I was sitting on the front porch of a house in Fredericksburg Virginia, a stone’s throw from the Rappahannock River. When the house was built Virginia was but a colony. I was smoking a cigar made in Cuba that was purchased in Montreal and my little speaker was playing “Last in Line” by Ronnie James Dio. A firefly buzzed nearby and in its light, a bright red cardinal sat perched on a magnolia branch, and while I was uncertain about what this juxtaposition of stimuli might mean, I was thinking about our country.

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I went to George Washington’s house. He grew up at Ferry Farm on that same Rappahannock I had crossed that morning. When he was young he threw a silver dollar across the river from one bank to the other, but his adult house, Mount Vernon, sat on the Potomac River and since he was older, his arm not being what it was, they say he was only able to heave a penny across the Potomac. At Washington’s death, Mount Vernon included over 7,600 acres. It operated as a small town and over 300 slaves made it work, they worked the fields, the distillery, the grist mill, maintained the mansion … they lived in separate quarters and were buried in a separate cemetery. The father of our country and his plump gray-haired wife were racists.

I went to Thomas Jefferson’s house. The view of the back of the house is on the American nickel. Monticello spreads out across 5,000 acres and over his lifetime, Jefferson owned over 600 slaves, all held to satisfy his personal desires and to stoke his legend. Jefferson was a genius in many ways, the father of the Declaration of Independence and, in a less heralded reality, the father of numerous illegitimate black children.

While I was in the neighborhood I visited the homes of James Madison and James Monroe. The last presidents of the Revolutionary generation, Madison and Monroe had beautiful palatial Virginia estates and when they lived there, between seventy-five and 125 slaves each. When touring Monroe’s house the guide was quick to point out that while Monroe did, in fact, enslave his fellow man he always sold them as families. What a compassionate Colonial gentleman! People often attempt to give our slave-owning forefathers a pass by saying things like: “They really treated their slaves as part of the family” or “He freed a lot of slaves in his will” or “His slaves had plenty to eat and nice clothes.”

It’s all nonsense and it’s clear to see it as nonsense when the life of the white man and the life of a black man are stacked side-by-side at the long-ago house of an American president.

How can such a monumental contradiction exist? How is it possible for two polar extremes to live within one body? How can all men are created equal, how can the concept of liberty possibly coexist with the reality of slavery? I believe I know the answer. Quite simply, when the Founding Fathers talked about freedom and equality they were not speaking about all men, they were speaking only about all white men. No white man could own another white man, no white man could tax another white man, no white man could force his religious or political views on another white man. A white British king could not be the boss of a white American colonist.

That African slaves would literally do the heavy lifting for the emerging America experience was completely and utterly inevitable – done automatically without a second thought. It was simply standard operating procedure for every American to have freedom on his lips and black men in his fields.

The term racism or racist, today, is overused and improperly defined. It is now mostly a synonym for hate, for disliking someone simply because of their race. The Founding Fathers did not necessarily hate blacks, it was much worse than that. They clung to the traditional definition of racism, that is, that blacks were innately and fundamentally below whites and genetically incapable of certain things (like independent thought and self-discipline and basic intelligence) that then made it impossible for them to live among white people.

Almost to a man, the Founders knew slavery was wrong and had a sometimes strong desire to end it. The sticking point, in almost every instance, was the shared belief that the African slaves would be unable, intellectually incapable of existing in a white society – so freeing them would be a disaster.

This is institutionalized, hard-wired, people-are-inferior-because-of-genetics racism.

So what we know now is that when Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe talked about equality it was purely in the context of white equality. What we do not know is this – something to consider should you ever travel to Virginia or some other place where they make the pretense Democratic ideals – can a man who is a racist in his soul still be admired? Can that man ever truly be respected for his ideals or his vision or his intelligence?

Do all the admirable qualities of a man become null and void if that man believes skin color determines the capacity for human achievement?

When we travel in search of history we find that complicated human dynamics are buried there.