Democratic principles and white supremacy are constitutively bound, not contradictory

Evidence

The value gap was baked into one of the foundational principles of this country. That struggle, at least since 1876 (when the nation turned its back on the possibility of a multiracial democracy with the end of Reconstruction), has been a part of who we are as a nation. … Black folk never aspired to be the moral conscience of the nation, even as black leaders shouted it from the rooftops. It only happened to be the case that our actual lives rested in the gap between who America said it was as a democracy and how we actually lived. Our democratic principles do not exist in a space apart from our national commitment to white supremacy. They have always been bound tightly together, sharing bone and tissue. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 26

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the precise definition of the value gap: a national premise that some are valued less by skin color, baked into foundational principles rather than contradicting them.
• QUESTION: Glaude dates the multiracial-democracy ‘turn’ to the end of Reconstruction in 1876 — worth checking this periodization against other scholarship.