Russ Douthat on Critical Race Theory

[Bootstrap]

Good approach. Before the next chapter, though, I think it's interesting to discuss the relationships between the things you approve of and the things you disapprove of. He said "all men are created equal", but he also owned a teenage girl who provided him with sex and companionship.

Really, this isn't so different from what we read in the Old Testament and even in the New Testament (e.g. Peter, Paul). The same people who did great things also did terrible things. We do not worship human beings, but we do learn from their stories. If we want to grow in wisdom, we need to look at all of this, as contradictory and confusing as it may be.

This is the first I've ever heard such claims about Peter and Paul so that's news to me.

Paul persecuted Christians, stoning them. Surely you know that. Peter rejected Christ and would not eat with Gentile Christians - Paul called that rejecting the Gospel, he was afraid of the criticism of "fine religious people". Surely you know that. But both men were also used for tremendous good. Just about every Old Testament hero also had serious moral failings (a few did not have particularly serious failings). We can honor David without air-brushing Bathsheba and Uriah out of the story. We can honor Abraham and still see that it was wrong for him to lie about his wife and give her to the local king.

Same goes for Jefferson. But not as a religious figure, of course.

[Bootstrap]

Why you’re so interested studying Jefferson's affairs is also beyond me. It was used in the tabloids of his day to besmirch his reputation.
In a high school history class I'd note that and relegate it to a footnote with references to search for those interested in it.

Should Bathsheba be relegated to a footnote? Should the story about Abraham giving his wife to Pharoah, claiming she was only his sister, be relegated to a footnote?

This is much more than a footnote. This is what slavery is. This is what it means for a man to own a teenage girl - very often, that man is going to take advantage of her sexually. White slave owners routinely fathered children with women held as slaves. It wasn't just Jefferson. When their wives found out, they would often take out their anger on the slaves or their children.The history I learned in high school denied this. You can read about it in the words of the slaves themselves. You can read about it in the DNA evidence they left behind.

The sanitized version of history I learned told us that Jefferson was always good to his slaves, taught them to read, implied that they loved him and wanted to be there. It didn't talk about all the slaves he sold on the action block. It didn't talk about Sally Hemings or other slaves he used for sex. It didn't talk about the cruelty needed to keep people enslaved when they would rather be free. We learned a lot about the agricultural genius of Jefferson, but we didn't dwell on the fact that the actual work was done by people he owned. Without them, there's no Monticello.

That's not a fair telling of history. And it leaves out the experience of black people who were there at the time, providing Jefferson with the wealth he needed to be part of the elite that founded this country. Their history matters too, and deserves to be told. Sally Hemings deserves to be more than a footnote. That doesn't erase what Jefferson contributed to modern democracy, but it does put it in context.

I'm curious about this book:

The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

I heard an interview with the author, who says that the Constitution was broken until "all men are created equal" became the law of the land. People who benefited from slavery made compromises with the same principles they wrote about and applied to themselves. He credits Lincoln with refactoring the Constitution, making the Bill of Rights apply to the individual states and to all human beings who live here. I haven't read the book yet, but it's an interesting way to think about our constitutional history.

[Falco Underhill]

Good approach. Before the next chapter, though, I think it's interesting to discuss the relationships between the things you approve of and the things you disapprove of. He said "all men are created equal", but he also owned a teenage girl who provided him with sex and companionship.

Really, this isn't so different from what we read in the Old Testament and even in the New Testament (e.g. Peter, Paul). The same people who did great things also did terrible things. We do not worship human beings, but we do learn from their stories. If we want to grow in wisdom, we need to look at all of this, as contradictory and confusing as it may be.

This is the first I've ever heard such claims about Peter and Paul so that's news to me.

Paul persecuted Christians, stoning them. Surely you know that. Peter rejected Christ and would not eat with Gentile Christians - Paul called that rejecting the Gospel, he was afraid of the criticism of "fine religious people". Surely you know that. But both men were also used for tremendous good. Just about every Old Testament hero also had serious moral failings (a few did not have particularly serious failings). We can honor David without air-brushing Bathsheba and Uriah out of the story. We can honor Abraham and still see that it was wrong for him to lie about his wife and give her to the local king.

Same goes for Jefferson. But not as a religious figure, of course.

Oh my mistake, i thought you were implying Peter and Paul also each kept a teenage girl for sex and companionship, too!

[Bootstrap]

Paul persecuted Christians, stoning them. Surely you know that. Peter rejected Christ and would not eat with Gentile Christians - Paul called that rejecting the Gospel, he was afraid of the criticism of "fine religious people". Surely you know that. But both men were also used for tremendous good. Just about every Old Testament hero also had serious moral failings (a few did not have particularly serious failings). We can honor David without air-brushing Bathsheba and Uriah out of the story. We can honor Abraham and still see that it was wrong for him to lie about his wife and give her to the local king.

Same goes for Jefferson. But not as a religious figure, of course.

Oh my mistake, i thought you were implying Peter and Paul also each kept a teenage girl for sex and companionship, too!

