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Danielle Allen's Flawed Genius Of The Constitution

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Danielle Allen writes about her love for the ‘flawed genius’ of the Constitution. Flawed, because the Constitution is inherently pro-slavery and racist document due to compromises such as the Three-Fifths Compromise. The Three-Fifths Compromises essentially wrote that enslaved persons would count as ‘three-fifths of a person’ for the purpose of counting for the population. This gave the Slave South a disproportionally larger amount of representation in the House of Representations, which basis representation on population size. At its foundation, the Constitution did not recognize Black people as full humans, as justification to help preserve the fragile Union from dismantling before it even began. However, as Allen writes, it is uncertain whether the Founders had to make this compromise. In her example, the Declaration and the Constitution have a religious compromise, which used language to include all religious viewpoints in the colonies, from both enslaved and free people. They did not do this with slavery. …show more content…

The Constitution is the greatest document to teach “the question of how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to protect themselves from domination by one another and to secure their mutual protection from external forces that might seek their domination” (Allen 9). To do this, the Constitution created the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances so that each branch of government does not have domination over the other. Each branch of government has a specific area of responsibility and was made to not have too much power over the others, to keep an unbiased system of

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