Slavery isn’t the primary problem, I have with the founding fathers. As apologists for the founding fathers have pointed out numerous times, slavery has been around since the dawn of civilization. They behaved just like every other winning civilization when given the opportunity to take advantage of free labor. They took it.

And if we could stop here with the Founding Fathers, I would be OK with that. But there is more to the story.

The African slave traders who sold their fellow Africans into slavery didn’t say that all men were created equal. The Founding Fathers did. This created a number of problems for them. First, how do you explain taking land from a native population and African slavery. I mean, if all men are created equal. There has to be a good explanation and that explanation was racism. These people were less than the European settlers. The African and the Native American were robbed of their humanity — their equality with their fellow men.

The African slave trader was involved in a money making operation with no regards to the humans they captured. They didn’t write the Declaration of Independence. They didn’t write of noble ideas about how men should behave and what the future would look like when men could elect their own government and thus determine their fates. The Founding Fathers, however, did.

This difference caused an expository problem. If all men were created equal, what of the Native American and the African slave. How can all men be equal given the treatment of these non-European peoples. The answer was they are savages. They are less than the White European, that Whites were superior to everyone else. The superior race deserved to run the show.

This sentiment is a much more damaging idea. It turns an unfortunate prisoner of war into less than a human. It poisoned the White population into believing they were better than everyone else so that when the Civil War ended — the slaves might be free but an ideology of racism still existed. Many Whites still believed they were better than Blacks and Native Americans. Treating them differently was OK because they were inferior beings.

But why do we have to dwell on that. Why not just look at the noble ideas and forget the racism. The noble ideas, after all, are what is important. Well, yes, to a degree this is true but we are also teaching children about the past. The Civil War, Civil Rights and the Settlers expansion into Native American Territories are very much a part of this history.

If you don’t give the context of racism, how do those events make any sense?

Noble ideas are starting points in history. This is what we want the world to look like. But, as with all human institutions, the Founding Fathers failed to live up to all of these noble ideas. We do not live in a perfect world and never will. Indeed, we all, even to this day, could do better and this isn’t such a bad idea to leave children with – we can do better.