Slavery’s coexistence with proclaimed equality was America’s founding contradiction.

Evidence

In the beginning of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois identified the fundamental contradiction in American history; the contradiction that would subvert America’s founding ideology, distort its institutions, traumatize its social relations and class formations, and, in the twentieth century, confuse its rebels and revolutionists: … From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation, (p. 3)68 It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 927

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Du Bois’s core explanatory frame for American history: the slaveholding republic founded on consent-based government.
• XREF: connects to: Believing blacks were animal-like masked the contradiction of slavery with equality. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1167