The three-fifths clause proves the American Idea never excluded racial hierarchy

Evidence

The problem lies, at least in part, in seeing America as something in the abstract, as an idea separate from our practices. We often frame unjust practices as aberrations that don’t live up to what we want America to be. But it’s hard to buy that logic when for more than seventy-five years the country’s very Constitution dictated that a slave should be counted as three-fifths of a person. Really, what’s an ideal when you can’t even get it into the founding document? The American Idea has never been quite the pristine paradigm we make it out to be, and it is our inability to acknowledge this fact that nourishes the value gap. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 86

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the 1619 Project debate and Cruse-style critiques of American exceptionalism as racial innocence.