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Trump Administration Report Attempts To Justify Slavery
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, only two days before President Donald Trump leaves office, the Trump administration released a report from its “1776 Commission” that excuses slavery, justifies the racist Three-fifths Compromise and rails against socialism and “identity politics.”
The “1776 Commission” — formed by Trump in September in direct response to The New York Times’ 1619 Project on America’s deep roots in slavery and racial injustice — released a report Monday that was meant to provide a “definitive chronicle of the American founding.”
The 45-page report reads in places like a right-wing manifesto: It makes excuses for slavery and the Three-fifths Compromise that declared slaves counted as less than full humans. It decries socialism and “identity politics,” celebrates the right to bear arms and calls the anti-abortion movement one of the nation’s “great reforms.”
The report notably defends the country’s Founding Fathers, who owned slaves, arguing that slavery was not “a uniquely American evil” and urging that “the institution be seen in a much broader perspective.”
The report goes on to justify the Three-fifths Compromise — in which white lawmakers from Northern and Southern states in 1787 agreed to count Black people as three-fifths of a person for congressional representation — saying that this was “just that: compromises,” and that, “as a question of practical politics, no durable union could have been formed without a compromise among the states on the issue of slavery.”
Historian and slavery scholar Daina Ramey Berry said the report “advocates teaching a narrow ‘patriotic’ history” of America and aims to “muzzle those who seek to teach a full and accurate history of America, including journalists of The New York Times’ 1619 Project.”
“From a historian’s vantage point, the report cannot be taken as a solid piece of historical work: It seeks to justify slavery and its damaging...
