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A Qualified Defense of Thomas Jefferson:
Or a Plea for Mercy in the History Wars
I’m sorry. Erect as many new statues as you want.
I need Jefferson. I can’t teach US history without him. Jefferson the schizophrenic hydra who tears at the American soul.
You can contextualize him and build a mausoleum to every Hemmings who ever lived. But if we erase Jefferson we erase the founder cited by Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama as they fought for a more inclusive America.
Maybe it is time to “begin the world anew.” But blowing up the statues without learning from them is not the answer. The path goes through the pain. It requires sitting under the accusing glare of the collateral damage of the American project.
Obviously we cannot change the past. Neither can we avert our eyes.
Finally we are asking new questions and abandoning limited and false narratives.
We must tell a better and more inclusive story.
Continuing our present nightmarish course is too horrific to consider.
Please, scream at my caption. “Exploited enablers.”
That is just “bull crap,” as my critics would say.
“Enslaved, raped, tortured, separated from families, and ultimately sold down the river to pay off his debts for books, french wine, and high living.”
Some critiques hit too close to home. How much of the past do we need to renounce for a more perfect union with justice for all? It is all too easy for the “privileged” such as myself to call for mercy when the guns are trained on complacent elites.
Yet, it is the keepers of Jefferson’s memory at Monticello and elsewhere who have accepted and participated in the new narrative. Pressured by activists scholars are removing shared blinders. Change is generational and maddeningly slow. Nevertheless the profession has accelerated the reappraisal of our past since the 1960s.” Black scholars and writers like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois and Langston Hughes never accepted the dominant narrative.
