Reply to Thomas Jefferson - How do people feel about him today?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Thomas Jefferson - How do people feel about him today?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Years ago, I listened to a podcast about Thomas Jefferson and the main guest was a scholar who was a black woman and Thomas Jefferson expert. The host asked her if Thomas Jefferson should be “cancelled” because he was a white cisgender slaveholder.

The woman said no. She said we should continue to recognize his brilliance and judge him by the standards of the times in which he lived, which sadly were accepting of slavery and other horrors. The woman also said that she feels differently about people who still defended slavery later in the 1800s, because by then it had been denounced and abolished throughout most of the world.

It’s complicated, no?
[/quote]

Let's give credit where credit is due. You're likely referring to Annette Gordon-Reed, who's a scholar of the Hemings family. She'd done brilliant work, and I highly recommend reading her stuff.

I think many of us can recognize Jefferson for what he was--a seminal part of the founding of this country, who was also [b]a hypocrite that lived beyond his means[/b].[/quote]

I mean, that describes the vast majority of Americans, 50% of Americans have credit card debt, for example, and almost everyone is hypocritical about something.  Very few Americans are a seminal part of the founding of the country.  None of us alive today can say that.  So you're saying that he was a Founding Father, and also human.  When we say deification, we don't literally mean elevate to godhood, everyone knows that the Founding Fathers were people, not celestial beings.  [/quote]

Lol, yes, let's equate credit card debt to an estate built via slave labor.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics