We the people have a deep-seated aversion to hard history because we are uncomfortable with the implications it raises about the past as well as the present. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. If the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery, then what does that say about those who revere the people who took up arms to keep African Americans in chains? If James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, could hold people in bondage his entire life, refusing to free a single soul even upon his death, then what does that say about our nation’s founders? About our nation itself? And yet, we the people do not like to talk about slavery, or even think about it, much less teach it or learn it. The central role that slavery played in the development of the United States is beyond dispute. They simply could not allow a world in which they did not have absolute authority to control black labor-and to regulate black behavior. So wholly dependent were white Southerners on the institution that they took up arms against their own to keep African Americans in bondage. When the southern states seceded, they did so expressly to preserve slavery. Slavery was also our country’s Achilles' heel, responsible for its near undoing. And slavery was a driving power behind the new nation’s territorial expansion and industrial maturation, making the United States a powerful force in the Americas and beyond. It was responsible for the growth of the American colonies, transforming them from far-flung, forgotten outposts of the British Empire to glimmering jewels in the crown of England. It is often said that slavery was our country’s original sin, but it is much more than that. But we cannot do that until we come to terms with racial injustice in our past, beginning with slavery. To achieve the noble aims of the nation’s architects, we the people have to eliminate racial injustice in the present. Instead, they embedded protections for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade into the founding document, guaranteeing inequality for generations to come. Constitution, the Founding Fathers enumerated the lofty goals of their radical experiment in democracy racial justice, however, was not included in that list.
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