Three Fifths
When “Patriots” Fight For the Constitution, Who Are They Fighting For?
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The flag waving insurrection of January 6th — launched in defense of the U.S. constitution — motivated me to peruse America’s most cherished document for the first time since high school. As the patriotic prose carried me away, and the flowery language threatened to flood every red, white and blue blood cell in my body, I was suddenly stopped dead in my idealistic tracks. How far did I get? Article 1, section 2. The very first page.
“Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
And…you lost me.
I kept reading, but it was tough to forget seeing the words “of free persons,” or “three fifths of all other Persons,” in a work upheld as the template for the great democratic experiment. Yes, the constitution was written during a different time, and much has undoubtedly changed, but those words made the rest of the document seem less meaningful — illegitimate. I had read them before, but this time was different.
Disenchantment, disillusion and disbelief wounded my sense of nationalistic pride long ago. The more I learned of economically motivated military action from books like Smedley D. Butler’s War is a Racket, the less I bought into the myth of America’s altruistic exceptionalism. From audio of Nixon and Reagan yukking it up during a racist exchange about African countries, to locking migrant kids in cages and illegally interfering in the affairs of other sovereign nations, America’s leaders have proven themselves despicable again and again.
Today, it bothers me when my daughter recites the pledge of allegiance (written by a socialist minister who adamantly supported separation of church and state and did not include the words “under God” in the pledge), because I don’t want her following anyone or anything blindly. The sight of my little girl standing at attention with her hand on her six year old heart, vowing loyalty before she can spell it, felt disturbingly Owrwellian.
There seem to be far too many planes of reality on which the minds and hearts of Americans exist to settle on common ground. Living on the same land mass does not make you a hive — thank goodness. My daughter’s allegiance should not be to an ideology, but to compassion and truth — and the truth is, this country has never offered, “liberty and justice for all.”
When I was a kid, I thought the USA was a flawed but noble nation that had worked earnestly to become the melting pot it professed to be. It was a country where everyone got a fair shot. America didn’t start off as perfect, I thought, but it was determined to get there.
Abraham Lincoln declared as much when he said the founding fathers, “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.”
Lincoln believed the founders were declaring their intentions — their commitment to pursuing a perfect union. Of course, perfection is impossible, but we would keep trying. Lincoln knew it would take time to ween the southern states off the teat of slavery. While the constitution didn’t prohibit the institution, it set a finite date (in 1808) to end the importation of slaves. This clearly delineated death sentence for the Atlantic slave trade was pointed to by President Lincoln and former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as confirmation of the anti-slavery spirit of the constitution.
Douglass used the constitution’s words (and its ambiguity on the subject of race) to argue his case for racial equality. After declaring it a racist instrument early in his career, he later proclaimed, “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the constitution is a glorious liberty document!”
But Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, called the constitution, “…defective from the start.” Justice Marshall said the framers, “consented to a document which laid a foundation for the tragic events which were to follow.”
The constitution’s vagueness on the morality of slavery left the door open for its defenders to manipulate the text as they saw fit. Although the document does not explicitly pass judgement on human enslavement, it does provide it some obvious protections. While perhaps theoretically meant to ease the shock to an economic system dependent on slave labor, these protections could also be viewed as validating slavery’s existence.
Along with the aforementioned “three fifths clause,” which gave slave states more representatives in the House and more votes in our beloved electoral college, the constitution included the fugitive slave clause, which mandated the return of escapees. The federal government was also given the written authority to squash rebellion, including slave insurrections, under the righteous mission of preserving the union.
Though the twenty year deadline had been set to end the Atlantic slave trade, wealthy slaveholders had insured generational servitude would keep them supplied with labor. The children of slaves became slaves, even when fathered by their white master — as was often the case. Homegrown slaves would also become more valuable without a foreign market to contend with.
Nearly half of the 55 delegates at the constitutional convention were slave owners. The concessions they received for the perpetuation of human bondage were integral to persuading states dependent on slave labor to join the union. Those concessions, and the two and a half centuries of oppression since, would ensure a reckoning would one day follow.
American writer James Baldwin once wrote, in a review of the novel “The Lonely Crusade”, “On the low ground where Negroes live something is happening: something which can be measured in decades and generations and which may spell our doom as a republic and almost certainly implies a cataclysm.”
The institutional racism developed since the thirteenth amendment ended slavery, gave the government legal ways to keep black people locked in cages — or at the very least, separate from white society. Mass incarceration, Jim Crow laws, gerrymandering, redlining, blockbusting and voter suppression have all been key to ensuring a lack of political power and ongoing generational poverty within communities of color.
