Dred Scott declared Blackness itself a bar to US citizenship, not just enslavement.

Evidence

The court’s decision dealt a blow to the Black American claim to citizenship: Taney ruled that Scott had no right to sue because as an enslaved person, he was not a citizen. Taney then went a step further. No Black American was intended to be a citizen of the United States by the framers. It was a powerful repudiation of the interpretation of the Constitution long promoted by Black activists. The nation’s highest court declared that Blackness rendered them unequivocally noncitizens. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 717

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the difference between ‘enslaved, therefore not a citizen’ and ‘Black, therefore never intended as a citizen’ — the second claim is the originalist reframing that Black activists had long contested.
• XREF: Direct evidence for the book’s reframing thesis: Taney’s originalist reading shows origin dating (what the framers intended) being weaponized against Black citizenship.