“Childless Randi has a child’s understanding of US history.” So said columnist Derek Hunter, joining others in criticizing teachers union boss Randi Weingarten for sending a tweet so historically illiterate that many find it unfathomable she’s an educator.
The Post Millennial reports on the story, writing that “Weingarten, the progressive president of the second-largest teacher’s union in the country [the American Federation of Teachers] and a former history teacher, displayed her lack of historical knowledge on Wednesday when she falsely claimed that ‘if America’s founders questioned slavery’ the three-fifths compromise wouldn’t have been added to the US Constitution.”
“Weingarten’s faulty claim [tweet below] was in response to a clip of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in which he asserted that ‘It was the American Revolution that caused people to question slavery,’” the site continued. “‘No one had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights.’”
The three-fifths-compromise canard — the notion that the standard’s origination lay in a desire to dehumanize black people — is one of those lies that got halfway around the world before the Truth could get its boots on. Yet it has been debunked repeatedly.
And The Post Millennial addressed the matter as well, writing that the “three-fifths compromise refers to an agreement between delegates from the Northern and Southern states at the 1787 US Constitutional Convention. The slave-owning southern states wanted to count all those they enslaved towards electoral representation in Congress, while the non-slave states argued that this gave the southerners an unfair representation in the House, according to Harvard University’s Perspectives of Change project.”
“The agreement ended up being a give-and-take for both sides, as the Founding Fathers settled on three out of every five enslaved individuals counting towards the electorate,” the site elaborates. “Without pushback from the Northern states, slave owners would’ve had a significantly larger pull in the House of Representatives….”
So, to be clear, the agreement’s meaning was not that a black individual was only “three-fifths of a person”; it wasn’t a philosophical or theological statement about his personhood. This is made all the more obvious by the fact that, under the agreement, all free blacks (“free Persons,” as the text puts it) were counted toward representation.
Obviously, the compromise was an example of how, as Otto von Bismarck put it, “Politics is the art of the possible.” But would today’s racial activists prefer that all slaves had been counted toward representation despite not being allowed to vote? Do they wish slave states had been granted even more electoral power?
As for Weingarten’s claim that the Founders didn’t question slavery, Nate Madden, communications director for Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas), tweeted, “… if nobody was questioning it, why was it a ‘compromise’?”
In reality, many Founders knew slavery was wrong, and some combated it strenuously. Just consider Thomas Jefferson. As black professor Thomas Sowell pointed out in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals (all quotations his):
- Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence first draft included a criticism of King George III for having enslaved Africans and for overriding Colonial Virginia’s attempted slavery ban.
- “When Jefferson drafted a state constitution for Virginia in 1776, his draft included a clause prohibiting any more importation of slaves.”
- In 1783, “Jefferson included in a new draft of a Virginia constitution a proposal for gradual emancipation of slaves.”
- In 1784, Jefferson proposed “a law declaring slavery illegal in all western territories.” The “bill lost by one vote, that of a legislator too sick to come and vote.”
- As president, Jefferson urged that Americans be stopped from participating in the violation of Africans’ human rights.
Of course, Jefferson’s efforts were largely stymied, as slavery then was much like abortion today: legal in some states but not others, with conflicting interests contending over, in slavery’s case, an age-old institutional status quo the world over. A clearer picture can be gleaned via the audio excerpt of Sowell’s book below.
In fairness, Governor Ron DeSantis’ claim that “no one had questioned” slavery until the Revolution isn’t strictly true. Some believe the Stoics, who lived in the B.C. period, frowned upon slavery. Then there was the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, which protested the enslavement of Africans. There were other anti-slavery efforts as well.
It does appear, however, that the Revolution inspired truly robust abolitionism. For example, just a year after it began, in 1777, Vermont largely banned slavery. Moreover, responding to Weingarten, actor Mark Pellegrino wrote, “The Declaration was followed by mass private manumissions. You teach?”
That Weingarten actually did speaks volumes about our “education” system. Critics noted this, too. Conservative journalist Kyle Becker wrote, for example, “It’s downright scary how historically illiterate these teacher’s union hacks are — and they teach children!”
Then, Texas GOP chairman Matt Rinaldi opined likewise, stating, “The head of the teachers’ union having zero understanding of history explains a lot about the state of our public schools.”
(Hat tip: Fox News.)
Unfortunately, it’s doubtful Weingarten will learn any better than she apparently taught. Her propaganda-like tweet is still up, but responses aren’t allowed except from people she follows or has mentioned. And she’ll likely repeat the same lies in the future, as the leftist norm is to put one’s agenda in place of Truth and then rationalize away the latter when it conflicts with that agenda. When your empire is built on lies, those lies can become as God.
