For what it's worth:


NPR: MYTHS ABOUT THE FOUNDING

BY DINESH D’SOUZA


I frequently lecture at American high schools and colleges, and I must acknowledge that many educators do not share my enthusiasm for the founding.  “The constitution was a racist document,” they say.  “After all, it says that a black person is three-fifths of a human being.”  I hear this all the time. Some teachers allege that even their good ideas the founders plagiarized from nonwhites.  “They stole all their ideas from the Iroquois Indians,” a history teacher informed.  I expressed surprise: “You mean,” I said, “that concepts like free elections, separation of powers, checks and balances and freedom of speech and religion were all invented and practiced by the Iroquois?”

“Absolutely,” I was told.  And then, in a condescending tone: “Maybe it’s time you went home and did your homework.”

Well, I have done my homework, and here are the facts. The notorious three-fifths clause of the constitution, the central exhibit in the claim that the document is racist, in fact reflects no denial of the equal worth of African Americans.  Indeed the three-fifths clause has nothing to say about the intrinsic worth of any individual or group.  It arose in the context of a debate between the northern and southern states over the issue of political representation.

It turns out that the South wanted to count blacks as whole persons in order to increase its political power.  The North wanted to count blacks as nothing, not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the anti-slavery majority in Congress.  It was not a pro-slavery southerner but an anti-slavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise.

The effect of the compromise was to limit the south’s political representation and thus its ability to protect the institution of slavery.   Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist, understood this.  He praised the three-fifths clause “a downright disability laid upon the slave-holding states” depriving them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”  So the notion that the three-fifths clause demonstrates the racism of the Constitution is both wrong and unfair.