> might better be phrased as "the US was founded on white supremacist principles that continue to exist and benefit many of its citizens at the expense of others, even today, with slavery as but one of the most visible," but I get the feeling you'd object to that also.

I would certainly object to it, as would most historians, I think.

The principles the US was founded on - that is, the principles that drove the colonies to declare independence from Britain and the unique ideas about government that they incorporated into the state constitutions (and eventually the federal Constitution) were not "white supremacist." Most of the world practiced slavery at the time. The empire they were breaking away from was the #1 slave-trading nation in the world at that time. Slavery was a pre-existing fact when the United States was founded. It wasn't the motivation for the founding.

In fact, at the time, the principles of the revolution were widely regarded as being in conflict with slavery, which is why the United States became one of the first centers of anti-slavery activism in the world. And it's why the northern states became some of the first places in the world to abolish slavery. Even slaveowners in Virginia began questioning slavery at this time. Jefferson, despite his own ownership of slaves, wrote the clause that forbade slavery in the Northwest Territories, and even proposed a new constitution for Virginia that would have freed anyone born after 31 December 1800. This was extremely early, in an international perspective, in the global anti-slavery movement. Britain wouldn't ban slavery until the 1830s.

When later Southern leaders tried to defend slavery, they found the founding principles to be an embarrassing stumbling block. The famous Cornerstone Speech, given by the vice president of the Confederacy, was very self-consciously formulated as a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence, replacing "all men are created equal" with a new supposed "great truth" that people are created unequal. From the "Cornerstone Speech":

> The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong.

The fact that the American Revolution did not eliminate slavery does not mean that the principles of the revolution were white supremacist, any more than Athenian democracy's founding principle was mysogeny, because Athens didn't overturn male-dominated society. The American revolution took a society that already had slavery, servitude, etc., and introduced new democratic principles, abolished many forms of servitude, generated opposition to slavery and outlawed slavery in half the new country. Slavery was not something the revolution introduced or ideologically strengthened. Quite the opposite.