2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hillary's historian refutes Sanders claim that this country is "created on racist principles". [View all]malthaussen
(17,194 posts)It does, however, establish that an "other person" only counts as 3/5 of a real human. One might suggest that this establishes a definitely racists criterion, since the majority of slaves were, after all, non-white. What is interesting, to my mind, is that no one wanted to challenge the underlying principle of ownership of other persons, or the humanity of persons so owned. Personally, I think most of the people involved around the founding of our country (and for many years after) were white supremacists, in that while they may have had a few piddling qualms about chattel slavery, they had no thought that those enslaved were actually equal to them (except, of course, in the eyes of the Creator, which is a nice little way to dodge the question). Hell, they didn't even care much for those with no real property.
-- Mal