Status Updates From American Dark Age: Racial F...

For [Frederick] Douglass, the idea of liberty was not simply freedom from slavery, but it was always freedom to advocate on behalf of others: enslaved people, women, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed.

‘despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims more numerous.’ He might also have asked: what is the nature of despotism in the United States such that White skin, on sight, allows one to inhabit the class of rulers?...James McCune Smith suggest[ed] in 1843 that [the US was]…a ‘Polygarch[y]’ filled with ‘tyrannies of many masters.’

The idea that White people are superior by nature, then, is an ideological illusion that masks the material circumstances governing any perceived natural advancements…This is all to say that the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, no matter how perfect they had been, were still vulnerable to vitiation by a corrupt populace that has displayed an ongoing commitment to maintaining racial hierarchies.

James Warren, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives...argued that the three-fifths clause, in effect, tethered political influence to the people who owned the most (human) property. For Warren, sanctioning the three-fifths clause would be tantamount to establishing 'in the representative branch of the new Congress a principle of aristocracy, with a vengeance.'