Um, no. I'm pretty sure they didn't ;->

But history often involves people who are complex, good and bad at the same time, some of the people who accomplish great things also do terrible things. I'm a big fan of American democracy, but it was built by very imperfect people over a long arc of history.

[Falco Underhill]

Why you’re so interested studying Jefferson's affairs is also beyond me. It was used in the tabloids of his day to besmirch his reputation.
In a high school history class I'd note that and relegate it to a footnote with references to search for those interested in it.

Should Bathsheba be relegated to a footnote? Should the story about Abraham giving his wife to Pharoah, claiming she was only his sister, be relegated to a footnote?

This is much more than a footnote. This is what slavery is. This is what it means for a man to own a teenage girl - very often, that man is going to take advantage of her sexually. White slave owners routinely fathered children with women held as slaves. It wasn't just Jefferson. When their wives found out, they would often take out their anger on the slaves or their children.The history I learned in high school denied this. You can read about it in the words of the slaves themselves. You can read about it in the DNA evidence they left behind.

The sanitized version of history I learned told us that Jefferson was always good to his slaves, taught them to read, implied that they loved him and wanted to be there. It didn't talk about all the slaves he sold on the action block. It didn't talk about Sally Hemings or other slaves he used for sex. It didn't talk about the cruelty needed to keep people enslaved when they would rather be free. We learned a lot about the agricultural genius of Jefferson, but we didn't dwell on the fact that the actual work was done by people he owned.

That's not a fair telling of history. And it leaves out the experience of black people who were there at the time, providing Jefferson with the wealth he needed to be part of the elite that founded this country. Their history matters too, and deserves to be told. Sally Hemings deserves to be more than a footnote. That doesn't erase what Jefferson contributed to modern democracy, but it does put it in context.

I'm curious about this book:

The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

I heard an interview with the author, who says that the Constitution was broken until "all men are created equal" became the law of the land. People who benefited from slavery made compromises with the same principles they wrote about and applied to themselves. He credits Lincoln with refactoring the Constitution, making the Bill of Rights apply to the individual states and to all human beings who live here. I haven't read the book yet, but it's an interesting way to think about our constitutional history.

Okay, then you can write the book about this (because I never researched it that much) and I'll refer the readers to your book in a footnote. (Kidding)

[Ken]

Why you’re so interested studying Jefferson's affairs is also beyond me. It was used in the tabloids of his day to besmirch his reputation.
In a high school history class I'd note that and relegate it to a footnote with references to search for those interested in it.

Should Bathsheba be relegated to a footnote?

This is much more than a footnote. This is what slavery is. This is what it means for a man to own a teenage girl - very often, that man is going to take advantage of her sexually. White slave owners routinely fathered children with women held as slaves. It wasn't just Jefferson. When their wives found out, they would often take out their anger on the slaves or their children.The history I learned in high school denied this. You can read about it in the words of the slaves themselves. You can read about it in the DNA evidence they left behind.

The sanitized version of history I learned told us that Jefferson was always good to his slaves, taught them to read, implied that they loved him and wanted to be there. It didn't talk about all the slaves he sold on the action block. It didn't talk about Sally Hemings or other slaves he used for sex. It didn't talk about the cruelty needed to keep people enslaved when they would rather be free. We learned a lot about the agricultural genius of Jefferson, but we didn't dwell on the fact that the actual work was done by people he owned.

That's not a fair telling of history. And it leaves out the experience of black people who were there at the time, providing Jefferson with the wealth he needed to be part of the elite that founded this country. Their history matters too, and deserves to be told. Sally Hemings deserves to be more than a footnote. That doesn't erase what Jefferson contributed to modern democracy, but it does put it in context.

I'm curious about this book:

The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

I heard an interview with the author, who says that the Constitution was broken until "all men are created equal" became the law of the land. People who benefited from slavery made compromises with the same principles they wrote about and applied to themselves. He credits Lincoln with refactoring the Constitution, making the Bill of Rights apply to the individual states and to all human beings who live here. I haven't read the book yet, but it's an interesting way to think about our constitutional history.

Jefferson is probably one of the top 5 most important figures in American history, along with Washington, Franklin, Lincoln, and FDR.

We study him because Jefferson is immensely important to the founding of this nation. And we study the entire person, warts and all, to understand where he was coming from, the conflicts of the society in which he was a both a product and creator. And so forth. History is about understanding conflict and how we came to be what we are as a nation. It isn't about ancestor worship in some dusty shrine full of faded icons to the past.

Jefferson is a central figure to understanding most of the conflicts of the last 1700s and early 1800s. The conflict between agrarianism and federalism. The conflict between slavery and abolition. Whether the US would become an expansionist imperial power or remain a small agrarian society. That is why we study Jefferson.

[Falco Underhill]

Should Bathsheba be relegated to a footnote? Should the story about Abraham giving his wife to Pharoah, claiming she was only his sister, be relegated to a footnote?

