How the Creation of the Constitution Informs the Inequities of Today

It's easy to look around the United States today and see just how far the nation has come since the creation of the Constitution in 1787. For starters, there are Black people living their lives as free, full, and powerful humans (at least on paper) with equal access to the privileges and immunities of the American citizenry (again, on paper). We also see women in positions of leadership and power, including in the federal government, in ways that would have been punishable by law in the 18th century. But does this mean that the United States is beyond inequity? To that I say, far from it.

Doomed From the Start

In the summer of 1787 - when the Constitution was being crafted - the only people who were considered eligible voters in this new nation were white, wealthy, landowning men. Sure, this meant that other white people who were poor or working class were largely excluding from voting, as well, but it did not mean that they couldn’t possibly vote one day.

As for Black people, Native Americans, and women, well they were doomed form the start, being deliberately (strategically, if Black/African) excluded from the American experiment. The great paradox of the time was the irony that a group men, all hailing from the history’s storied Enlightenment Period, were unable to explain intelligently how the land of the free required Africans to be in bondage.

To Be in the Room Where It Happened

The delegates chosen to represent the nation during the Constitutional Convention were a unique group of people - all of whom white and all of whom male; and it stood to reason that any product resulting from the meeting was going to be influenced not just by the white male psyche, but the white male desires, as well. As a result, the finished product, written intentionally to guide a new nation and its people, was a pro-slavery/anti-Back document that excluded women entirely and constitutionalized the United States’ supremacy over Indigenous land. When engaged further, you will uncover the thinking behind the latter being that Native Americans were not considered state citizens for the purposes of taxation. Meaning one of the ways the government justified the taking of Indigenous lands was to acknowledge them as separate from the nation, itself. This matters because the framers knew all too well the hypocrisy and dangers of taxing persons without first affording them representation. “Such persons” (a term we’ll become all too familiar with), of course, do not include Black or African people.  

This type of framing led to a similar type of thinking which, by the rules of engagement, led to a societal climate and culture that saw certain groups of people as second class and less then. Despite Abigail Adams writing to her husband, John Adams, to “remember the ladies” when crafting new laws, the sentiment of women as “the weaker sex” was too widely accepted throughout the colonies at that time. 

As a result, I am not sure we can be too surprised when the most qualified presidential candidate in United States history, a woman named Hilary Clinton, was defeated by her Republican adversary who also happened to be the most unqualified presidential candidate in American history. Research has shown that at least 30% of Americans are not ready for a female President (thehill.com) and it is not terribly difficult to draw a straight line to the culture created around “a woman’s place” in 1787.

How Does This Affect Me?

White households have been known to hold as much as 9.1 times as much wealth as Black households. This wealth becomes generational and creates not just a sustainable living situation for future white families, but it creates influence in essential areas of life, such as education, banking, and healthcare. The reality is that this vast amount of wealth begins on the backs of enslaved Africans who were forced to till land that was stolen from those Indigenous. 

As such, Black and Indigenous Americans have been largely left out of “the room where it happens” because the nation was never designed to include them in the first place. And despite the efforts to address the harms created by the past, it is because of  this deliberate act of exclusion, strategically designed throughout the summer of 1787, that anyone who is not white, wealthy, landowning, or male, themselves, can attribute much of their inequities of today to many of those names we see on American currency and universities everyday.

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Awakening the Constitution is a series designed to help bring the power of the United States Constitution back into the hands and minds of Americans. This series makes a concerted effort to not only provide education around the U.S. Constitution, but to highlight the role of the courts, as well; taking a constitutional eye towards everyday life and telling the true story of the document's relationship to the nation and its people.