I get it.

He lives in an ivory tower.

He breathes only air infused with the scent of centuries old vellum and parchment.

But in an essay, he seeks to minimize the way slavery was absolutely a core embedded principle in the nation’s founding documents. He does this by nowhere stating the obvious — the obvious truth, that those of us long departed from college campuses know in our bones: the United States, at its founding, expressly denied the humanity of people of color.

It — by force of law — as well as the crack of a whip, made them non-human. Devoid of human rights. There was no need to say anything else. They were non-entities. [Forget the 3/5^ths clause — that was to help the south with additional WHITE, LANDED voting power — the majority’s voting power, not to enshine humanity on what the nation regarded as chattels.]

All of this leads the prof. (whose name I won’t mention in text, as it is linked — he also teaches at Arizona State University, part time) to glibly write, as his conclusion:

…At the same time, all it took to free the Constitution from its entanglement with slavery was the application of the legitimacy principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence to the states….

“All it took?!”

All… it took?

That is not just academic nonsense — that is outright denying what turns out to be more than another century of lynchings, oppression of voting and employment and inheritance and marriage rights. And insults great — and some… slight.

Like this one he offers, from a purportedly Catholic university’s perch.

In today’s dollars, that omission of all people of color’s humanity… allowed the United States to sell what were hundreds of trillions of dollars of cotton, sugar and even rum — to the rest of the world (and trade the same for every modern thing we now enjoy) — to build a vast roads and railways and waterways system — to endow “high-minded” universities (like Notre Dame and ASU!), to raise up great gleaming cities and bring the nation’s vast natural resource wealth into an undeniably whyte-dominated world market.

In sum, we are the richest nation on Earth due to four centuries of forced free labor (protected by our then founding papers) from the millions and millions of dead humans of color. The fields of the south literally are rich black Earth — from their blood and decayed bones. We willfully killed them — as certain as if we had hung every one of these humans — solely for the “offense” of breathing.

So, “professor” — sometimes, not directly mentioning something at all (i.e., the humanity of all humans) — is the loudest howl in the room… and it echoes… for more than four centuries.

And so… just shut it, man. Damn. Retire fully already, man.