537
Louisiana Senator: Our Maternal Death Rates Are Only Bad If You Count Black Women
(www.vanityfair.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
537 points (98.6% liked)
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Ah, I have a modest proposal. Let's count 60% of maternal deaths from black women. /s
I might be wrong, Frank, but my reading of the text says that freed slaves fall under “the whole Number of free Persons” and thus count as 1, not three fifths.
The three fifths compromise just said slave states shouldn’t get to count slave population to get more representatives. The non-slave states wanted them not to count at all, since they don’t get representation regardless. It’s wild to me that we think of the “three fifths of all other persons” thing as the bad part, rather than the “rich assholes who owned people got more representation than those who didn’t own people because the people they owned counted toward their representative allotments.” After all, the slave owners wanted slaves to count as a full person. The problem, as always, was slavery.
I read this in Dennis’s voice
I don’t think it’s that “three fifths” is the only bad part per se, it just gets referenced a lot because it is a really indefensible example of how enslaved people were considered less than a person. So much so that here it is codified as a fraction of a person. Very in your face sort of language.
I think although very vivid language it is quite defensible for the reasons Kuni mentioned: in the only context where slaves were actually defined as 3/5 of a person, all they could do was allow their masters to extract extra value through representation from them, as they did not get representation for being counted towards House representation.
A government can't possibly serve the whole population. /s
We'll call it the...60% Compromise. Got a nice ring to it.
With gerrymandering that number is often much lower these days. We’ve ended up with even worse than the 3/5