WaPo editorial: The Declaration’s dual traditions: Broad equality, and equality for whites

WaPo editorial: The Declaration’s dual traditions: Broad equality, and equality for whites by Danielle Allen:

This Fourth of July, like the preceding weeks, will be painful, following the Charleston massacre — a devastating example of the lofty ideal of human equality’s failure to take root in a human heart. Many would say, as many have said to me, that taking the ideals of the Declaration of Independence too seriously is a mistake, because the men who signed it didn’t. These folks say that I should be more clear-eyed about revolutionary hypocrisy. I counter that we should be more clear-eyed about how the Declaration launched two political traditions in this country: one for broad equality, and one for an equality limited to whites.

But, many of the “truths [we hold] to be self-evident” become a part of the 1789 Constitution and the 1791 Bill of Rights. The hypocrisy “that all men are created equal …” meant white men; not blacks, and women were somewhere in between. As a school child reading that, I didn’t know, and wasn’t told all the history. After all, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner who enslaved his own children he had with Sally Hemmings. In addition, Jefferson was also found to have written in detail on the economics of slave women and how their existence helped us win the Revolution.

And remember, prior to the civil rights amendments, blacks were 3/5ths of a person. (Thirteenth Amendment, 1865; Fourteenth Amendment, 1868; Fifteenth Amendment, 1870)

The declaration also wasn’t kind to Indians, from whom we stole land.

I used to wax poetic about the Declaration of Independence. Like everybody else, I pick and choose the parts I want to quote. The parts to keep swept under the rug are.

See also NPR: Scrapped Declaration Of Independence Passage Denounced Slavery. Jefferson wrote extensively on ending slavery, including in the proposed Virginia Constitution, but he was limiting it to children born in 1800. I guess he was a political realist. What he believed and did v. what he wrote still troubles me in its hypocrisy.

See also WaPo: The Volokh Conspiracy: What the Declaration of Independence Really Claimed by Randy Barnett

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