Because it doesn’t matter who you’re dating, married to or friends with. Take Thomas Jefferson, for instance. He kept slaves. Human beings that were his property. He also took a liking to one of them, a young girl called Sally Hemings. When Jefferson’s wife died, she became his de-facto partner, concubine, and the mother of several of his children. Children who, like their mother, were legally the propery of their father.
Now was Jefferson always evil and vile to his common-law wife, who was also his slave? Not necessarily. In fact she enjoyed certain privileges. Some of the children he had by her, he treated well. He saw it to they enjoyed a better education than the other slaves at his plantation.
So you can be racist as hell, literally keep slaves, and still have a bit of a ‘soft spot’ for one or a few of them. Of course to us, today, the very concept of owning your own family, literally owning them as property, is sick. Even in his day, some were weirded out by it. Jefferson didn’t claim the kids as his own. But he did set one of them free, later in life.
By today’s standards, Thomas Jefferson was a disgusting, horrible racist. Not to mention the fact that Sally Hemings was just fourteen when he began bedding her. For his era, though, it should be said that he was relatively benign, maybe even considerate, as far as slave owners go. Still hella racist though.
People are complex. Racists are people, so they, too, are complex. Derek Chauvin may been awfully sweet to his now ex-wife. And decidedly not sweet to the defenseless, unarmed and tied up man he murdered in broad daylight.
Let’s talk about race and guns….
John McWhorter on Cursing, Anti-Racism, and Why ‘We Need to Stop Being So Afraid’
Columbia University linguist John McWhorter on “anti-racism” as a new, misguided civic religion and his new book on curses, Nine Nasty Words.
If advocates of “wokeness,” “critical race theory,” and “anti-racism” seem to be acting like religious zealots who must crush all heretics, that’s because they are, argued Columbia University linguist John McWhorter at a 2018 debate at the Soho Forum.
“Anti-racism as currently configured has gone a long way from what used to be considered intelligent and sincere civil rights activism to today [being] a religion,” said McWhorter. “I don’t mean that as a rhetorical thing. It actually is what any naive anthropologist would recognize as a faith.”
The 55-year-old author first explored his idea of anti-racism as “Our Flawed New Religion” in a 2015 essay at The Daily Beast. He’s expanding the concept into a book, due out next year, that he’s serializing on Substack. Tentatively titled The Elect, it lays out his argument about the misguided fervor undergirding the anti-racist movement championed by people such as Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Meanwhile, McWhorter’s latest volume to hit store shelves is Nine Nasty Words, a study of how curse words such as fuck and the N-word became commonplace, unsayable, or something in between. Reason’s Nick Gillespie talked with McWhorter about the shifting status of curse words and accusations of systemic racism in contemporary America.
That momement when he realizes he put a Jim Crowe era slogan in the bill claiming isn’t voter-suppression
This is the understanding of history you get without learning about the impact systemic racism has had on the country. https://t.co/loZhP2mai0
— Beau of The Fifth Column (@BeauTFC) May 8, 2021
Rep. Anchía Questions Author of Texas Voter Suppression Bill