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I do not have to think Thomas Jefferson was a saint to find value in the opening of the Declaration of Independence--when applied to all people. You understand

I do not have to think Thomas Jefferson was a saint to find value in the opening of the Declaration of Independence--when applied to all people. You understand that one can be very, very in favor of the stated aspirations of the American founding documents while understanding that the people saying them both did a lot of bad shit and had a provincial and shitty understanding of who those stated aspirations applied to, yeah? Those words are a call for us to do better, and part of doing better is understanding our often-shitty ancestry.

deogeo 7y ago
But I was not referring to only the declaration of independence, but to the US founding and history as a whole. For example, your naturalization acts were limited to "free white persons of good character", so it's pretty obvious the US was, for most of its history, a white ethno-state. It's fine if you want to change that (well, by now it has been changed), but it's just that - a change, not the continuation of some mythical welcoming-to-all America that never existed.