Hacker News Reader

Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

It speaks to the power of that part of US historical documentation that despite it declaring all men equal (women miss out again), the US then spent the next 80 years owning one type of human as property. If the core essence of the words were immediately ignored by the original authors, why should they be considered so ironclad today?

View on HN

I don't bring this up to defend it, but it was pretty clear that Africans weren't actually considered people at the time. You can't use modern value judgements unless you want a dissonant argument.

> You can't use modern value judgements unless you want a dissonant argument

This is my whole point! It's dissonant. There is no point in holding to the purist ideals of a document, if the authors themselves wrote it to ignore the invconvenient facts of life. Some people talk of the authors like they're some sort of demigods, and therefore any of their utterances are uncontestable. Highlighting dissonance like this is important it countering this trend.

There's no point to holding to the purist ideals of the document because the authors didn't uphold it fully? That's illogical.

Reading only half a comment and forming your conclusion from that? That's illogical.

It's worth noting they were well aware of the contradiction and slavery mainly got a pass to avoid an immediate civil war with the southern colonies. So yeah, they made choices for purposes of political expediency, but they weren't totally unaware of the contradiction. Thomas Jefferson was actually in sort of a "tough" spot (I say this without sympathy or defense) because it was widely recognized in his intellectual circles that slavery was wrong and against the many ideas he and his peers espoused, but his own personal wealth was so tied up in it that he had to make intellectual excuses for it (see Notes on the State of Virginia).

It's absurd to think that white people as a whole didn't think Africans were people. You are confusing propaganda with what people actually believed.

No, you're confusing my statement of the what the law at the time was with some sort of comprehensive statement of opinions that I couldn't possibly know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com