Critics, I think you have got it backward.
Senator Cory Booker recently declared that the U.S. has “Yet to truly acknowledge white supremacy that tainted this country’s founding.”
He is only one in a chorus who have damned the country’s founders. Because many were slaveholders who believed one race was superior to others.
There is another way to view this. It is best summed up with “Who in hell didn’t believe this?”
The world of 1776 was awash in ignorance. The wisest men believed women were not entitled to education. They believed blood-letting and leeches were best to treat disease. Half the world’s babies died before two. Because of malnutrition, foul water, filthy food and hygiene worse than that of monkeys.
Humans made no connection between illness and the raw sewage in the streets. They seldom bathed. They did little about polluted air and water.
And most did not believe fellow humans were worth much. The educated men of that era and all the 1800’s saw little wrong with working class folks living wretched lives in pig-sty conditions. They felt it natural to subject them to 16-hour shifts and 80-hour weeks in filthy factories.
Most leaders around the world believed in slavery. Which was founded in the belief that some of us are naturally superior to others.
Historian David Forsythe estimated that at the beginning of the 1800’s “…three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”
African empires were built on the slave trade. Africans who believed they were superior rounded up Africans they believed were fodder. And sold them. In the 1840’s King Gezo of Dahomey boasted “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…”.
When Britain tried to stop slave-trading the King of Bonny (part of modern Nigeria) fought against the idea. He reckoned his slave trading was ordained by God. Hell, Ethiopia did not abolish slavery until 1942. And northern Nigeria waited until 1936.
In Algiers in the 1800’s 1.5 million Christians and Europeans were captured and forced into slavery. In Niger today, 8 percent of the population is enslaved. Throughout the world today 40 million people are enslaved in some way.
The British put an end to much slave-trading. At the same time, they fervently believed most of the rest of humanity was inferior to them. They felt Anglo-Saxons were utterly superior to all. And that they were set upon this earth to rescue and rule despicable low-lifes everywhere. They needed to believe this to justify ruling India and its hundreds of millions.
So, Cory Booker, consider the declaration that “all men are created equal” in the context of 1776. Why, most learned men around the world considered that idea ludicrous. Preposterous.
Most everyone believed the opposite of equality for all. And many Americans of that time certainly did not include slaves among “all men”.
However, many of our founders believed all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. They believed their declaration would inevitably lead to the extension of those rights to all people in their new country.
Brave and blessed with foresight, I call them. Ignorant and full of poppycock, much of educated humanity called them.
Cory, you have a right to believe our founding was tainted with white supremacy. Others are entitled to believe it sowed the seeds that would lead gradually to waves of freedom for countless human beings.
Our founders proclaimed a radical concept. They had the courage to record it in a document. They waved that under the noses of the people of the world. Their revolutionary concept is even today ridiculed by ruling classes in many countries.
Give some credit to our founders, Cory. They lit a candle that grew into a beacon in a world that was dark with ignorance. Had they not, you might well be enslaved today.
From Tom…as in Morgan.
Find Tom on Facebook. You can write to Tom at tomasinmorgan@yahoo.com.