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Will America Ever Give White-Man Rights To Everyone Else?

If we want to make it another 250 years, the Constitution is going to have to do a lot more than protect individual political and civil rights.

The room where it happened: The signing of the US Constitution in 1787, in a painting by Junius Brutus Stearns.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, wealthy white men in the process of colonizing the North American continent declared their independence from the wealthy white men who’d sent them to do the colonizing. Their fundamental disagreement was over which group of white men had the right to profit most from their joint subjugation of other humans. Eventually, the American colonists triumphed over the British venture capitalists.

You don’t need to be a Puritan to recognize that this country was born in sin. The early generations of Americans stole land, murdered the people living on that land, and then forced enslaved people to work the land they’d stolen. That’s a trifecta of evil so twisted that nobody would believe it if you wrote it as the backstory for a dystopian empire that rebels had to take down with laser swords.

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America Is Due a Third Reconstruction Michele Goodwin

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What Should Be Done With America’s Slave Mansions? Aaron Ross Coleman

What Should Be Done With America’s Slave Mansions?

Separation of Church and State: America’s Best Idea John Fugelsang

Separation of Church and State: America’s Best Idea

For all the founding documents’ grandiose talk about self-evident truths and inalienable rights, neither the white man’s Declaration of Independence nor his Constitution conferred any rights or liberties on Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, women, children, or poor people. These documents—and the political philosophy around which they were organized—were written by rich white men for the benefit of rich white men, and this country has never for a day recovered from their failure.

We’ve tried to fix this thing. At every point in US history, people have worked desperately to perfect our Constitution and make it applicable to all of the people living under its principles. But we’ve never addressed the structural failures of our Constitution, and so we’ve really only ever addressed the symptoms of our dysfunction, not the root causes.

The core failure of our Constitution is that it is based on individual political and civil rights, with no mention of economic or social rights. It’s based on what we call “negative rights”: things that the government cannot do to its citizens. What’s missing is a robust conception of “positive rights”: the things that the government must do for its citizens. Indeed, there have been efforts, led by the Supreme Court, to “calcify” the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties” and nothing more. It’s a mistake that we keep making.

You can see how that design and structure are great from the perspective of a wealthy white man who merely needs the government to stay out of his way (and out of his pocket). It’s not so great from the perspective of a person who needs affirmative things from the government. And it is largely silent on the broader issues of social and public good.

We can see the wealthy-white-man perspective clearly in the Bill of Rights—the part of the Constitution where the rights of the people are finally addressed. The first eight amendments all affirm individual political and civil rights: speech, religion, due process, trial by........

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