General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDe-fund Jefferson Memorial?
I was at the gym a few minutes ago and the HGTV monitor was blank, so I reflexively glanced at the Faux News monitor and was startled to see the Rev. Al Sharpton. If the running banner at the bottom of the screen was to be believed, the Rev (whom I normally admire) was advocating for de-funding the Jefferson Memorial. I didn't get the rationale, since there's no sound unless you plug in earphones.
Has anybody heard about this?
Beartracks
(12,821 posts)I hope Sharpton isn't advocating this just because Jefferson was a slave-owner. Don't prove Trump right, Al -- Trump claimed the left was gonna be coming for Washington and Jefferson after all the Confederate memorials were taken down.
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marybourg
(12,634 posts)He's playing right into their hands. I don't remember him ever doing anything like this before.
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)it became the new thing to trash any historical figure involved with slavery.
I'm hoping the whole thing blows over sooner rather than later.
oasis
(49,407 posts)What did the "running banner" have to say about Hillary Clinton during her presidential run?
marybourg
(12,634 posts)oasis
(49,407 posts)He definitely won't be leading a movement to make it happen.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
All of this passage except for the last sentence is taken from Notes on the State of Virginia. The last sentence is taken from Jefferson's Autobiography. That sentence, as isolated in the memorial inscription, deceives the public as to Jefferson's meaning. For the original passage in the Autobiography continues, "Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them." (Emphasis added.)
In short, these people are to be free, and then deported. Jefferson's teaching on that matter is quite clear and often repeated.
Those who edited that inscription on behalf of the memorial commission must have known what they were doing when they wrenched that resounding sentence from the Autobiography out of the context that so drastically qualifies its meaning. The distortion by suppression has to be deliberate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/10/thomas-jefferson-radical-and-racist/376685/
Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their slaves, he opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at his death, Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will emancipated only five slaves, all relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and condemned nearly 200 others to the auction block. Even Hemings remained a slave, though her children by Jefferson went free.
Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of humane criminal codes for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship, he proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks outlaws in America, the land of their birth. Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men.
Jefferson also dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality. As a state legislator he blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state.
As president he acquired the Louisiana Territory but did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast empire of liberty. Jefferson told his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves, because free blacks were pests in society who were as incapable as children of taking care of themselves. And while he wrote a friend that he sold slaves only as punishment or to unite families, he sold at least 85 humans in a 10-year period to raise cash to buy wine, art and other luxury goods.
Destroying families didnt bother Jefferson, because he believed blacks lacked basic human emotions. Their griefs are transient, he wrote, and their love lacked a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.
Jefferson claimed he had never seen an elementary trait of painting or sculpture or poetry among blacks and argued that blacks ability to reason was much inferior to whites, while in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. He conceded that blacks were brave, but this was because of a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.
A scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that blackness might come from the color of the blood and concluded that blacks were inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/the-real-thomas-jefferson.html
White supremacy is based on the concept that blacks and other people of color are not equal to whites -- many believe they are not even worth the three-fifths that was embodied in the original Constitution for tax and representation purposes. Such notions of inferiority are what Jefferson and other slave owners used to justify holding blacks in captivity and treating them as animals.
Invoking Jefferson to condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were demonstrating Friday and Saturday is antithetical to Jefferson's beliefs -- and certainly to the life he led.
Jefferson owned 600 slaves during his lifetime, freeing only two men before he died and bequeathing freedom to five other men, believed to be his progeny, upon his death.
And that is part of why McAuliffe's invocation of Jefferson hit me so hard. Our national healing cannot move forward if even well-meaning leaders don't recognize the role our Founding Fathers played in seeding white supremacy.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/15/opinions/jefferson-charlottesville-rally-opinion-due/index.html
Although I suppose there's probably an argument to be made that in his monstrous racism and hypocrisy, Thomas Jefferson is actually an honest representation of America.
marybourg
(12,634 posts)against his country.
Would you be in favor of de-funding the upkeep of the Jefferson Memorial, perhaps leaving it to a private foundation? That's a bridge too far for me; it's censoring an important founder and thinker for one aspect of his belief system.
