What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza

Author:Dinesh D'Souza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2013-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Leading black scholars such as John Hope Franklin say that the problems of African-Americans go back to the beginning—to the American founding. Franklin argues that the founders “betrayed the ideals to which they gave lip service.” They wrote “eloquently at one moment for the brotherhood of man and in the next moment denied it to their black brothers.” They chose to “degrade the human spirit by equating five black men with three white men.” The consequences have been unremittingly painful for African-Americans. “Having created a tragically flawed revolutionary doctrine and a Constitution that did not bestow the blessings of liberty on its posterity, the founding fathers set the stage for every succeeding generation to apologize, compromise, and temporize on those principles of liberty that were supposed to be the very foundation of our system of government and way of life.”8

Such views have become commonplace among African-Americans, and they are routinely promulgated in multicultural textbooks. Interestingly Franklin’s criticism of the founders relies on the same reasoning that Justice Taney relied on in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Writing for the majority in this notorious 1857 case upholding slavery, Taney argued that since several of the founders, including Jefferson, were slave owners, these men could not have really meant that “all men are created equal.” They may have written “all men,” but what they really meant was “white men.” As for black slaves, Taney concluded that they have “no rights that the white man is bound to respect.”9

Are Franklin and Taney right? Are the founders guilty as alleged? Let us consider the evidence fairly, beginning with the notorious “three-fifths” clause to which Franklin alludes. To the modern mind, this is one of the most troubling pieces of evidence against the founders. And yet it should not be, because the clause itself has nothing to say about the intrinsic worth of blacks.

The origins of the clause are to be found in the debate between the northern states and the southern states over the issue of political representation. The South wanted to count blacks as whole persons, in order to increase its political power. The North wanted blacks to count for nothing—not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the antislavery majority in Congress. It was not a proslavery southerner but an antislavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise. The effect was to limit the South’s political representation and its ability to protect the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass understood this: he called the three-fifths clause “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” which deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”10 So a provision of the Constitution that was antislavery and pro-black in intent as well as in effect is today cited to prove that the American founders championed the cause of racist oppression.

Refuting the myth that the three-fifths clause degrades black humanity does not absolve the founders of the charge of hypocrisy. We still have to meet Franklin

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