I am amazed the Levine and his ilk can so cavalierly skip over the over 4,900 words Douglass wrote which precede the paragraph that they love to use as a cudgel. Douglass spoke about the country’s founding as an arbiter and source for good. That the foundation of America is a blueprint for liberty, and this is why that foundation must be made true by ending slavery in the United States. Douglass rightly expounded that slavery is antithesis to the heart and soul of a great nation, and if America was to continue to be that, it must change its ways.

Douglass debunks the 1619 Project blather that America’s founding is rooted in systemic racism and slavery with this insightful phrasing:

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.

[…]

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.