The Dred Scott Court ignored established Black voting history for economic gain

Evidence

Although Taney was absolutely right about the founding fathers regarding Blacks as inferior, he was absolutely wrong that Black men had been excluded from the original political community. Dissenting Justice Benjamin Curtis revealed that upon the nation’s founding, Black men had possessed voting rights in at least five states—almost half the Union—sinking Taney’s argument against Black citizenship rights. But Curtis’s history lesson made no headway upon Taney, his other colleagues on the Court, or the residents of the White House or the US Capitol, who applauded the Dred Scott decision. They probably already knew the history. They seemed not to care about the crippling effects of the Court’s racist decision. All they seemed to care about was maintaining their nation’s enriching economic interests. And nothing enriched northern investors and factory owners and southern landowners and slaveholders in 1857 as much as the nation’s principal export: cotton. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 543

Categorization

• XREF: This is textbook evidence for Kendi’s causal inversion: racist policy (denying citizenship) preceded and was justified by invented racist ideas (that Blacks were never part of the political community), overriding true history that would have refuted the racist claim.
• ADDENDUM: Two sentences in: Taney was right that the founders regarded Blacks as inferior, but wrong they were excluded from citizenship — a precise case of policy and self-interest driving a false racist narrative.