Thomas Jefferson and the Great Wink of 1776

Thomas Jefferson, the third US president and a Founding Father of his nation, wrote stuff like this in the Declaration of Independence (1776):

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

– while owning 175 Black slaves. Wink, wink.

Excuses: Some call this a “paradox”. Or say that he was “a highly compartmentalized man”. Or “complicated”. Or “human”. Or that he “agonized” over the contradiction, one that haunts White America still.

The Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, Virginia, September 14th 1769. (Virginia Historical Society / Library of Congress, via Slate).

Actions speak louder than words: If you judge him by his actions, he was perfectly fine with owning slaves, as many as 267 at a time. He only freed eight slaves, four of them his own children. Which. He. Kept. As. Slaves. Till. His. Death.

The same goes for most White Americans. Most ~ though “not all” ~ seem to be perfectly fine with living in a racist society that goes against their supposed democratic beliefs. And Jefferson is part of why. Because he made it crystal clear that his fine words, if they are to be taken seriously at all, certainly do not apply to Black people. That it is all right to be racist so long as you mouth the right words. He set the example. “Man is an imitative animal,” he once noted.

Founding Father: Jefferson was not just a US president and a hero of the White American Revolution – he was a Founding Father, one of those Mythically Wise Beings who founded the US.

But it gets worse:

“It was the times” – It is hard to write off Jefferson as a Mere Product of His Times: he was well in advance of his times and a shaper of them. Not just in pushing revolution, democracy, human rights, and science, but in his racist ideas too.

In his “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1787) he said of “the blacks”:

“in memory they are equal to the whites;

in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid;

and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

…

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.… This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

Notice how he hedges – “a suspicion only”, “perhaps”. What he is saying is not yet conventional wisdom. But his words, as a Founding Father, helped to make them so.

Low Black intelligence is an idea he had been pushing even before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, leading the way to scientific racism – polygenism, Morton’s skulls, Broca’s brains, IQ tests, “The Bell Curve” (1994), and all the rest.

Jefferson gave redneck racism intellectual depth and respectability. By 1829, when David Walker wrote his “Appeal”, Jefferson’s ideas had become the main ones for anti-racists to knock down.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• Jefferson
  • Jefferson’s library
  • Sally Hemings
• Walker’s “Appeal”
• Black people according to:
  • -445:  Herodotus,
  • 1700: White racial frame
  • 1728: Chambers’s Cyclopaedia
  • 1765: Diderot’s Encyclopédie
  • 1787: Thomas Jefferson
  • 1906: Franz Boas
  • 1911: Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • 1959: Golden Book Encyclopedia
  • 2010: US television
  • 2021: The Economist
• “The average African IQ is 70”
  • polygenism
  • Samuel George Morton
  • Broca
  • IQ
  • The Bell Curve
• The “not all whites” argument
• “It was the times!”

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