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Claire Oh Nette

(2,636 posts)
13. THe problem with the compromise is slavery
Wed May 5, 2021, 11:38 AM
May 2021

I don't know what "should have been done." Ideally, there should never have been chattel slavery. The SOuthern slaveowners didn't view their Black labor as People or Human Beings. Residents of Northern states at the time of the Constitutional convention were not trying to bring about an end to slavery in any way. Wanting non voting people to remain uncounted at all diminishes them as well.

Accepting slavery in any form is the inherently intolerable position to take. Slavery by definition is the antithesis of freedom, liberty, and democracy. We didn't really have a democracy, we had an oligarchy with some democratic enlightenment ideals baked in.

If they aren't counted at all, then emancipation would have to suddenly account for them. They weren't thinking about Emancipation in 1787. They weren't thinking about one man, one vote, either. Landed white men voted, not tenant farmers and poor whites.

The problem with the three fifths compromise is that most yahoos still think that means Black people are only 60% as good as white people. This false White superiority is at the root of racism. There is a certain subset of white people, a rather large subset, I'm afraid, who still believe their lack of pigmentation is a sign of better when it isn't. The bigots know they're not better.

These states are not examining the 3/5 compromise to the benefit of any person of color. It's justification for more jim crow and voter suppression. Those same states have passed a law that history teachers can not teach anything that's divisive. If you ask me, white supremacy is divisive, just like sexism is divisive. Dividing all the Others from the straight, white christian man.

There is no one more divisive that the Straight, white, christian man who demands unity and adherence to his opinion...

There is no right answer on that Compromise. That Compromise kicked the can and set up the next 80 years of sectionalism and eventual war because one group wanted to own people.

It's hard to find many compromises in history that were for the benefit of anyone but the most affluent, most landed folks. and with a few exceptions, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and now the ACA, that still holds true.

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