They tell us to "respect the foundation." They tell us the Constitution is the greatest document ever written by the hands of men, a divine blueprint for liberty. But when I open those pages, I don’t see a sanctuary. I don’t see a "shining city on a hill." I see a ledger. And in that ledger, under Article I, Section 2, my ancestors weren't people. They were a decimal point.
Three-fifths.
Let that number sit on your tongue until it tastes like copper. The "Founding Fathers"—men like Madison and Jefferson, who wrote poetic lines about "unalienable rights"—sat in a room in Philadelphia, probably sipping tea and wiping sweat from their brows, and debated whether my blood was worth 100% or 0%. They didn't argue over our souls, our intellect, or our capacity to feel pain. They argued over our utility.
They landed on 60%. Not because they thought we were 60% human, but because it was a cold, calculated move for political leverage. Southern states wanted enslaved people to count toward their population so they could have more seats in Congress and more power to protect the very institution of slavery. Northern states didn't want the South to have that much power. The "Compromise" wasn't about humanity at all; it was a business deal using Black bodies as currency to balance a political scale. We were just numbers used to fill seats in a Congress that was designed to never hear our voices.
The Paper Doesn’t Forget
The "Three-Fifths Compromise" is the ultimate gaslight in American history. People love to point to the 14th Amendment and say, "But Roseanne, they fixed it! The math is gone! Why are you still stuck in 1787?"
I’m stuck there because the ink is still there.
If you walk into the National Archives today and look at that parchment, those words haven't been scratched out with a heavy pen. They haven't been erased or redacted. In the legal world, they call it "superseded," but in the real world, it’s a permanent scar. You can’t just put a "patch" on a foundation that was poured with cracks in it and expect the house not to lean. The Constitution is treated like a holy relic, yet its "original intent" included the literal devaluation of my existence.
Every time a politician talks about "Originalism"—the idea that we must interpret the law exactly as the founders intended—my skin crawls. Because if we go back to the "original intent" of those men, I am a fraction. If we go back to the "original" vision, my right to breathe, to vote, and to own my own body is a statistical error they had to "compromise" on.
The Modern Fraction
When I see the way the world moves today, I see that the "Three-Fifths" ghost hasn't left the room. It just changed its clothes.
We see it in Gerrymandering, where Black communities are carved up and diluted so our votes count for less. That’s the 3/5 math.
We see it in the Justice System, where a Black life is often given a fraction of the value of a white life in a courtroom. That’s the 3/5 math.
We see it in Medical Bias, where Black pain is ignored or underestimated by doctors. That’s the 3/5 math.
They might count us as "whole persons" on a census form now, but the systems built on that original document still act like the math is in effect. They want our culture, they want our labor, and they want our "representation" when it benefits their district power, but they don't want the "whole person" that comes with it. They don't want the Roseanne Milton who speaks up. They want the version that stays in the parentheses.
Reclaiming the Whole
I am a Black woman. I am 100% of a soul, 100% of a citizen, and 100% finished with being told that a "compromise" on my humanity was just "the way things were."
The people who wrote that document weren't "men of their time." They were men who knew better but chose power over personhood. They looked at a mother being torn from her child and saw three-fifths of a person. They looked at a man working until his back broke and saw three-fifths of a person.
We aren't just an amendment. We aren't a "fix" to a broken line of code. We are the pulse of this country, the very people who forced it to actually live up to the "liberty" it bragged about. The Constitution didn't grant me my humanity—my humanity was always mine. The Constitution is just finally starting to catch up to the truth.
So, don't tell me to "get over it." Don't tell me it’s "just history." History is the ground we are standing on. And as long as those words remain in the ink of our founding laws, I will be here, 100% loud and 100% whole, reminding you that we were never a fraction. We were always the whole damn equation.
No comments:
Post a Comment