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Haley says US has ‘never been a racist country
(thehill.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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The constitution is quite racist. Has she never looked at the constitution? Oh right yeah, republican, she hasn't. Hey Nimarata, they later famously had to add a whole amendment to add equal protection under the law regardless of race, after you know, that whole civil war thing.
It was hard to get dumber after her civil war comments, but she found a way. This is even more mental gymnastics than all that lost cause BS. Like holy crap, you can't glance at any time period of American history without racism or its effects rearing its ugly head.
Race and color weren't referred to in the constitution until the 15th amendment, which granted equal protection. You can argue parts talk about slavery in the abstract but could refer to any non-free person (prisoners for example).
Racism was institutionalized in many, many other ways but to say the constitution specifically is quite racist isn't really correct, it's more than race was left out.
Now the confederate constitution, that's an example of won't shut up about race.
I mean, Article 1 Section 2? The Three Fifths Compromise seems like it's pretty race based to me. I suppose it probably doesn't explicitly outline that it's based on race, just enslavement status of the person, but that's splitting hairs a bit, no?
Three fifths compromise was an attempt to determine how to count the population in terms of representation. Free men of any race were counted as a whole person.
Leads to the question, was it racist because a slave should be counted as whole person and thus give slave owning populations more power in government despite the fact that the slave would not have their representatives advocate for them? Or should they not be counted as a person at all and thus be reduced to property with no representatives accounting for their population? Is being in the middle any worse than the extremes?
There is no morally right answer on the subject (because slavery itself makes any decision on the matter inherently immoral), however it needed to be addressed in terms of how representatives are distributed to the states.
Do you really think they had white people in mind when they made the 3/5ths compromise?
I'm aware it managed to avoid the specific word "race." It still enshrined chattel slavery thanks to the fugitive slave clause, even though they deliberately avoided using the word slave. I'm also aware the 3/5ths clause is often misconstrued (was pushed for by the northern states not southern), but it's a huge indication that it was generally understood that the rights enshrined by the constitution did not apply to people of other races and slaves and they were to be treated differently. Not until the 14th amendment were the benefits of the constitution and the law in general theoretically available to people of all races, though on a state by state basis sometimes people of other races got some rights prior to this. It ultimately is a compromise document between pro and anti slavery framers with varying levels of racist thoughts and opinions, as was common at the time.
Nikki Haley of course also ignoring the vast multitude of even more explicitly racist laws throughout all of the colonies. Heck even though Pennsylvania law didn't mention race in regard to voting, black people there lost the right to vote in 1838 because of course when we say men in the state constitution we just meant white men not black (they didn't get the right back until the 1870s). A document can still be racist without explicitly using the words race or slave, if that's how everyone understands it.
And then there's Jim Crow and that whole era, not to even get into more insidious manifestations where race isn't explicitly mentioned but racist effects result (but that brings up critical race theory, the ultimate conservative boogeyman).
And yes the confederate constitution definitely dials it up to 11, agreed.
I know the constitution isn't the perfect example, but I bring it up because it shows that racism was a part of the country from the beginning. Overall point is just that saying we've never been a racist country is a ridiculous statement no matter how you frame it.
3/5ths?