The American Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men are created equal”, has some serious editing and semantic errors. Time to fix them
The American Declaration of Indepence says, “...all men are equal.” They meant that men were created equal, but women were another matter entirely. Representation pic
I’m worried about America. Not South America, which is going down the drain quite well by itself without help. Not Canada, which has managed to stay a cool dude. Not Mexico either, because why on earth? It’s that big, self-conscious country called the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave.
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I’m worried specifically about their Declaration of Independence, carefully crafted in 1776 at the beginning of the American Revolution by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
What worries me in that declaration is the bit about all men being created equal. Did Jefferson really mean all American men are created equal? It is difficult to imagine an American in 2021 holding a Chinese, Russian, Arabian or Indian human being as their peer. Even America’s cousins “across the pond”, the British, are regarded as being a few pegs lower. After all, America was built by Britons who broke away from Britain. Prime Minister Tony Blair was famously known as George W Bush’s pet poodle.
There was a memorable demonstration of high-pitched American superiority at Dubai International Airport once, when I and several hundred other tired passengers were waiting to board a packed plane to somewhere. There was a sudden commotion, and a lanky, bearded, ginger-haired white man with a backpack became visible, shoving his way past the queued passengers, shouting, “Let me through! I’m an American!”
Behind him, perfectly mimicking his flapping movements, was a slightly taller, coal-black Somali man, chiming shrilly, “Lemme through, I’mma’merican!” Several hundred people were laughing. The American was oblivious to the frivolity around him.
Donald Trump has told Americans over and over again, to thunderous applause, that Mexicans are “rapists and criminals”—which presumably no American is. He has identified several ‘shithole’ countries, none of them with white-skinned populations.
Wait. Is that it? Are there in fact two missing words in the US Declaration of Independence? That all white American men are created equal?
To take the simplest example, history tells us unequivocally that Americans have long felt superior to black Africans, whom they called Negroes, chained together and brought in shiploads to work as slaves in southern plantations.
The tradition continues. In February 2020, a young black called Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down and shot by three white men while he was out jogging in his neighborhood, because he “looked like a thief”. If one could put a value on a life, then to his murderers, the value of Ahmaud Arbery’s life was zero.
Not so very long ago, though, a US law explicitly stated that a black person would be counted for census purposes as three-fifths of a human being. This would be used to determine the ‘real’ population of slave-owning states, and in turn the number of congressmen who could be elected from that state.
During the Rwanda genocide, when Clinton was trying every trick to prove it was not actually a genocide and therefore required no US intervention, a US official called his counterpart in the US Embassy in Rwanda to say, “We are doing our calculations back here and one American casualty is worth about 85,000 Rwandan dead.”
In other words, a black Rwandan is worth a fraction of a black American who himself, till not long ago, was worth a fraction of a white American.
What worries me the most about the American Declaration of Independence is that it leaves out half the planet. Mind you, Jefferson’s words were not idly penned; they would have been read, reviewed, edited, vetted, drafted and re-drafted. Each word in it is fully intended. So when it says, “...all men are created equal”, be sure they considered, and rejected, every alternative: people, persons, human beings, individuals. They actually meant that men are created equal; women were another matter entirely.
The American woman, no less than an Afghan or Indian woman, is in the sights of a brutal, patronising, hypocritical and dehumanising patriarchy. The USA consists of elderly white Americans who understand neither a woman’s body nor her mind but are obsessed with controlling her fertility. The USA has enacted more devilish laws to inhibit and curb abortion rights than any other country on the planet, including forcing a woman to listen to the fetal heartbeat, and more recently, in Texas, to allow vigilantes to sue anyone suspected of having or enabling an abortion.
In the coming week, we will all watch the USA’s Supreme Court take the first steps to kill abortion rights dead in the water.
So here, edited with logic and brought up to date, is the new Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, as long as they are white, American and 100% male.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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