posted by geeblock
Im not going to argue with you. If you think a group of people who owned slaves and knew it was wrong wrote piece of legislation that saw all races as equal and applied to all people thats up to you.
On the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the US Constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, said that the Constitution was "defective from the start." He pointed out that the framers had left out a majority of Americans when they wrote the phrase, "We the People." While some members of the Constitutional Convention voiced "eloquent objections" to slavery, Marshall said they "consented to a document which laid a foundation for the tragic events which were to follow."
The word "slave" does not appear in the Constitution. The framers consciously avoided the word, recognizing that it would sully the document. Nevertheless, slavery received important protections in the Constitution. The notorious three-fifths clause—which counted three-fifths of a state’s slave population in apportioning representation—gave the South extra representation in the House of Representatives and extra votes in the Electoral College. Thomas Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800 if not for the Three-fifths Compromise. The Constitution also prohibited Congress from outlawing the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years. A fugitive slave clause required the return of runaway slaves to their owners. The Constitution gave the federal government the power to put down domestic rebellions, including slave insurrections.
The framers of the Constitution believed that concessions on slavery were the price for the support of southern delegates for a strong central government. They were convinced that if the Constitution restricted the slave trade, South Carolina and Georgia would refuse to join the Union. But by sidestepping the slavery issue, the framers left the seeds for future conflict. After the convention approved the great compromise, Madison wrote: "It seems now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lies not between the large and small but between the northern and southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences form the line of discrimination."
People recognizing that was the division that was going to fester for decades up to and directly leading to the civil war is not the same as saying the document is racist.
There is a difference, again, in the sins of the authors and the document itself.
Key example, David in the Bible was an adulterer and a murderer, he also wrote the book of Psalms. Does that mean the Bible supports murder?
Of course not, that would be a logical fallacy just like saying that “well, some of the delegates that had a hand in the Constitution were racist, that means the document was” is asinine.
The founding documents said ALL MEN (and of course men being of mankind/humans). Sure, as a people/country we took nearly 200 years to accomplish that goal of all men (1787 to 1960s) but that’s on us as a country and a people, not on the document itself.
So again, point to the words in the document that spell out race, not to the authors.
