Monticello, Jefferson, Contested Memories & Hate Speech

It’s a phrase I heard some time ago in an NPR interview about the southern United States and the fact that our Civil War has created a host of “contested memories”.  The phrase has stayed with me and leaves me bemused and troubled and unsettled.

Yesterday I visited (again) Monticello (Jefferson’s home) here in central Virginia, taking a guest for the umpteenth time (yes, Max, you guessed correctly) to this shrine to I know not what – interesting architecture?  I really do not mind as the grounds are lovely, but each time, I am reminded how divided we are as a nation in so many, many ways.

And I hear all our voices in my head, so that I am left hardly knowing what to do with myself:

Enjoy the feast of interesting things, say the Jefferson enthusiasts.

Learn the checkered history of a famous man, including his ‘relationship’ (she don’t know what to call it, so settle on ‘relationship’) with slave Sally Hemings, says the earnest historical guide.

The DNA doesn’t prove it was Thomas Jefferson, so claim the apologists who simply cannot bear that an icon might have feet of clay.

“My industries”; “my boys”; “my nails”; “my land”; “my legacies”, so read the many Jeffersonian quotes attesting to his own greatness, leaving out, of course, that there is none of this, not even the time to read and study and pen a universal Declaration of Independence for the select few, without the slave labor that makes his life possible.

I hate it.  I hate it all.  I hate the way it makes me feel, co-opted somehow into the conspiracy by enjoying the fruits of this ill-gotten labor – the same way I felt beholding the Sistine Chapel and then remembering the many sales of indulgences that made it possible.

Is Monticello beautiful?  Yes.  Is it filled with clever and interesting artifacts?  Yes.  Is there a vision there to be beheld even today?  Yes.

But what do I do with the contested memories that are paid mere lip service here?  With the placard that insists that Jefferson the keeper of enslaved peoples, strived to treat ‘his’ slaves ‘well’ (by sparing the whip as much as possible as if that were a grace rather than the travesty to human dignity that a whip would be used at all)?  With the many unremarked ironies and fissures in the integrity narrative (like how there are so few slave ‘houses’ because most of them ‘lived’ where they worked, with perhaps a room beside the kitchen or being relegated to the kitchen floor)?

And why am I to be thankful for a man who almost single-handedly set this nation up for the inevitable Civil War we had by failing and refusing to confront the issue in his own time and shoving the debacle down the road a few decades?  Am I to be thankful that he thought nationhood was more important than the lives of those thousands and thousands of people he believed could be owned like a chair?  That he and others participated in a constitutional convention that held that emancipation could not, must not, would not happen (continuing the lie that those held as slaves were not people) while insisting that they be counted as 2/3 a person for representation purposes (the irony of that one never fails to stab)?

There is no contested memory.  What there is is wide-scale denial of reality.  It’s easier that way and sometimes (not often, but sometimes) I am envious of those living in the land of denial.  It really is easier to simply insist we were the ones wronged than to grapple with the long-term consequences, benefits and disadvantages of claiming the right to own another human being.

It was wrong then and we (white folk) knew it, pretending not to.  And we did it anyway.  And it wasn’t that long ago.  And I hate it (yes, this is my own hate speech).  I hate the lasting legacy.  I hate that I still benefit from it.  I hate that my own people work so hard to deny it.  I hate what it cost us all.  I hate the injustice of it.  I hate that the very foundation of my own nation rests upon it.

And I hate that I pay money to go to a place that celebrates one of the main people here that made it happen by institutionalizing and ensconcing it in our (claimed to be sacred) founding documents.  I hate that the folks who try to deal with that reality at Monticello still describe Sally Hemings as somehow in a relationship with her claimed owner.  I hate that the word ‘rape’ is not used to describe the reality of a man who holds absolute power of life and death and all in between over a woman and engages her in sexual intercourse.  I hate that the docents are careful to point out that Jefferson’s wife was long dead by the time of his sexual congress with Hemings, as if infidelity were really the elephant in the room, as if fidelity in marriage were the issue.

And I hate that the people who love Monticello and Jefferson and American history will likely hate me for having said these things, for having felt them at all.  I hate that they can so easily adjust their thinking and make the ownership of other human beings a footnote of not much import in the life of this supposedly great man.  I hate that the Enlightenment was reduced to self-serving self-interest in this one person.  I hate the lack of moral imagination that we collectively hail as evidence of greatness.

And truthfully, there are days when I hate that I hate it.  For who am I to judge?  Who am I do demand more from history and its keepers than it or they are willing or able to give?  Who am I, a white woman, to feel these things at all?  For the fact is that Thomas Jefferson gave me much (with some help from some Suffragettes along the way, let us not forget).  But truthfully, I do not thank him for it.  And I hate that too, for I know in the eyes of many, it makes me ungrateful.

So be it.  Because I also believe with all my heart the God that I know that Jefferson could scarce abide forgives it all – Jefferson’s hubris and blindness and failures – and mine too.

Just today, however, that forgiveness feels like shifting sand beneath my feet.  And yes, I hate that too.

