American schools teach that America was founded on the ideal that “all men are created equal”. It is the fundamental thing taught in schools. But it is a lie. The truth is that America was founded on the principal that a white-dominated America is what makes America great. This is a difficult truth to swallow but it must be acknowledged in order to understand what makes America the America it is today.
Most American readers will focus on the words; “all men are created equal” and on the numerous promises made in the United States Constitution. What most will ignore is what the promises really meant in the document.
Case in point is Article I, Section 9, clause I of the Constitution.
“The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress”.
Note how that passage makes no mention about slavery, yet it is about slavery. Therein lies the lie that has been taught in school for so many years. Slavery was part of the American “all men are created equal” lie but it was cleverly distorted to hide the truth to protect the American lie of equality.
Also note who was generally understood to be the “importation of such persons”. It wasn’t white people. It was people of color.
Some readers will be tempted to argue that the constitutional clause is no longer relevant because it had a built-in expiration date. It has since expired, but it remains very visible in the Constitution today.
But the original lie that “all men are created equal” has been protected since the deliberate exclusion of the word “slave” from the Constitution. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, best explains how the lie continues to be protected.
In a post posted on December 28, 2015 at the Heritage’s website, David Azerrad argues that “textbooks and history books routinely dismiss the Constitution as racist and pro-slavery” to make the Constitution “an object of contempt rather than reverence,” fostering “alienation and resentment among African-American citizens by excluding them from the Constitution.”
Azerrad bases his argument on the notion that the “concept of race does not exist in the Constitution,” adding no where in the founding documents “are human beings classified according to race, skin color, or ethnicity.”
Azerrad goes on to state that the “Constitution speaks of people, citizens, persons, or other persons” and “Indians”, and not of skin color.
Therein lies how slavery is at the center of today’s ongoing national debates on racial tensions and equality in the political processes and between law enforcement and citizens. Look closely at the choice of words and it becomes clear.
In using select words, like “citizens” and “other persons” it creates the divide between people that allow citiznes to argue that undocumented immigrants are criminals or that “stop-and-frisk” was needed to protect the citizenry. “Other people” was an euphemism for slaves and it persists today in the caging of immigrant children and of making women, people of color, and even gays unelectedable under the scheme of the electoral college that keeps the popular vote in check favoring the minority that was born out of the idea that there exists two sets of Americans, the citizens who are “equal” and all the other people that are not.
The Constitution used selective words and those words continue to be used selectively to keep two sets of Americans separate while keeping the minority in control of the nation’s destiny.
It started out as slavery, but it has evolved into a lie about equality while ensuring that the divide between the minority in power and the rest is kept under the illusion of the greatest nation on earth. Tomorrow we will explore this further with the Texas Revolution.