Fullfilling the Promise: Race and Gender in Ante-Bellum America

It has always seemed strange to me how easily Americans compartmentalize their “morals” and “values” into paradoxical categories. On the one hand, Americans boast of a nation built on the idea that “all men are created equal” as written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, many Americans supported slavery and saw blacks as inferior including Thomas Jefferson who in Notes on the State of Virginia declared “I advance it…that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” So the “men” in the Declaration apparently meant “white” men only. Of course the word “men” also does not include women who suffered a more subtle inequality than blacks, but one that was just as unfair.
After reading works like “David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles,” Margaret Fuller’s The Great Lawsuit, Frederick Douglas’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, or Elizabeth Drew Stoddards “Lemorre v. Huell,” it seems hard to argue that these African American and women writers are inferior to white men. So where does this blindness to the apparent talents and abilities of both African Americans and women come from? I guess it was easy for white men, who held all governmental offices, ran the countries corporations, and sat on the boards of most universities to assume this status quo existed because they were in some way superior to women and African Americans or in a Social Darwinian sense—the fittest. That argument may seem logical until you think about the fact that they have slaves and they have wives because they cannot seem to figure out how to survive without them. Take away the oppression of African Americans and women; erase history and put them all on a level playing field, and then see how the status quo looks.
Erasing history may be impossible, but there have been steps taken to change the future status quo. The Civil War, the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments, the Civil Rights Act, and various other governmental acts have been the most obvious legal steps to equality. The legal reality, however, is still ahead of the cultural reality. American culture has improved dramatically from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglas, Margaret Fuller, and even Martin Luther King Jr., but it is not there yet. These great figures just mentioned would be astounded to know that we now will have for the first time either a woman, Hillary Clinton, or an African American man, Barak Obama, as the democratic presidential nominee. However, the sad fact is that these candidates are so unique for their identities as either female or black. If all were equal, it wouldn’t be such a big deal that Hillary Clinton is a woman, and Barack Obama is a black man. When we get to the day when a woman is just a candidate and a black man is just her opponent, or when a voter doesn’t have to check whether she is female or male or whether she is white or black, then maybe we will truly understand what equality means.