Founders' ambivalence on natural equality gave way to white supremacy

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/founders-ambivalence-natural-equality-gave-way-white-supremacy
MGB: Originalism is about Scalia's insistence that decisions be based on something and the response was to bring more history into written opinions.  Most lawyers and judges have a good idea of history, just as historians and social scientists must have some understanding of law.

History showed that the founders thought slavery to be a temporary problem because at the time, cleaning cotton was so labor intensive as to be uneconomic. As the book points out (and every high school freshman knows) Eli Whitney changed that and the Slave Culture overtook the South, controlling African slaves, poor whites and doing violence, including murder, to anyone in the south that advanced abolition.  Part of cultural control was segregated worship, which is still with us to this day, although it gave rise to a black church and limited black literacy and the biblical imagery equating the slaves of America with the slaves of Egypt. This was still the case in Dr. King's last speech where he talked about getting to the promised land.

Racism existed in its own right, but it is forever linked to classism, including class relations with the white race. It was the glue that help poor whites in check, when their class interests should have been with the slaves (and in rare occasions, they were, at least in the Free State of Jones). Property rights were a justification of capitalism where human beings were the machines (although Marx calls it a separate thing, although the use of blacks as machinery continued under the color of law until automated cotton harvesting was invented. To treat people as machines, they must be dehumanized. Dred Scott was simply the last constitutional racism, which needed all three Civil War amendments to overcome - and Plessey showed that only a change of heart, or federal troops or election  monitors, can guarantee such rights.

Securing women's rights were not even attempted by even Frederick Douglas and child labor lasted in law until the early twentieth century, except in the agricultural sector when cotton needed harvesting. Even now, there are converture laws on the books that essentially treated women as property. Some judges still do. The 1960s were not about sexual excess, as reactionaries would have us believe, they were about emancipation of women from men. This is not complete, as the Kavanaugh arguments show. It is also why the pro-choice movement is so sensitive to the historic treatment of women. To a great extent, undoing Roe would also undo progress of women out of being property themselves.

Current efforts to disenfranchise both blacks and students have their roots in the denial of the franchise to freemen, which was either official or informal through the Klan. That Republicans, the heirs to the racist south, still go to this tactic to try to win elections is simply a continuation of past racism. It never really stopped.  Efforts to restrict bankruptcy rights and to issue predatory loans to African Americans who qualified for much better terms is another sign that racism exists in places one would think would be immune from it. It does not even make business sense.