Marta Russell wrote:
> Blacks were considered three fifths of a person. It is disparaging but it is
> also expedient. In the case of slavery, for instance, if blacks were not
> fully human they were more expendable.
Racism is fundamental enough to the structure of u.s. history that it is well to be more precise in reference to it, and Marta is imprecise here. Barbara Fields writes:
<<<Loose thinking on these matters leads to careless language, which in turn promotes misinformation. A widely used textbook of American history, writtn by very distinguished historians, summarizes the three-fifths clause of the United States Constitution (article I, section 2) thus: "For both direct taxes and representation, five blacks were to be counted as equivalent to three whites." The three-fifths clause does not distinguish between *blacks* and *whites*--not even, using more polite terms, between black and white *people*. (Indeed, the terms *black* and *white--or, for that matter, *Negro* and *Caucasian*--do not appear anywhere in the Constitution, as is not surprising in a legal document in which slang of that kind would be hopelessly imprecise.) The three- fifths clause distinguishes between *free Persons*--who might be of European or African descent--and *other Persons*, a euphemism for *slaves*. The issue at stake was whether slaveowning citizens would hold an advantage over non-slaveowning citizens; more precisely, whether slaves would be counted in total population for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress--an advantage for slaveholders in states with large numbers of slaves--of assessing responsibility for direct taxes--a disadvantage. The Constitution answered by saying yes, but at a ratio of three-fifths, rather than the five-fifths that slaveholders would have preferred for representation or the zero-fifths they would have preferred for taxation. When well-meaning people affirm, for rhetorical effect, that the Constitution declared Afro-Americans to be only three-fifths humans, they commit an error for which American historians themselves must accept the blame.>>
["Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," by Barbara Jeanne Fields. New Left Review, May/June 1990.]
The precise truth, that slaves (predominantly but not wholly black) were the subject of political political negotiations in which their interests simply did not appear, is more damning (and I think more illuminative of the "role" of disable people in contemporary politics) than the rhetorical embellishment. The ways in which different segments of the population become non-persons are on the whole more subtle than the vulgarities of a Jerry Lewis.
Consider for example that most (all?) health plans offer only half-coverage for mental illness. The politics of this outrage are exceedingly complex -- and would not quite be covered by saying Insurance Companies and Congress think the mentally ill are only half human. Actually, of course, neither the Insurance Companies nor Congress give shit about whether this or that group is half-human, inhuman, or wear beanies.
Carrol