Sadly, little has changed in the hearts of some Americans since Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney said a, ”perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery.” Taney and the court ruled 7–2 against Dred Scott, an enslaved black man who sued his captor in 1857. Scott argued that because he had been brought into free territory, his enslavement should no longer be legal.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandord said the constitution was not intended to provide rights to black people, free or enslaved, because black people were not thought deserving of such protections by the founders. The court opined that if people of the time thought little enough of blacks to subjugate them, the founders clearly did not think the race worthy of the privileges of citizenship.
This was nearly a century after Thomas Jefferson (owner of over 600 human beings) comically wrote, “All men are created equal.”
Abraham Lincoln interpreted Jefferson’s words far differently than Chief Justice Taney did in denying Dred Scott his freedom.
“The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, nor for that, but for future use,” the Great Emancipator said.
I suppose it should come as no surprise that a country built on hypocrisy and the pain of the powerless has largely moved laterally over the course of a couple of centuries — while pretending to make progress.
When the upper class of the early United States hoped to rid themselves of the undesirables among them, they were happy to see the dregs of humanity seek their fortunes out west. If fate had set their ceiling so low, let the less fortunate at least feel laterally mobile. Much like the exportation of England’s miscreants to the wasteland of the new world, or the corralling of blacks into ghettos, segregation can keep riff raff out of sight and mind, while maintaining a watchful government eye out for potential insurrection. Keeping all your enemies in one far away place means you won’t have to look at them — but you can still see them coming.
Barack Obama’s election immediately ignited nostalgia for days gone by among many white Americans . Going to war in the 90’s with foreign brown people because some other, totally unrelated brown people attacked America hadn’t made the USA any better off. After 911, the country began to resemble a police state, with soldiers patrolling subway stations and airport security feeling like a visit to see your cousin on Rikers. Getting rid of Sadaam hadn’t made America any greater, but the economy was in a great recession and American soldiers were in harm’s way — thousands of miles from home. Then, along came our first black president.
Shouts of impending tyrannical doom could be heard from every right wing corner. The internet jumped to attention: FEMA camps; a Manchurian muslim candidate with the middle name Hussein; a socialist who isn’t even a citizen and wants take our guns; a closeted gay communist married to a transexual who is plotting with the enemies of Christianity to implement Sharia law; a man who would wear a tan suit!
The Tea Party heard the call and came to white America’s rescue. They wanted to preserve the Great American Way. They cared about “Main Street, not Wall Street” — one of my favorite bullshit, racist dog whistles. They were soccer moms and veterans and hard working Christians, not like those Hollywood types (translation: Jews and homosexuals), or those “woke” New York City types (translation: minorities and homosexuals). And most of all, they loved the constitution, as it was originally intended.
The word “originalist” makes me squirm. America was originally pretty fucked up to a lot of people. From the natives to the slaves and immigrants from far and wide, there hasn’t been a non-white, non-Anglo-Saxon, non-male group that hasn’t been marginalized by the ruling majority in this country. The founders’ sense of inherent superiority remains in those people who fancy themselves the direct descendants of the original oppressors — who thought it their right to profit off slave labor and deny men and women the most basic human rights, based on race alone.
Then there are those who have been unwittingly recruited. Victimized and hungry for saviors and scapegoats, the poorest white Americans saw their fortunes turn for the worse after the civil war. A lack of opportunities lead to generational poverty, and the further demonization of black people by bitter, poor whites.
In recent years, the inefficiency of coal has rendered that industry nearly obsolete. Towns founded by coal companies have economically collapsed. The uneducated, unskilled labor that lived where they worked and were certain to never leave — and whose kids would almost certainly have worked in the mines — have been abandoned.
With the closing of a mine, other businesses close, because residents can’t afford to buy goods. Companies leave in search of better markets, taking jobs with them. Soon, just a shell of a town remains. Progress has destroyed these people’s lives, not just their livelihood. They’re pissed about it. They don’t think it’s fair. Even if they understood that it was inevitable, they never wanted things to change. Still don’t.
Even once the ballots have been cast, electors have voted, and the whole thing has been certified, those people may need to hold on for dear life, because it’s all they’ve got. I don’t think it’s because they’re racist — though I’m sure some of them are. I don’t think they hate the environment, either — though some might. For them, America was great during a time that it just happened to be fucked up for a whole lot of other people.
