The Constitution’s framers removed slavery’s language while keeping its policies

Evidence

By September 17, 1787, delegates in Philadelphia had extracted “slave” and “slavery” from the signed US Constitution to hide their racist enslavement policies. These policies hardly fit with securing “the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Then again, for the delegates, slavery brought freedom. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 308

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the reader’s goal of testing policy-before-ideas: here policy (slavery) precedes the rhetorical masking (omitting the word ‘slavery’), a direct instance of Kendi’s inversion — language follows policy to justify it.