Equality, not racism, is in America's DNA

America is under siege from all sides. That’s why I wrote America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. Today, the most often-repeated charge is that the United States was rooted in racism from the beginning. The New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project” stated that it’s in our DNA. Is this true?

The 1619 date was chosen because that’s when the Dutch brought African slaves to Virginia to sell to the English colonists. This was supposedly “the beginning of American slavery.” It wasn’t, though. Here’s the missing context: for all recorded history there was slavery. Slavery was the norm, not the exception. The 1619 Project could more accurately have said that slavery was in the world’s DNA rather than ours. Remarkably, it says nothing about the slavery the Native Americans practiced for centuries, well before the English arrived and for long afterward. That would not have suited its purpose, however, of “refram[ing] American history” around imported African slaves.

So, the existence of slavery was not the puzzle. The real puzzle was its elimination in the very nation in whose DNA it supposedly resided. The Times should have asked: How did that happen? What ideas made that possible, and from where did they come?

The Declaration of Independence provided the moral principle of human equality for the ultimate extirpation of slavery in the United States. With the background in revelation that “man is made in the image and likeness of God,” that principle was stated with the force of natural reason’s apprehension of the “laws of nature and nature’s God.”

“All men are created equal” does not bear out the DNA theory of racism at America’s origin. Of course, it was only as this principle suffused society and the political order that the elimination of the great evil of slavery became possible. Regarding slavery, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever…” Although he was a slaveholder, Jefferson, like all major founding figures, considered slavery evil. Like many others, he didn’t quite know what to do about it. Many hoped slavery would die out peacefully over time.

The accusation comes quickly: didn’t the Declaration mean equality only for white people? If so, then why, in the decade between the Declaration and the Constitution, did every state north of the Mason-Dixon line and the Ohio River abolish slavery or pass legislation leading to its abolition by 1800? Why did the Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787, forbid slavery in the huge territory that would later comprise five midwestern states?

Why did the Constitution contain a provision allowing Congress to pass an 1808 law forbidding the foreign slave trade? President Jefferson applauded the approaching measure “to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe.” Why, in 1820, did Congress make it a capital crime?

And why was a Civil War fought in which some 400,000 Union soldiers lost their lives to preserve the Union and to end slavery?

If racism was in America’s DNA, how could any of these things have happened? No one can change their DNA. Yet the United States, to its everlasting credit, eliminated slavery – because in its actual DNA was the great moral principle that “all men are created equal.”

To fight racism today, the last thing anyone should try to do is tear down the nation premised on that principle.

ROBERT R. REILLY is the director of the Westminster Institute. In government, he served as the director of the Voice of America and as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.