The founders crafted the U.S. Constitution to consolidate power for white Christian men of an elite class. The rest of us were not counted in “we the people.” The law was designed to colonize and control the rest of us, not set us free. And yet the founders had invoked words whose power even they could not constrain—justice, freedom, equality, the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These were magical words that had a power of their own and seized the imagination of the people for whom they were never meant.
