The New York Times has begun a major initiative, the "1619
Project," to observe the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American
slavery. It aims to reframe American history so that slavery and the
contributions of black Americans explain who we are as a nation. Nikole
Hannah-Jones, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine
wrote the lead article, "America Wasn't a Democracy, Until Black
Americans Made It One." She writes, "Without the idealistic, strenuous
and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most
likely look very different -- it might not be a democracy at all."
There
are several challenges one can make about Hannah-Jones's article, but
I'm going to focus on the article's most serious error, namely that the
nation's founders intended for us to be a democracy. That error is
shared by too many Americans. The word democracy appears nowhere in the
two most fundamental founding documents of our nation -- the Declaration
of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Instead of a democracy, the
Constitution's Article IV, Section 4, declares, "The United States shall
guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of
Government." Think about it and ask yourself whether our Pledge of
Allegiance says to "the democracy for which it stands" or to "the
republic for which it stands." Is Julia Ward Howe's popular Civil War
song titled "The Battle Hymn of the Democracy" or "The Battle Hymn of
the Republic"?
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