William Spivey
2 min readMay 12, 2021

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America is not a racist country. We believe that all people are created equal. Every time prejudices have compromised this critical principle, people of strong moral character have, often at great cost, forced us to confront the ugly reality, to make meaningful changes, and to ever more strongly reaffirm this principle: people are created equal. This is the legacy of the country: throwing off the horrors of slavery and tackling racist thought and institutions.

America is not a racist country. We were founded with glorious principles and grotesque “compromises”, and the principles won. But there is still racism. That is why we will, why we must take up the cause again — there are still too many ways in which we fall cruelly short of our ideal, of who we are.

America is not a racist coutry. We will take up the cause again and again; we will fight the lingering stains of racism until it is exiled to the pages of our history books. Because we must be true to our ideals, and we are not a racist country.

I would love for your version to be true but I disagree with your entire premise. America is not a nation founded on glorious principles that occasionally makes mistakes which it corrects. The Constitution is inherently racist and contains many clauses and compromised designed to protect slavery and those who owned them, Twelve of the first eighteen Presidents owned slaves and several of the first Supreme Court Justices. Our judiciary doesn’t allow us to progress and is constrained by originalism which keeps us tied to those founding principles. Even the times Congress has made progress by passing this Civil Rights Act or that Voting Rights Act, SCOTUS has acted to undermine those Acts and/or find them wholly or partially Unconstitutional. What we have at this moment is 47 states trying to enact voter suppression laws. Should I have said, “three American states are not racist?” Let’s not forget the majority-minority locations of Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, with populations larger than Vermont and Wyoming with no voting representatives in Congress and no Senators. Does racism play no part in that? America is true to its ideals, that is the problem.

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William Spivey
William Spivey

Written by William Spivey

I write about politics, history, education, and race. Follow me at williamfspivey.com and support me at https://ko-fi.com/williamfspivey0680

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