This country labeled black as inferior in order to justify slavery (often by pointing to scripture), when much of the world was beginning to see the barbarity of the institution. While slavery had existed for centuries all over the globe, it was the good old U.S. of A that made it about the color of your skin.
In Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote, “To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?”
Using an argument I was surprised to never have read before, the architect of the Declaration of Independence artfully justified his grotesque racism.
“Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species.”
Jefferson goes on to criticize the “offensive” odor blacks gave off because of what he perceived as differences in the way their bodies excreted waste. He claimed while their memories were equal to those of whites, black people’s powers of reason were far inferior, below that of Indians, who though massacred by the “settlers” in a horrific genocide, were admired for some aspects of their society.
Black people were said to be enslaved because they were pre-ordained as inherently inferior. The cursed descendants of the biblical Canaan, blacks were commanded to serve perpetually when Noah, in his drunkenness, condemned his son Ham for observing his father’s “nakedness.” Noah declared of Canaan, “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
The tale was shaped into the proof slave masters needed to justify their wickedness, from the Sahara to the United States of America. How else to reconcile biblical calls for love and compassion or the heroic words of the Declaration of Independence with the reality of human bondage?
Make the slave subhuman— easy to do when they look different than you. White is good, black is bad. There, it’s settled. Blacks were branded with a scarlet letter passed along by their forefathers, earned not by misdeed, but by birthright. The only birthright a black person possessed in the “land of the free” — enslavement.
Aside from the denial of rights and the horrible mistreatment, there is the diabolical hypnosis that this early narrative implanted in the hearts and minds of people of color. When “slave” became synonymous with “black,” the self-worth of countless generations of boys and girls was trampled on. They would have once been deemed chattel by virtue of their skin tone alone — reduced to property and relegated to the most menial places in society — not because they broke the law or owed a debt, but because they were not born white.
The power of the black inferiority myth did not miraculously fade away after the last literal chains were broken. Through the courageous civil rights movement, the end of segregation and the rise of black people into positions of power and influence, the stain of once being considered insignificant enough to be bought and sold remained. Painful memories always linger longest. They are burned into our unconscious — a way of protecting us in the future.
As Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son, “The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”
Being told to simply forget trauma is pointless, and demonstrates a lack of compassion that can only serve to infuriate the traumatized. Unresolved trauma is passed down through generations. Each vivid retelling of the black experience, conveyed on a backdrop of hopelessness, reinforced the wall Chief Justice Taney thought he was defending when he condemned Dred Scott to a life of bondage.
While the American system of slavery had race at its core, a Eurocentric worldview made blackness undesirable for hundreds of years beforehand. With the Romanus Pontifex of 1455, Pope Nicholas the V granted Portugal the religious authority to enslave the conquered people of West Africa and spread Christianity. Spain subsequently decided to import Africans into the new world rather than enslave natives, who the queen considered Spanish subjects.
The Corpus luris Cononici, which was Catholic church law from 1226 AD through 1913, allowed for holding slaves as punishment for a crime, as prisoners of war, or in the case of someone selling oneself or one’s own child into slavery. With the conquering of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau by Portugal, and the enslavement of the African people, black skin became associated with servitude.
However, even before Africans were kidnapped and shipped to Europe or the New World, colorism and the concept of blackness being less desirable developed separately in Islamic Countries. The curse of Ham was used by some Islamic scholars to justify the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which saw Africans sold (often as a consequence of conquest) into slavery for seventeen centuries, only ending officially in 1960. In 2017, CNN captured video of African migrants being sold in Libya.
This association of black skin to slavery has permeated societies throughout history, embedding limiting beliefs in people of color and fueling discrimination.
A group of researchers led by NYU’s Professor Adam Alter (Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2016 Dec;42(12):1653–1665), found people’s preconceived notions of light as good and dark as bad do extend to skin color. Participants were found to judge darker skin as housing a “darker soul” — one more capable of committing a criminal act. In media coverage, the researchers found negative stories about white and black celebrities or politicians were accompanied by photographs with darker skin tones. While bias based on skin color and shade was independent of race, participants who held racist views were far more likely to judge a darker skinned person as immoral or guilty of a crime. Researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “bad is black” effect.
Handicapped by a millennia of demonization, American Blacks sat passively at “white only” lunch counters during the civil rights movement, as the people in power spat at them, and hurled objects and insults punctuated with hatred. To demand the dignity of being regarded as human, American blacks allowed themselves to be abused relentlessly by those who feared them. They turned the other cheek, only to be met by an even harsher blow.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and those who followed his peaceful lead, chose to rise above the violence that oppressed them. It was as if the movement was the karmic culmination of the white man’s christianization of the African “savage.” In a dramatic crescendo, the good book would be used against the masters. If God was Love, then God would certainly deliver equality.
