This is a continuation of the blog series Today’s White Niggers.
To start reading from the beginning, go to Part 1.

The Framers of the U. S. Constitution diminished the voting power of non-slaveholding whites (white niggers), but made it look like an attack against blacks (black niggers). This strategy was part of a coup, a conservative counterrevolution against the fear of “excessive democracy,” as Harvard Law Professor Michael J. Klarman puts it in his book The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.

Here’s how one part of this coup worked: it made the voter suppression of white niggers a founding principle of the American system of governance.

The voter suppression became a founding principle of the American system of governance.

The narrative begins with greed. The Southern delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 wanted to tally each of their slaves and would ratify the U. S. Constitution only if the new republic would count each slave held in the states of this new government. The Northern delegates wanted to count only the free inhabitants of the states as the basis for determining tax rates and the apportionment of members of the United States House of Representatives. The compromise reached by the two groups was that slaves would be tallied as three-fifths of a person (Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3).

Thanks to this compromise, every five slaves counted as three white men and thus increased proportionately the number of representatives who could be elected to represent the state in the Congress.

These extra votes—called the “Negro votes” and the “Negro Count”—swept the first (George Washington) and third (Thomas Jefferson) presidents into office.

New Hampshire Senator William Plumer summarized Jefferson’s election mandate this way: “the Negro votes made Mr. Jefferson president. Negro electors exceed those of four states, and their representatives are equal to those of six states.” [1]

The “Negro Count” swept the first (George Washington) and third (Thomas Jefferson) presidents into office.

Slave owners became, in effect, the political masters of free non-slave holding white men, the white niggers. The motivation wasn’t racial animus, it was greed; the “haves” wanted to have more. Senator Plumer put it this way:

Every five of the Negro slaves are accounted equal to three of you . . .  Those slaves have no voice in the elections; they are mere property; yet a planter possession a hundred of them may be considered as having sixty votes, while one of you who has equal or greater property is confined to a single vote.

Slave owners became the political masters of free non-slave holding white men.

Historian Garry Wills’ study of Thomas Jefferson’s election within the context of this vote-grabbing scam is unusual. Wills is one of only a handful of historians who address the fact that “Jefferson won it by the slave count” even though the election “is one of the most thoroughly studied events in our history.”[2]

The U.S. Constitution not only sanctioned the economic exploitation of blacks, but it also sanctioned the political disestablishment of non-slaving holding white voters: white niggers.

Wills summarizes the results: “The slave states always had one-third more seats in Congress than their free population warranted—forty-seven seats instead of thirty-three in 1793, seventy-six instead of fifty-nine in 1812, and ninety-eight instead of seventy-three in 1833.”

In 1843, John Quincy Adams looked at what the Negro vote had wrought and told the House of Representatives, “Your country is no longer a democracy, it is not even a republic—it is a government of two or three thousand holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the remaining part.”

The unequal representation of the slaveholding states in the Senate, as American historian Barry Weingast notes, gave the “South a veto power over any policy affecting slavery.”[3] The Slave Powers, in effect, had control over every policy affecting white America.

The Slave Powers, in effect, had control over every policy affecting white America.

Voter suppression schemes in the deep South were updated rather than abolished. One contemporary story illustrates the point.

The US Constitution, in sum, was not originally designed politically to be a one-man-one-vote system of governance. This political strategy of “[u]nequal representation,”[4] however, did not spark mass rebellions. As white men moved westward, bought land, and settled down on their own farms, the federal system of vested property interests protected these independent farmers and other entrepreneurs as they took over the lands of the natives.[5]

Rather than fight the system, American property owners (large and small) simply demanded that the government leave them alone to pursue their constitutionally guaranteed right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in their own individual propertied terms. These propertied citizens, in effect, were now vested in what the government didn’t do, namely, interfere with what they had, rather than what it could have done, namely, pay more structural attention to the basic interests and rights of the “least privileged minorities.”[6] Namely, America’s niggers of all colors.

White bodies were colonized, oppressed, and brutalized by more powerful white bodies long before the United States became a nation, as trauma counselor and author Resmaa Menakem notes in his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Revitalized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. “The carnage perpetuated on Blacks and Native Americans…[is] an adaption of longstanding white-on-white practices. This brutalization created trauma that has yet to be healed among white bodies today.”[7]

White bodies were colonized, oppressed, and brutalized by more powerful white bodies long before the United States became a nation.

The history of the trauma, however, is not enough. To heal the trauma, we must peer into what preceded it: the terror. The rapid heartbeat, the sweating, the gastronomical upset, the increased muscle tension, the panic,[8] the muscles enervating themselves for action,[9] but the released energy to prepare the body for fight or flight got blocked. Fighting was futile, and there was no place to hide, so the body froze to numb the onslaught of pain. These frozen feelings aren’t racial; they are desperate. The body-state isn’t hatred; it’s terror.

Niggers of all colors unite.

Continue to Part 6  >

[1] “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power: Garry Wills …, 2.
[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, Second Edition), 53.
[4] Ibid., 52.
[5] Ibid., 52-53.
[6] Ibid., 52.
[7] Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Revitalized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), 62. Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (New York: SUNY Press, 2000).
[8] Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, The Archeology of the Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 190.
[9] William James, The Variety of Religious Experience, 63.