This is much more than a footnote. This is what slavery is. This is what it means for a man to own a teenage girl - very often, that man is going to take advantage of her sexually. White slave owners routinely fathered children with women held as slaves. It wasn't just Jefferson. When their wives found out, they would often take out their anger on the slaves or their children.The history I learned in high school denied this. You can read about it

Nobody is contending over the factual account of Bathsheba and Abraham here. But different scholars have looked at the same evidence and still come to different conclusions about whether or not Jefferson actually did father an any of Sally Hemings' children.

It didn't talk about Sally Hemings or other slaves he used for sex .

Again, according to the sources I'm reading it's still not as universally established as you seem to be trying to make out, so maybe that explains it.

It didn't talk about the cruelty needed to keep people enslaved when they would rather be free.

Again, I don't know what type of class you had, but we covered the cruelty of the slave trade and the auction blocks. To this day what I learned then stands out in my mind. It was pretty vivid in it's description of the cruelty involved.

We learned a lot about the agricultural genius of Jefferson, but we didn't dwell on the fact that the actual work was done by people he owned. Without them, there's no Monticello.

While that's true most people who emphasize that are focusing on the wickedness of one class exploiting another. The focus is based on Marxist class-consciousness, and that doesn't jibe with my Christian viewpoint.

And it leaves out the experience of black people who were there at the time, providing Jefferson with the wealth he needed to be part of the elite that founded this country.

Again with the Marxist class conflict theory here. Whatever validity there is to such insights they are outweighed by the negative effects of introducing them, imo.

Marxist class conflict theory is poison, especially in history class.

Their history matters too, and deserves to be told. Sally Hemings deserves to be more than a footnote.

Sure, but unfortunately different scholars don't agree on the details. So, unless you insist on having it all your own way, a footnote with bibliography references to the various studies is a fair thing to do.

[Ken]

And it leaves out the experience of black people who were there at the time, providing Jefferson with the wealth he needed to be part of the elite that founded this country.

Again with the Marxist class conflict theory here Whatever validity there is to such insights they are outweighed by the negative effects of introducing them, imo.

Marxist class conflict theory is poison, especially in history class.

Marx wrote FAR MORE about the capitalist class, industrialism, and the free market than he ever did about slaves or the experiences of Black people in America.

Do you object to any teaching of capitalism, industrialization, free markets because those are ALSO subjects of “Marxist class conflict” or is it only the history and experiences of Black people that you think is “poisonous class conflict theory”

Frankly the history books are going to be pretty empty if you purge them of any subjects that relate to Marxism and Marxist class conflict.

[Falco Underhill]

Marx wrote FAR MORE about the capitalist class, industrialism, and the free market than he ever did about slaves or the experiences of Black people in America.

The racial divide was only the latest divisions for the neomarxists to exploit. Marx himself was as racist as anyone else.

Frankly the history books are going to be pretty empty if you purge them of any subjects that relate to Marxism and Marxist class conflict.

To me public education is just a lost cause, period. You're certainly not gonna help things by adding one more class conflict to the list

[Bootstrap]

Should Bathsheba be relegated to a footnote? Should the story about Abraham giving his wife to Pharoah, claiming she was only his sister, be relegated to a footnote?

This is much more than a footnote. This is what slavery is. This is what it means for a man to own a teenage girl - very often, that man is going to take advantage of her sexually. White slave owners routinely fathered children with women held as slaves. It wasn't just Jefferson. When their wives found out, they would often take out their anger on the slaves or their children.The history I learned in high school denied this. You can read about it

Nobody is contending over the factual account of Bathsheba and Abraham here. But different scholars have looked at the same evidence and still come to different conclusions about whether or not Jefferson actually did father an any of Sally Hemings' children.

Well, there are a smallish minority of scholars who suggest that it was Jefferson's brother Randall instead of Thomas Jefferson, since the DNA testing cannot distinguish the two. I don't know of any scholars who dispute the DNA evidence that it must have been Jefferson or a very close relative. If this were a high school class, we could discuss theories like these. And as Ken points out, students would probably bring these things in themselves, at the teacher's encouragement, so they could have this discussion.

It didn't talk about Sally Hemings or other slaves he used for sex .

Again, according to the sources I'm reading it's still not as universally established as you seem to be trying to make out, so maybe that explains it.

Almost nothing in history is "universally established", and some historians would dispute the historicity of David and Bathsheba or Abraham and Sarah. In a high school class, though, I think this is precisely the kind of discussion that would be useful. To understand what history is and the kinds of evidence historians pick through and interpret. I would find it pretty hard to accept any theory that ignores the DNA evidence, though, it must have been Jefferson or a close relative.

It didn't talk about the cruelty needed to keep people enslaved when they would rather be free.

Again, I don't know what type of class you had, but we covered the cruelty of the slave trade and the auction blocks. To this day what I learned then stands out in my mind. It was pretty vivid in it's description of the cruelty involved.

I imagine history is taught differently now, when I was in high school, Nixon and Ford were the presidents. My guess is you learned history a little later. But did you ever discuss the cruelty of slavery while discussing Thomas Jefferson? In my classes, we knew slavery was cruel, but somehow we were taught that the founders, with their sensitivity for "all men are created equal", were kind, gentle slaveholders who did not abuse their slaves. The idea of selling their slaves on the auction block was never discussed, either.