Three Fifths.... was it about Slavery or was it about Race?

Was the three fifths clause in the U.S. Constitution an official stance against black people or was it an official stance against slavery? A lot of people have confused these issues. If you read through the Constitution you will only see one word that has any racial identity to it: Indian. There are no other references to people's race in the Constitution whether it be white, black, yellow, brown, African, European, Asian or Hispanic. The three fifths clause appears in Article One, which explains how the House and Senate work, and was written as follows:

"Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

So the "racism" in this clause is aimed at Indians. Specifically if you are an un-taxed Indian then you don't get counted as a citizen of the state when we figure out how many Representatives each state gets. If you ARE an Indian who DOES pay tax then you DO count as a whole person toward the number of Representatives your state has in Congress. The other two categories of people are "free persons," and "all other Persons." So if you are a "free person" then we can count you when we are apportioning representatives. We will only count three out of every five people who are not free. The value is placed on the FREEDOM, not the person - free people count more than enslaved people. If the states with slaves wanted more representation in Congress then all they had to do was free their slaves and they would get more representatives.

Technically, this part of the Constitution was never repealed. The Thirteenth Amendment only abolishes slavery... it didn't change the fraction. If someone were to ignore the 13th Amendment and enter into slavery today, they would immediately loose two-fifths of their value toward apportioning representatives (although we would probably pay a little more attention to the SLAVERY part of that scenario). If the South had abolished slavery on their own, there would not have been a need for the Thirteenth Amendment because the Constitution is written such that it awards a full count to free persons (it doesn't even say anything about "slaves" ... just "other Persons" than "free persons" and "Indians").

So if you were a free black man in 1790, how much of a man were you? One whole person. If you were an enslaved white man, how much of a man were you? If you were only bound to service for a term of years (in other words, if you signed a contract to work as a slave for a limited time in exchange for something) then you were still a whole person. But otherwise, a WHITE slave was worth no more than a BLACK slave. It was never about race... it was ALWAYS about FREEDOM.

The Constitution emphasizes the value of free persons - FREEDOM is valued. SLAVERY was so devalued that the word doesn't even appear ANYWHERE in the Constitution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.