first post. Even if we agree with everything you said in your second post, that doesn't begin to draw a line from slavery to civil forfeiture. (I mean, if civil forfeiture was primarily applied to blacks, you might have a case. But you didn't even try to make that case, or any other.)

> Do you know why the constitution counted slaves as 3/5 of a person?

None of that changes the fact that doing so explicitly indicates slavery to be a legal practice in the newly founded country. "You can keep black people as property, but don't worry, we fixed the impact on Congressional representation" is exactly the sort of thing that "white supremacy" describes.

> I mean, if civil forfeiture was primarily applied to blacks, you might have a case.

That's pretty easy.

https://oklahomawatch.org/2015/10/07/most-police-seizures-of...

"Nearly two thirds of seizures of cash by Oklahoma law enforcement agencies come from blacks, Hispanics and other racial or ethnic minorities, an Oklahoma Watch analysis of high-dollar forfeiture cases in 10 counties shows."

https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/taken/2019/01/27...

"Black residents have their money and property taken by police in South Carolina nearly three times more often than whites, for deep and unfair systemic reasons that go beyond the design of a civil forfeiture law, experts say."

A civil war was fought and lost by a side who pretty much treated the principles of the Declaration of Independence like dirt for decades. So count the aftermath of the Civil War as the Second Founding, the amendments made that fulfilled the promise made in the First.

I can't imagine how anyone could actually believe this if they were aware of the 100 years of history following the civil war.

I don't imagine that constitutional amendments are fully implemented with immediate effect in areas that are congenitally hostile to them is why. It is not exactly news that the South did everything they could to resist the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments for over a century. They still failed - and why did they fail? Because those amendments were eventually used in a renewed federal effort to bring the South into the compliance with their most basic standards, an effort that was put on hold for decades. You can't expect history to happen overnight, sometimes it takes time.

It sounds like you’re agreeing with the Dredd Scott decision: you’re saying the founders never intended to include people of African descent as persons under the constitution.

The reason it’s wrong is the post is written as if slavery and all it’s sins fall on America, that America wouldn’t exist today without this ideal and that a great correction is due. All of the ‘developed’ world at the time were slave owners. Also slavery was not new it’s as old as time and every civilization had it’s own version of it. It wasn’t white supremacy as in we are doing this because we are better its class warfare asserting power over one group, the conquerors and the conquered. Was that group dehumanized? Yes but many of the founders wrote and stood against it and didn’t view them as subhuman. Pretty sure one of them freed and married a slave. The 3/5ths compromise at the time was a compromise to have slaves considered as people with rights to vote while other states didn’t like that because it meant they were people. But it was a great compromise just like the civil war, if the idea of slavery and white supremacy ie man is not created equal was so rooted then why was there decades of conflict over it…

> The 3/5ths compromise at the time was a compromise to have slaves considered as people with rights to vote while other states didn’t like that because it meant they were people.

If you think slaves in the US had the right to vote, I think you should sit this discussion out.

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