We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor

The only way a rational, intelligent man who was also a slaveowner could write "all men are created equal" could only have been aspirational. Any other interpretation would have to start with the premise that Thomas Jefferson was an idiot. And if that's your position, I'd invite you to read the rest of the Declaration of Independence and then re-evaluate. Even if, along with Adams and Franklin,* he were only responsible for a third of it, it's a pretty strong fucking third. Pick any third, even the boring parts about how George III is a dick who's way in to, like, taxes and shit. There's not a lot of room for blinkered fooldom to be found.

And if you're still not sure about what the slaveholder thought of slavery, you can check out the Deleted Scenes bonus content of the Declaration itself. The section was cut, like most editing decisions in the modern film industry, to make sure it played to a wider audience who might be put off by some of the nuances of the English language and what would be seen as a foreign culture of values. Except in this case, that probably meant the Carolinas.

Racism and slavery are American birth defects, passed to us in the womb by a self-rationalizing mercantilist British mother-system, a club foot that we have independently decided, as we've grown into national adulthood, to compensate for by repeatedly kicking ourselves in the face with our deformed appendage. And yet some of us are still startled to find that this may not have been the best of therapeutic strategies.

I'm all for the empowerment speech that seeks to de-victimize the otherwise limited. You know, the type of people who insist on using euphemistic salves like "handi-capable" or "differently abled." In some extreme cases in the realm of ideas, this comes in the form of loudly declaring, when confronted with challenging information one would rather not have to reckon with, to simply shout it down, junior-high-school pep-squad style.

Some of us think--and I recognize this is some complicated more-than-one-thing-ism, but bear with me--that the right approach is maybe an orthopedic shoe. To take advantage of the blessings of modernity in order to minimize if not eradicate the effects of deficiencies that have beset us from conception.

There's a through line from slavery to legal disenfranchisement to economic exploitation to segregation and Jim Crow to lynchings to brutal housing discrimination to police harassment and incarceration culture. But it's not obvious to everyone. It seems clear to me. But if you start with the premise that America is and always has been what it needs to be and a force for good, then you can reach conclusions, contra Jefferson, that the symptoms and the disease are the same thing, insisting on remaining willfully blind to the sickness underneath.

That's how we can't even manage a discussion on the topic, where two men like Bill O'Reilly and Russell Simmons can spend a few minutes on television where all they can agree upon is that the basic underpinnings of their worldviews don't match.

Bill O'Reilly is never going to say that crime in low-income African-American neighborhoods is the result of centuries of systemic exploitation, degradation and abuse; or that those traditions of oppression pit largely white police forces and communities of black Americans, especially young black men, against one another days, months, years before they might ever meet in the street. That's the same as saying America wasn't wrought immaculately, like Mary in the womb of St. Anne, conflating all the preferred fairy tales--religious and nationalist--into one.

No, the problem is black criminals. Not the conditions that create them. It's the criminals themselves. Why don't they just go to college like the Asians? Because they've chosen--from all the other options before them--to live in shitty neighborhoods, with all the attendant grief and limits suggested therein. When confronted with that, what are the white police supposed to do? Before you answer, remember: they are, like every single person who was ever in the military, automatically heroes.

So there is no room for subtlety. There's no point/counterpoint, just (at best) a vaguely polite vomiting out of mutually exclusive ideas into totally separate buckets during awkwardly shared television time. And the people who can hold more than one idea in their head at the same time, they've all apparently been dead for 200 years.

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*Maybe a couple of other guys too, but if you were never president or have your face on any currency of any denomination, we don't know you. Paul Giamatti will never play you in an HBO miniseries, so it's like you were never born.