By Larry Kenneth Alexander
The U.S. Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas declared that the U.S. Constitution is color-blind in overturning affirmative action. This finding by Justice Thomas on behalf of the majority was wrong because of the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott v. John A. Sandford case that found that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution intentionally created “a perpetual and impassable barrier” between the white race and those they enslaved. The Dred Scott Decision is the law of the land as it was never overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court and it stands inapposite to Justice Thomas finding that the U.S. Constitution is color-blind.
Further, the “smoking gun” supporting the thesis that the US Constitution is color-bias is the Three-Fifths Compromise which declared enslaved blacks were counted as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. This country violated the Treaty of Paris of 1783 and did not grant the 500,000 enslaved black colonials fundamental due process of law because they knew colonial slavery had never been lawfully codified and that the British Parliament had abolished all colonial slave statutes and “Negro laws” by way of the Declaratory Act of 1766, ten years before the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, England’s Court of the King’s Bench in the James Somerset v. Charles Stewart case in 1772 ruled that slavery was not “allowed or approved by the law of the Kingdom.” The notion that the US Constitution is a color-blind document is a myth.