Thoughts on the True Significance of Slavery in the America of 1776 and 1861, and Today
The Left gets it exactly backwards by claiming incessantly that the /Founders were hypocrites for not abolishing slavery in 1776, thus staining America to this day.
Send your kid to any publicly funded university or top private school and you can be sure they will be told over and over ad nauseum the same thing we adults are told.
That is, by academic “experts,” hordes of Democratic/Socialist/Progressive politicians, and legions of “journalists,” namely that America is inherently and always has been thoroughly racist since before the Declaration of Independence.
Consider these illustrations:
Derrick Bell, the father of Critical Race Theory (CRT) tells us via a Harvard Law Review article that "‘we live in a society in which racism has been internalized and institutionalized,’ producing ‘a culture from whose inception racial discrimination has been a regulating force for maintaining stability and growth.’"
Demonstrating Bell’s influence is this passage from an admiring 2021 profile in the New Yorker stating he "came to recognize that racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform... He began to argue, is permanent."
As Legal Clarity described the influence of Bell’s CRT, his “most foundational — and most controversial — theoretical contribution is racial realism. The premise is blunt: Racism is not a temporary condition that better laws and shifting attitudes will eventually cure. It is a permanent, structural feature of American society, one that adapts and persists regardless of legal reform. Bell argued that the subordination of Black Americans serves a stabilizing function for the broader social order, providing poor and working-class white Americans with a psychological floor—someone always positioned below them in the hierarchy.”
And then there is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 250 celebration address in which he summarized America as a nation where “the powerful have always known their answer [on what America means]. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin.”
It is true that all 56 of the signers of our Declaration of Independence in 1776 put their names on a document that historically declared that “all men are created equal.” That word “created” is hugely significant. They could have instead said “should be equal” or “can someday, maybe become equal,” or some other non-committal, deceptive vagueness.
But no, they specifically declared that we are all created equal. That means something outside of man created all men as equals. For the vast majority of the Founders, that creator was (and is), of course, the being Christians call “God.”
It is also true that 85 years passed before millions of Black Africans. toiling here in slavery were freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s devotion to preserving the Union and the 13th Amendment’s confirming that under America’s fundamental law all men are created equal.
It is true that there were setbacks in the decades thereafter, including Jim Crow, a “Separate but Equal” Supreme Court decision, and legalized segregation in various forms in housing, employment and voting across the North and South. Then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It is thus inarguable that this nation was imperfect at its Declaration and that its flaws, particularly those regarding the equality of man, have seen landmark steps forward and tragic setbacks along the way. But it is also inarguable that the process has steadily advanced closer to achieving genuine equality.
The question at hand then is this: What does this process tell us about ourselves, our Constitution and our nation?
To hear the Left tell it, that process “proves” America has been since its founding and continues to be today intractably racist, controlled by the “powerful” few and as oppressive as ever it was to everybody but privileged whites. Only the tools and appearance of oppression have changed, not the substance.
But why isn’t it even more reasonable to conclude such evidence indicates the exact opposite, that the Left is purposely misrepresenting the significance of our history? Yes, America was not then, nor is it perfect now, but those landmarks along the way from the Declaration to the 13th Amendment, then from Plessy v Ferguson and Jim Crow to 1964 and 1965, are all steps in a steady and continuing progress toward fulfilment, at least in America, of the principle that all men are indeed created equal? Especially compared to the rest of the nations of the Earth.
Think about it: You never see boats full of starving, oppressed people leaving Miami and heading to Cuba or Venezuela. The “Boat People” of South Vietnam weren’t seeking escape to Communist China or Muslim Indonesia, they came to America. People around the world flee oppression, poverty and slavery to somehow get to America. That’s because they know America is better than any other place on Earth. We are moving toward genuine equality, not suppressing it.
Speaking of slavery and the rest of the contemporary world, there are an estimated 50 million men, women and children held in bondage in other nations around the world today, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO)? The ILO pegs this as consisting of 27.6 million in forced labor (including forced prostitution, domestic servitude, agriculture, manufacturing, construction, fishing, etc.), and 22 million in forced marriages.
For the record, the vast majority of those forced marriages are in Muslim and Hindu countries that officially banned legalized enslavement in recent decades, but which continue to sanction the horror of handing a woman (and often a young female child) to a Muslim man to do with as he pleases, sexually and otherwise.
Additionally, what the ILO did not recognize, but should have, is the historical fact that wherever followers of Marx, Mao and Lenin have gained power, hundreds of millions subsequently died in the Gulags operated in ever such country.
Why is America so different? I suggest it goes back to why the Founders specifically said all men are “created” equal. All but a couple of the 56 signers were professing Christians and even the two who weren’t, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, had to accommodate their language and logic to the predominantly Protestant Christian - especially Scots Presbyterian - culture of the 13 colonies.
Christians recognize that we are all sinners but God has provided a gift of salvation that prompts a lifelong sanctification process of the individual maturing in the faith, in becoming more like Christ. Perfection is not possible in this fallen world, but it can be sought and ever approached here through grace and faithful study of the Word.
The majority of Americans in the colonial era were Christians (by choice, not force) of one mostly Protestant denomination or another. Scripture tell us that “blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”
Is it not reasonable to conclude that, if a people committed as individuals to becoming more like Christ do so over a lifetime, so, too, would they in their collective national commitments and actions, seek to progress toward fulfillment of their founding ideals?
I suggest that, rather than a record of hypocrisy and oppression, the influence of Christianity is in great part why American history is one of progress and hope.
Author’s Note: In my next column, I will caution us all about deification of this or any nation.