@seawulf575 – Look, I don’t open by insulting you, so let’s keep it civil, eh? Actually, I kinda did, so my bad. I’m really not trying to antagonize because I think you generally have the more thought out incorrect opinions of most people here.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I also own people and can rape them and sell their children.
Also. Indians are “merciless savages”.
Jefferson wasn’t a psychopath, he was just a white supremacist like a lot of them. He didn’t invent slavery, but he benefited greatly from it. No one likes to believe they are a piece of shit, and being a slaver is a giant piece of shit move. The way these high minded liberals rationalized their hypocrisy was a fundamental belief in white supremacy.
Of course there was some hand wringing and internal debate, but to “table” the issue for later, (and give the power of federal representation for owning said slaves) in favor of the expediencies required to forge a new nation, means that slavery was fundamental to the nation being founded.
Slavery and white supremacy absolutely were fundamental to the creation of the nation. It didn’t even need to be mentioned that black people didn’t count as equal. It was known and assumed. Sure some people hated slavery and wanted it gone, but the bargain that brought the colonies together was that no one would do anything about the slaves. When John Laurens tried to convince slavers to free their slaves to fight for the Union, the response he got was “Long live the King”
The country could not have been founded without slavery as a fundamentally understood right, and white supremacy was the cope that let them sleep at night.
And yes, thank you for reminding us that blacks did slavery too. Slavery has been a part of just about every culture with power over another, but European colonialism plus ready access to capital were required to morph traditional, forced enslavement of others, into the one drop rule and chattel enslavement. The economic opportunity was too great and too many forces demanded it. White supremacy grew up around the economic imperatives.
As far as institutional racism goes, (I know you hate that term, so let’s just say “systemic”) how do you account for the noticeably different rates of poverty, violent crime, incarceration and maternal mortality, without entertaining the idea that the system might be unfair?