[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]
On three
frustrating layers to a founding American exchange.
Back in
August 2022, I dedicated one of my
Saturday Evening Post Considering History
columns to the great Benjamin Banneker, and included there not only his
inspiring letter to Thomas Jefferson but Jefferson’s deeply frustrating
responses. Check out that column if you would, and then come on back for a
couple more layers to this frustrating founding moment.
Welcome
back! Besides the fact that Jefferson was given and dropped the ball on such a
clear opportunity to transcend the racism “of his times” (which as I argue in that
column was never the only option “in his times” in any case), there are a couple
other deeply frustrating things about how my
hometown icon responded to Banneker in this moment. For one thing, I’d
contrast Jefferson here with what I wrote about Ben Franklin’s evolution on the
issue of immigration in this
long-ago post. We all hold prejudices at times in our lives, and perhaps
especially when we’re younger, and one of our most important life goals thus
has to be to continue learning and growing in those ways (among many others of
course). Yet when Jefferson was presented with a pitch-perfect opportunity to
do so, he instead (after a somewhat encouraging initial response) retreated
into and even deepened his prejudices toward African Americans. For such an
intelligent man, that’s a strikingly ignorant thing to do.
And
speaking of intelligence: as I wrote in this other
Saturday Evening Post column, one
of Jefferson’s truly inspiring achievements was the founding of the nation’s
first non-sectarian public university, a space dedicated the freedom of thought
as well as religion (both far from a given in the early 19th
century). It’s true (and important) that that educational and civic community
also featured, and indeed depended upon, enslaved
people in ways that contrasted quite clearly with its ideals. But just as
we can’t let the presence of slavery in every part of America’s founding keep
us from fighting for the nation’s ideals (as enslaved
people themselves did time and time again), neither should the University
of Virginia’s frustrating flaws elide the importance of what an “academical
village” (as Jefferson
dubbed the institution) could mean for individual and collective thought. That
Jefferson himself failed to live up to those thoughtful ideals in his exchange
with Benjamin Banneker is one more reason this moment is a decided non-favorite
for me.
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?
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