The Electoral College: Affirmative Action For White People
Technically, the Electoral College doesn’t serve all white people; it never has. Its original purpose was to limit the people's opportunity to make rash decisions, leaving the important decision of picking a President to those who knew best. There were no political parties in 1787, so it wasn’t designed to give an edge to one party. Though George Washington was elected unanimously, the presumption was there would be lots of candidates in future elections that couldn’t get enough voted to win outright and that Congress would end up picking the winner. Political parties shifted the balance of power and the last time Congress picked a President was in 1824.
Another issue was determining how many electoral votes each state should receive? A disproportionate percentage of the decision-makers were from Virginia. It was only natural they developed a plan to keep power amongst those who were certain they knew best. Virginia, a slave state, had a vested interest in ensuring the perpetuity of enslaving people and, along with their friends from South Carolina and other slave states, came up with the three-fifths compromise.
That clause kept the southern states from bailing on becoming part of the union because they gained a permanent overrepresentation (white affirmative action) in the Electoral College votes and the House of Representatives. Because their population was determined by the number of free white people and sixty percent of their enslaved population, they swayed presidential elections and ensured Congress wouldn’t outlaw slavery. It would take the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments after the Civil War to finally eliminate enslavement (more or less). Four of the first five Presidents were from Virginia, and eight of the first eleven were from Virginia or South Carolina.
Small states immediately recognized that their lower populations would see them shut out of national politics. They held out until an agreement was reached, the Connecticut Compromise, which gave them disproportionate power vs. larger states in the Senate where Wyoming or Vermont has the same number of Senators as California or New York. This admittedly wasn’t through the foresight of the Founders (well, maybe it was for Vermont). Still, the result is that small, predominantly white states have as much power to influence legislation as states with forty times as many people. A single Senator can hold out to gain carve-outs and special benefits for their states to secure their vote. The result is white people affirmative action.
The Constitution is full of articles and clauses designed to benefit or protect white people. The Second Amendment and the ability for “well-regulated militias” to bear arms was about enshrining the rights of slave patrols. Plantation owners were often vastly outnumbered by those they enslaved and needed a mechanism to protect themselves against revolt and capture and return runaways. Article One, Section Nine: Clause One guaranteed the international slave trade would remain intact for twenty years. Some people try to interpret that as intending the gradual elimination of slavery. In reality, it laid the groundwork for trade protectionism and the dependence on the domestic slave trade. The additional enslaved people required didn’t come from “natural increase,” as some historians like to claim but were the result of forced breeding and rape.
Other laws changed what had been the norm of linking a child to their father as had been the practice in England and throughout Europe. Americans decided a child would be tied to the bloodline of the mother. This ensured that a child of an enslaved person was automatically enslaved as well. It also absolved the father, often the white master, of their relative responsibility for the baby.
Affirmative action has existed long before programs of the 1970s that get such bad press in right-wing circles and did far less for minorities than they imagine. The primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have always been white people. Almost exclusively white males until the 1970s. Some of those protections are built into the Constitution and highly unlikely to change. Others depend on the beneficiaries of white affirmative action giving up their benefits, which is equally unlikely. White affirmative action has been with us since the founding of the nation. Every four years, a Presidential Election with the Electoral College is a stark reminder.