Do we censor all his sayings and writings? Or just the ones we disapprove of? I can find it in my heart to accept him, stains and all. Stonewall Jackson and other traitors, not.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)And "founding father" or no, I don't especially think that Jefferson is a fit symbol for a nation that isn't based on the idea of white supremacy.
marybourg
(12,634 posts)There's the rub. How much of him can be erased? This is wrenching.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)Jefferson wasn't responsible for writing the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Many of his ideas were bad ones (for instance he argued that the Federal government should have no veto over laws passed by the states). He did write the Declaration of Independence (or, was the principal author of a document substantially edited by a committee, anyway). Among the people claiming Jefferson's authority for their actions in later years were John Calhoun with his doctrine of nullification and most of the Southern states with secession. It was Hamilton's vision of what the government should be that triumphed.
LittleBlue
(10,362 posts)then MLK would have to go too. He was a pastor who allegedly cheated countless times on his wife. He was allegedly in another woman's bed the night before he was assassinated. Jackie O was apparently disgusted with him after hearing of tapes where he tried to organize a "sex party", which apparently was code for orgy. You'd have to conclude that a Baptist minister engaging in this behavior is very hypocritical.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)He isn't remembered for preaching in favour of marital continence, but for civil rights. Jefferson, though? He's remembered as a "prophet of freedom" who said "all men are created equal"...who argued that freed slaves should be deported or outlawed (outlawry being a legal state that stripped someone of all legal protection and allowed them to be killed on sight). Those two things aren't really comparable.
MichMan
(11,971 posts)WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)statues of the leading TRAITORS????
rusty fender
(3,428 posts)were not the equal of whites, but he did oppose slavery. Should we defund the Lincoln Memorial because of Lincoln's beliefs about blacks
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.
Jefferson, I would submit, should be remembered not only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of slaves, but also as a contributor, along with his successors, to a doctrine of race war and what Hannah Arendt would later call, in another context, race imperialismwhich would find its ultimate fulfillment a century later, and a continent away.
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/12/02/thomas-jefferson-american-fascist/
BannonsLiver
(16,448 posts)"If we let two men marry what's next, people can marry their dog!?"
MousePlayingDaffodil
(748 posts)marybourg
(12,634 posts)Listening to him on that clip, my heart wants to agree with him. But my head thinks it's wrong (I have a hard time saying he's wrong; I admire him very much.)
Yes. there was a time when I didn't agree with him quite so much, and I know that you know when it was. But just as I think Jefferson can be understood if not forgiven, I understand Sharpton.
MousePlayingDaffodil
(748 posts)I'd have all monuments and memorials and statues of so-called "great men" (and women) taken down. Idolatrous nonsense. Man has a pretty high opinion of himself, all in all, and it isn't warranted.
So, defund (and demolish) the Jefferson Memorial. And the Lincoln Memorial. And topple that ludicrous Egyptian obelisk the mars the nation's capital. Washington, D.C., in large part, is a testament to the warped egos of profoundly proud, and profoundly flawed, people.
marybourg
(12,634 posts)on new memorials. But I wouldn't go so far as to take down those to our founding generation. . . or to our greatest generation. . . or to some of our greatest past presidents. Not everyone reads books once they're out of school, and "those who forget history . . ." well. you know.
MousePlayingDaffodil
(748 posts)... in itself, communicates little besides hero-worship and idolatry.
I mean, for someone who otherwise knows little or nothing about George Washington, what does a 555-foot tall obelisk -- the symbol of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, who were worshiped as gods on Earth -- say of the man, hmm? Washington, for whom the renunciation of power was his great defining attribute ... memorialized in the manner of a pseudo-deity. What a preposterous travesty.
"Monumental Washington," in particular, is like a theme park for warped egomaniacs. Tear 'em all down ... except for the Vietnam Memorial, which speaks eloquently to the great harm these "great men" can do the average, decent person.
Self-governing citizens shouldn't be into the hero-worship of "great men." Such should be reserved to subjects and slaves.
marybourg
(12,634 posts)that are important, that carry society forward, that form the basis for a "teachable moment" when we see, and bring our children to see, a monument to a man, a memorial to a terrible event.
InAbLuEsTaTe
(24,122 posts)Snackshack
(2,541 posts)WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)InAbLuEsTaTe
(24,122 posts)octoberlib
(14,971 posts)say all the time . Don't believe it unless there's confirmation from other sources.
underpants
(182,877 posts)Or if it's something kind of outrageous then they fill airtime mocking that person. Rev. Al hits the buttons for their viewers on many levels. It's no coincidence that BLM has to be mentioned on every Fox and talk radio show.