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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Three fifths compromise was an attempt to determine how to count the population in terms of representation. Free men of any race were counted as a whole person.

    Leads to the question, was it racist because a slave should be counted as whole person and thus give slave owning populations more power in government despite the fact that the slave would not have their representatives advocate for them? Or should they not be counted as a person at all and thus be reduced to property with no representatives accounting for their population? Is being in the middle any worse than the extremes?

    There is no morally right answer on the subject (because slavery itself makes any decision on the matter inherently immoral), however it needed to be addressed in terms of how representatives are distributed to the states.



  • Race and color weren’t referred to in the constitution until the 15th amendment, which granted equal protection. You can argue parts talk about slavery in the abstract but could refer to any non-free person (prisoners for example).

    Racism was institutionalized in many, many other ways but to say the constitution specifically is quite racist isn’t really correct, it’s more than race was left out.

    Now the confederate constitution, that’s an example of won’t shut up about race.