It is no longer a surprise why so many American students have come to despise their own country.  The latest example of deliberate misinformation comes from the New Jersey State Bar Foundation (NJSBF).  Claiming that "informed citizens are better citizens," the NJSBF issued a May 20, 2020 article titled "Explaining the Roots of Institutional Racism."

Institutional racism was baked into the U.S. Constitution, dating back to when the Founding Fathers were determining how to calculate the number of seats each state would have in the House of Representatives.  Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution states: '...shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons ... three fifths of all other Persons.' Those three-fifths persons were slaves.

In fact, the "words 'slave' [and] 'slavery' do not exist in the Constitution.  Thus, as escaped slave abolitionist, Frederick Douglass stated '[a]bolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered.'  Thus, Douglass steadfastly believed that the government created by the Constitution 'was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.'"

In the "1776 Report" now scrubbed by the Biden administration but available here, one learns that Douglass "initially condemned the Constitution, but after studying its history came to insist that it was a 'glorious liberty document.'"

Erick M. Jensen writes in the Heritage Guide to the Constitution that the "three-fifths rule for counting slaves is often misunderstood.  When the Constitutional Convention debated the issue of how to count population for the purposes of representation, the Southern delegates to the Convention would have been pleased if nonvoting slaves had been counted as full persons.  That way, the Southern states would have had a greater representation in the House of Representatives."

Moreover, "counting slaves provided an incentive to import still more slaves."  Thus, the three-fifths rule compromise was not in the interests of the slaveholding South.

In essence, "the clause does not deny that blacks are full persons (in fact, free blacks were counted on par with whites for purposes of apportionment).  Rather, it addresses whether and how slaves should be counted for the purpose of determining the number of representatives in Congress.  Including slaves as part of the Southern population would give the South disproportionately greater representation in Congress and therefore more influence in forming the country's laws."

By contrast, "Northern delegates favored omitting slaves entirely when determining representation and therefore denying Southern states the advantage in the national legislature.  The compromise allowed three-fifths of the slave population to count toward determining representation."

Thus, "even though slaves were property under the laws of the Southern states, the Constitution itself acknowledged that they were persons.  By tying both representation and direct taxation to apportionment, the Framers removed any sectional benefit, and thus any proslavery taint, from the special counting rule."

An article by Malik Simba explains that the "three-fifths clause was part of a series of compromises enacted by the Constitutional Convention of 1787.  The most notable other clauses prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories and ended U.S. participation in the international slave trade in 1807."

By being shielded from the nuances and the evolution of ending slavery, American students are cheated out of vital information.  Instead, Phyllis Raybin Emert at the NJSBF asserts that "despite the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, today institutional racism or [structural racism] is still deeply implanted in governmental entities."

And then the obvious leftwing bent of the article rears its head by citing the Huffington Post, where Robin L. Hughes, a professor at the Indiana School of Education, trots out standard left-wing language and asserts that "[i]nstitutional racism is a powerful system of privilege and power based on race.  Those powerful structures begin and are perpetuated by seemingly innocent, normal events and daily occurrences and interactions."  Thus, "statistics show that white males make up nearly 75 percent of Fortune 500 company boards."

Enter the left's fallback position on every issue.  Hughes writes, "Since racism is so deeply embedded in our culture, we cannot assume that those who benefit from a powerful system of privilege built on race will somehow learn to see or even want to see inequity and institutionalized systems of racism overnight."

Going even farther, Dr. Donnetrice Allison, a professor of Africana studies at Stockton University, asserts that "[w]e cannot eliminate institutional racism unless those in power who deem themselves superior and worthy to maintain their power, give it up."

If this were not sufficient to mislead American students, and turn them into left-wing activists, the next article by Jodi L. Miller at the NJSBF titled "White Supremacy Rises Across the Nation" would surely cement the core ideas of critical race theory now rampant in schools across the nation.  Miller cites the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which claims to be a legal advocacy organization that tracks hate groups.  When it first began, the SPLC certainly did expose many hate groups, but as time has passed, the SPLC has deviated from its once constructive actions.

Assuredly, "some of the groups that are named in SPLC's lists, can in fact, be accurately described as hate groups whose platforms are founded upon values like racial separatism, racial supremacy, or the promotion of discrimination or violence against people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, etc.  But many of the organizations targeted by SPLC are not 'hate' groups in any legitimate sense of the word. Rather, they are thoughtful, articulate conveyors of conservative values and principles that are anathema to SPLC, and their inclusion in SPLC's list of 'hate groups' constitutes an egregious libel that is based on nothing more than SPLC's intolerance for ideas with which it does not agree."

But "[b]y conflating actual hate groups on the one hand, with respectable conservative organizations on the other — and thereby giving the impression that conservative values are somehow inherently hateful, racist, or otherwise repugnant — SPLC seeks to shut down debate, shut down free speech, and delegitimize conservatives as odious monsters whose viewpoints do not even merit a fair hearing."

The Social Contract Press has done in-depth reporting on the Southern Poverty Law Center. Actually, "SPLC spokespersons Richard Cohen, Heidi Beirich, and Mark Potok serve as attack dogs of the far left as the organization smears law-abiding citizens while ignoring real terrorist threats."

At the end of the NJSBF article is the following question: does it matter whether or not a person impacted by white supremacy is a citizen?  For most students educated in critical race theory as opposed to genuine critical thinking skills, this is a rhetorical question.  They have been marinating in a skewed and  hateful view of America since kindergarten.  Thus, schooled to be more sympathetic to those who have broken American immigration laws, they will (a) ignore the illegals' assault on the country, (b) view the non-citizens [code for illegals] as meriting more concern than actual Americans, and (c) presume that racism is only a white-on-black occurrence since they have never been informed about the racist attitudes of such groups as Black Lives Matter. 

This is a perfect stew for the continuing attack on the country by radical progressives.  And it is apparently being promoted by the legal profession.  The slanted and pre-ordained conclusions corroborate the now popular "anti-racist" approach by Ibram X. Kendi, who "maintains that America was 'stamped from the beginning' with racism and slavery.  Progressives will damn as racist any version of the story of our nation that does not affirm this divisive race mongering Narrative."  This stands in direct contrast with what students should be taught as explained by Dennis Prager.

In 1768, Josiah Quincy, Jr.[1] wrote

O, my countrymen! what will our children say,
when they read the history of these times,
should they find we tamely gave away,
without one noble struggle,
the most invaluable of earthly blessings?

Indeed, 253 years later, what will they say?

Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.

Image via Flickr, Public Domain.