Of course, it was!  That fact stands as plain and hard as the granite of Mount Rushmore. Whether we still are racist is a far more complex question and does not admit an easy answer. But at the moment America was born, no other answer is possible.

The Constitution of the United States written in 1787 makes the point clearly. The language of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 only counts three-fifths of “other persons” – slaves – to divide the power among the states. James Madison made this transparently clear in Federalist Paper number 54. Madison wrote that the Constitution “regards the SLAVE as divested of two fifths of the MAN”.  George Washington owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. The United States was actually and legally racist until the definition of citizenship was changed in the Fourteenth Amendment eighty years later.

This is not to say that everyone in the United States in 1787 was racist. Benjamin Franklin, to pick an example, owned six slaves until 1781. But Franklin was able to confront his own personal crisis of hypocrisy and then became the President of the Abolition Society in 1787. In other words, Franklin stopped lying to himself.

This brings me to the main point. We all live entirely in the black hole inside our own skull. I don’t know what you think and you don’t know what I think. No one knows how Thomas Jefferson reconciled the ringing words he wrote in the Declaration of Independence with the plain fact of that time:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I do know that Washington, Jefferson, and America writ large were all racist. Whether they ever faced this truth in their own minds isn’t possible to know. This doesn’t make Washington, Jefferson, or America bad or wrong. That’s a completely different subject that I won’t address here except to say that my admiration for Washington, Jefferson, and America remains clear, bright, and strong. America and its leaders didn’t confront the racism of their time. But they did dedicate their lives to confronting the tyranny of kings. And they won. At the time, it was a choice. Who am I to criticize their choice today?

Lying to other people starts by lying to yourself. If it is important to you to know what truth actually is, you must first not lie to yourself. After you lie to yourself, lying to other people is easy.