On the other side of the spectrum, militant black leaders like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers believed showing force was necessary in order to be heard. Like a fighter gaining another’s respect after hitting him with a powerful punch, an opponent must have a reason to fear you — he must know you will fight back — or he will walk right through you.
Watching those old videos of sit-ins, or of a black child trying to go into a newly integrated school just after Brown V Board of Ed, it’s difficult not to become infuriated at the misguided passion of white America. So vehemently did they oppose the presence of black skin — the reminder of this country’s original sin — that the most primal human emotions radiated from their countenances. That same passion was there on January 6th.
Yet, the right feigns outrage each time a group of dark skin people reaches a breaking point that leads to violence. If we are not peacefully passive, we are seen as wildly out of control. Because darker skin has you start off as a threat (the bad is black effect), there is much less road to travel before being met by rubber bullets. Any realist can agree that if the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol had been black and wearing BLM hats instead of Q-Anon merch, Trump would have been on Pennsylvania Avenue with tanks, tear gas and Holy Bible in hand. We don’t have to guess, we all saw the two scenarios play out on live TV.
The reckoning we have faced in the United States over the past year has been brewing since a group of white men first declared themselves worthier of God’s grace than their fellow humans. When people of privilege conspired to marginalize so many men and women, while masquerading as the protectors of democracy, they sealed America’s fate.
The Republican party recruited southern whites to pad their numbers and win elections, while keeping black people in their place by isolating them in economically depressed political districts. But the number of uneducated, disenfranchised, angry, white Republicans grew with every small town factory or coal mine that shut down. Left behind by progress, those poor white folks found themselves without the opportunities of educated blacks. A black man in the White House was too much progress for some of them to stomach.
Far right groups, like the Boogaloo Bois, hanker for civil war as if glory and the spoils of victory are the only byproducts of armed conflict. Gone are the days of bayonets and muskets. Today, no militia stands a chance against the state. A standoff with the federal government may sound sexy, but the truth is any people’s rebellion would be crushed by the military might American tax dollars have financed. But it’s not really the government these “rebels” fear.
No one will stay oppressed forever. Justice slowly gnaws away at the binds of subjugation — and the oppressors’ paranoia begins to mount as their grasp on power weakens.
In South Africa, where apartheid reduced the black majority to civil rights abuses, poverty and degradation until the 1990’s, white people are now finding themselves on the other side of the economic spectrum. A small group of isolated whites do still own the majority of the wealth, but shanty towns one may have only seen in the favelas of Brazil are now populated by down and out Afrikaners, the white minority that once ruled South Africa. Though far out numbered by blacks, Afrikaners dominated from 1910 through the implementation of apartheid in 1948 — and the eventual global outrage which forced change nearly a half century later.
Unable to get jobs because of sweeping government reforms aimed at creating greater racial equity, modern Afrikaners are learning that the sins of the father, like his assets, are indeed passed on to the son, rightly or not — much like a human being could once inexplicably be bequeathed as property to one’s kin.
When someone who once trembled in your presence threatens to become your master, you imagine you will suffer the same subhuman conditions to which you once subjected your victim. You’re afraid of being the nigger. Or wetback. Or kike. Or slope. You’re afraid of being the other — powerless and insignificant.
Americans love romanticizing the past: Guns, gangsters, cops and robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Reagan’s bullshit war on drugs - Reagan himself. From The Lone Ranger and Tonto to Rambo — the reality behind much of what captivates us could only be pleasant to a sadistic fuck. America’s history is no different. Nobody wants to flip the bloated carcass over to see the diseased underbelly.
Some people may hear Hail to the Chief and get misty eyed. They may stand at attention and feel compelled to hang on every narcissistic word of the man at the podium. They may need it, because it makes them feel like they are part of something bigger and better than they really are, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
As my psychiatrist said to me the other day, “emotion is not rational.” The politicians that spread “The Big Lie” about voter fraud know this. They know some people will fight over God, unborn babies, other people’s genitalia and the American constitution — because the thought of those things makes them feel warm and tingly — and the preservation of black lives does not. Hell, some people will fight so hard they’ll destroy democracy and beat cops over the head with old glory just to prove how much they love THEIR country. America!!
