Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Been Sitting on This One for a While Edition

In an 1860 speech before the New York Senate trying to defeat a bill that would give black men suffrage, quoted in the New York Times of February 15, one Mr. Callicott tried to prove that blacks were not considered citizens, therefore didn't have the right to vote. In his speech, he quotes William Wirt, Attorney General of the United States, as saying:

The only qualification required by the Constitution to render a person eligible as President, Senator or Representative of the United States is, that he shall be a 'citizen of the United States' of a given age and residence. Free negroes and mulattoes can satisfy the requisitions of age and residence as well as the white man; and if nativity, residence and allegiance combined (without the rights and privileges of a white man) are sufficient to make him a 'citizen of the United States' in the sense of the Constitution, then free negroes and mulattoes are eligible to those high offices, and may command the purse and sword of the nation. For these and other reasons which might easily be multiplied, I am of the opinion that the Constitution, by the description of 'citizens of the States,' intended those only who enjoyed the full and equal privileges of white citizens in the State of their residence.

So you see, black people couldn't be citizens, because then they could be elected to office!

I feel Bill O'Reilly's anti-immigration tirade is of a comparable nature: we can't let brown people into the country because then they'd gain privileges that have previously belonged strictly to white people.