White Like Me

Reading Jamie Utt’s blog post, "That's Racist Against White People!" A Discussion on Power and Privilege, I come again, particularly in the comments discussion, to the place of curiosity about one of the many things that make us human beings different, each from the other.  Why do some folk, white like me, receive information about white privilege with a reaction of defensiveness, hostility and anger and others do not?  Why do some externalize the message and some internalize it?  What makes the difference in our ability or inability to hear, to listen, to be changed or to reject out-of-hand, to become more entrenched?

Utt’s interaction with a FB friend is instructive: they made progress when the conversation could be turned, even a little, from a direct discussion about ‘them’ and ‘us’ to a conversation about ‘us’, all of ‘us’.  So maybe it’s as simple as feeling included.

Yet I find even that problematic.

Long ago in a group discussion, a loving, sincere, good, young white woman commented, "but everyone's been oppressed in some way".  My thought then and now is that this point of view is a part of the problem of the well-meaning – no – everyone has not been oppressed.  To say everyone has is to say we're all in the same boat oppression-wise, which is just one logical step away from saying no one is oppressed (or perhaps better, since 'it's' happening to us all, what are we to do?)

To claim that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to oppression is to make meaningless any desire or effort to challenge systems that benefit one group at the expense of another.  In Jesus world where I (at least try to) live, that's just not on.  I cannot benefit from the pushing down of others and call it good or even just the way it is (the last refuge of moral bankruptcy).  In Jesus world, it's my job to know and to work to change, or at a bare minimum, not lie and deny.

And before we white folk cry foul, we might do well to spend a little quiet time in prayer asking God to reveal to us the ways in which we profit and benefit from the treatment and mistreatment of others who are not white in our time and place (the old adage about walking in someone else's shoes requires the thoughtful, deliberate, intentional exercise of our moral imagination).

If you think it’s not a problem, consider former Senator Jim Webb’s book, Born Fighting, where in the Foreword, he writes, “The fundamental assumption – flawed . . . was that the reins of power were unfairly held by the so-called WASPS . . . since much of American society was dominated by Caucasians of Protestant, Western European descent, then by definition all of those who, however loosely, fit this category were assumed to have shared a presumptive advantage . . .”, a position he condemns.  Senator Webb cannot accept that his ancestors, some of whom may have been dirt poor, had it better than the slaves.  I understand the crushing poverty of the Appalachias.  But you cannot compare situations in one narrow aspect and call it fair.  Slaves and indentured servants were not the same: indentured servants had a certain future that slaves did not – freedom.  And indentured servants did not have their mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children sold and forcefully removed from them.  And with the importation of slaves from Africa, white indentured servants became a higher class of worker.

Senator Webb, whose Scots-Irish ethnicity I share, misses the crucial point when it comes to black-white dynamics in these United States: no matter how bad we may have had it, we chose those paths, we and our ancestors.  With the exception of the imprisoned or impressed, no matter how poor or disadvantaged, we chose to come here.  And we were free to choose whether to remain or move on, as his book later points out in terms of those who migrated further west.  More plainly put: we started out white.  And no matter how much we want to cringe away from the reality of it, it is a disadvantage to be black in the United States.  It was in the 1600's.  It is today.  Even for the poorest among us, to start out not-black is to start out several steps ahead in virtually every aspect of our collective life.  And it does not negate the struggles of my people to admit it.

So how do we white folk talk about this?  What do we do?  How do we ‘give back’ our privilege, our edge?  Should we?  Should we even want to?  Those are all fair, if tough, questions.  But we’ve got to begin from the place where we recognize and acknowledge that we have an edge, an advantage, that we did nothing to earn and that our ancestors and the systems they put into place that continue into today, guaranteed would flow to us and not to others.  That might be a beginning.

But fighting about whether it’s true, this thing we call white privilege?  The time for that is over.  For now is the time for the grown-ups to lead the conversation.  And grown-ups do not fight about reality.  They deal with it.

***

SIDE NOTE to Fox News and others on the usage of the word ‘cracker’ and equating that to racial slurs against black people: I’m a West Virginian, so perhaps the language just doesn’t have the same history with me as it does folk of the South (to my Northern friends – West Virginia is not a southern state).  Even so, this is what I know: if someone were to call me a cracker, I would simply think it was funny or odd.  It would have no application to me.  But whenever the ‘n – word’ is used in the United States, every black person feels the assault.  I never had to have ‘the’ talk with my children about being called crackers on the street.  I do not have reason to fear for my or my family’s safety simply because the word cracker is used in a sentence.  I do not have to go out into the world always on psychic guard against the random attack of language on my personhood.  I don’t like any name calling and try my very best not to do it.  But I’m with Mr. Utt: all names are not created equal and hurt feelings are not the same as oppression.  Both matter.  But they are not the same.  One is transitory; the other is forever.


________________________
*An obvious play on the title of John Howard Griffin’s book Black Like Me, taken from a line in the poem Dream Variations by Langston Hughes:

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.

Then rest at cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently,

Dark like me-

That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide

In the face of the sun,

Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

Till the quick day is done.

Rest at pale evening...

A tall, slim tree...

Night coming tenderly

Black like me.