Hello, Excon.

In the beginning, WE, as a nation, believed that black people were worth 3/5's that of a white person.

You left out the important parts of the historical context, and thereby misrepresented (unintentionally, I think) what the 3/5 rule implied.

The 3/5 rule was NOT about people's personal value. (Slavery and the attitude it caused was enough to do that.)

3/5 of the number of slaves was a political compromise for Congressional representation. It counted only for slaves, not for free blacks, so it was not about comparative value between the races, but about how many people to count when determining taxes and the number of Congressional representatives. (Section 2, Clause 3) .

The representatives of slave owning states were the ones who wanted all slaves to count (in the context of the Constitution) which would have allotted more representatives in the House of Representatives to those states with high slave populations.

However, the other states wanted to tip the balance of power in their own favor. Originally they did not want the number slaves to factor toward representative count at all.

That BELIEF fomented slavery, and all the horrors that came with it, and haunt us to this day.

A couple things:

First

I think you have the causal connection backwards. Greed and lust for power over others, NOT racism, is what causes the dehumanization of slavery. Racism did not cause slavery in the Americas. The Africans who sold their slaves to the European slave traders were selling other blacks that were already slaves, for example. NOT racism.

Slavery is one of the oldest and most pervasive human institutions (up there with war and genocide). When Christians (Spanish, English, American, etc.) wanted to do horrible things to people, including enslavement, they always dehumanized the people they wanted to oppress or rob (witches, Inquisition victims, Jews, Aztecs, Incas, Sioux, blacks, etc. ad nauseum.)

The desire for slaves fomented the racism and dehumanization, not the other way around.

Second

It is the categorization by race (and the connected subversion of individual identity in favor of group identity) instead of dealing with everybody as individuals, NOT just the belief ["that a black person was closer to an ape"] that made it easy to perpetuate the nastiness that followed slavery.

More to the point, it is the racists who insist that this categorization should determine what rules apply to whom that "haunt us to this day."

It is a problem even when someone as well meaning as you thinks racial category should factor into social rules. Racism that grows from a desire for justice and sensitivity is ultimately just as destructive of justice and togetherness as racism from any other source.