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America was founded on white supremacist ideals? Catholics, Irish, Italians...? The vast majority of "white" groups had absolutely no power within society. Even
by rjf72 7y ago
America was founded on white supremacist ideals? Catholics, Irish, Italians...? The vast majority of "white" groups had absolutely no power within society. Even for groups such as the British the vast majority were also rather less than reigning supreme. But slavery... For centuries peoples around the world enslaved one another. White enslaving white, brown enslaving brown, black enslaving black. Even within the US while the majority of owners of slaves were white, so was the majority of the entire population. In America there was also native Americans that owned slaves, blacks that owned slaves, and people of every color and type owning slaves.
But then why were most slaves black? Europe was almost exclusively Christian and the church had long since forbade Christians enslaving Christians. And across the world there were various powerful empires forming. In the Mideast there was the Ottoman empire, China had the Qing dynasty, and so on. Then there was Africa: a disorganized, technologically underdeveloped people whom also had a thriving domestic slave trade already in place. Africans were not chosen to be slaves because of their skin color, they were chosen because their nations' lack of development left them susceptible.
But I think we should go even further on slavery. In spite of the normalcy of the practice of slavery at the time, many of the founding fathers were actively working to see its end. Thomas Jefferson, indeed a slave owner by inheritance, had penned an explicit condemnation of slavery into the original draft of the constitution. However this was not workable when trying to form a union of states when some still endorsed it. It was stripped from the final revision. In its place we saw two things. The first was the addition of "all men are created equal", which was a fully self aware statement. The second was an agreement that the US would not federally ban slavery prior to 1808. Thomas Jefferson was the president who would effect a law in 1807 that would ban the slave trade on January 1st, 1808. [1]
America, in spite of an extensive "need" of slavery, was also a very small player in it. About 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the new world, 10.7 million survived the voyage. How many were shipped to North America? 388k, less than 4%. [2] There are complex reasons for this, but our mixed relationship with slavery no doubt played a significant role.
But perhaps you mean voting laws. Once again this was hardly an American institution. The idea of the masses being able to vote is something very new. The reason this was avoided in the past was to try to avoid demagoguery and corruption. What do I mean there? Our current president is a reality TV star who had no experience in politics. At one point it looked like he might be running against Oprah, a TV talk show host - with no experience, for the 2020 election. We are a living demonstration of the very reasons that nations feared letting people vote without condition.
After downvoting this because... reasons, please do at least consider that not a single statement I've made here is false. It's quite dangerous when ideology becomes more influential than facts.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of_Slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of...
[2] - https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...