Your Comment is “Unavailable”
I submitted a comment to the New York Times on Friday, July 14, relating to a story of US House Republicans using the annual Defense spending bill to score some points on social policy. The paragraph I was responding to was:
The House added language barring the Pentagon’s educational arm from buying any book that contains pornographic material or “espouses radical gender ideology.” And with the help of nine Democrats, Republicans won approval of a policy prohibiting Defense Department schools from teaching that the United States or its founding documents are racist.
Here, in full, is the comment that I submitted:
How is this clause quoted from Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution not racist?
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
It drips with racial identity used as categories of “Persons” (aka African slaves) as part of the formula to apportion taxes.
How is it not racist to weave into the founding governmental document the recognition that kidnapped Africans and their descendents were held in bondage when there were no whites held as slaves. Not one. (Indentured servants were not slaves and their children were always free.)
Racial slavery was a fundamental institution as the United States was created. Not to tell our children of this wrong leaves them ignorant of a reality that they need to know to recognize how far we have come — and how far we must still go.
I composed it early in the day and received an email that my comment had been approved and posted.
Like any person with an ego, I checked later to see if anyone had “recommended” my post. Okay, it was in single digits, actually 7 as I recall. But I have to recall, because the posting disappeared later in the day and what I would see when I clicked on the link for the post was the screenshot at the top of this piece. (The caption has the URL embedded in it, but you have to subscribe to the Times to view the page.) My comment has been “unavailable” ever since yesterday. My surmise is that someone thought it offensive and reported it to the editors or the editors decided that it was offensive. Either way, it’s gone as of this writing.
I’m at a loss as to why my post was removed. It was not inaccurate. It was not offensive. It provided context for a clause in the Constitution that is necessary to see an important reality when it was written, 1787. I actually have a PhD in American history, so this is not the result of a casual reading of the document.
It saddens me that a presumably enlightened publication found my thoughts unprintable.
