I have a cousin on the white side of my Jefferson descendant family who did the world a great favor back in 1999 when I first took my cousins from the Sally Hemings side to the Jefferson family reunion at Monticello. The Monticello Association, the all-white group of Thomas Jefferson descendants who own the graveyard at Monticello, had just finished its annual meeting after the family reunion. The meeting was, not to put too fine a point on it, raucous, with white descendants shouting down black descendants when they tried to speak at the meeting. I had made a motion that the Monticello Association accept our Hemings cousins into the group by acclamation. A few white descendants countered with a move to table the motion until our next meeting, a year hence. That motion carried by the entire association voting yes with the exception of four Truscott members – my brother Frank, and sisters Ginny and Susan – voting no.
Eloquent and powerful writing as a punch in the face. Tuberville is as he always has been, a jackass with a microphone. Too bad there are so many of him that think (they believe, defiantly) alike. Ironically their idea of defiance is to scream: we’re scared. Then hide.
You used the word ‘pernicious’ perfectly btw. However any of us can support you in your efforts to bring all of Jefferson’s descendants forward to be recognized let us know.
If some genealogist traces my ancestry back to Genghis Khan or the Norman Conquest (good luck with that) and discovers I'm related to Tommy Tuberville, I will absolutely deny it, under oath if necessary.
Seriously, this all comes down to a very deep fault line in American life: the rights of the individual vs. the needs of the community and the nation. Me vs. Us. Tommy Tuberville doesn't seem to know what words mean, so he doesn't know what he's talking about. But a white supremacist cannot take any oath of office, civil or military, without perjuring him/herself. Public schools are to serve the needs of the community and the nation, not the political or religious beliefs of petulant individualists. I think liberals sometimes twist themselves in knots in an effort to be "tolerant." It really is OK to be intolerant of people who are publicly trying to undermine all that is best about this country.
It also edges one into Barry Goldwater territory, which makes me uneasy. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue” was in the text of his 1964 nomination acceptance speech, though (I was just reminded by a Google search) he delivered it a little differently.
Susanna, I quoted from the last two sentences in your post and added some more material, from Thomas Mann and Karl Popper - both noted opponents of the Nazis in the 1920's and on through the "Thousand Year Reich that lasted twelve years." - also shared it to Notes.
Thanks for bringing up the topic in exactly that way!
There's an old adage to the effect that you can choose your friends but you can't choose your relatives. At some point, however, "relative" becomes, well, *relative*. It's highly likely that I have at least one ancestor in common with Tommy Tuberville, but I reserve the right to deny it. ;-)
My MAGAt neighbor, who told me the worst day of his life would be if a person of color tried to date one of his daughters, insisted that he wasn't a "racist"! He doesn't wear a white hood or burn crosses for goodness sake! But minorites should "stay with their own kind" (relationships, housing, schools etc). What's wrong with that?!
It must drive him crazy to see the increasing number of interracial couples around today! And that's in ordinary society-- not just the celebrity couples and the ones who are appearing more and more often in advertisements for every conceivable product except KKK costumes.
Oh yeah....THAT couple! Well, CT is an honorary white guy, except behind his back, when I'm sure his white "friends" call him by every vile racist epithet known to the English language. If Thomas weren't such a thoroughly rotten human being, he'd be pathetic-- a black man being remorselessly used by cynical, racist white men for their own ends.
I've never heard a reporter corner one of these creeps into saying exactly what s/he thinks 'racist' means. I believe that to them, just as 'woke' simply means black, 'racist' means only the person who pulls the noose snug at a lynching or hauls up the rope on the other side of the high branch. To them, the word applies to no one else.
Exactly. They're "entitled" to their "opinions" - which is true - but then their opinions somehow become regulations, codes, rules, laws, and lately Supreme Court decisions.
There is reason opinion is considered the lowest form of hooman knowledge and the lowest form of hooman intellect. Therefore, should come as no surprise Rs/cons rely on opinion.
Throughout my life-- even as a child-- I can recall hearing those "I'm not a racist/not an anti-Semite/not against gay people" circumlocutions, always followed by: "BUT..... there are [certain things] about those groups that I dislike/don't want to associate with, etc." It was disgusting and infuriating way back when, and it still is!
Tommy Tubes is way past a wink and a nod. He is waving the white robe and the pointy hat of the Klan...and daring us to do something about it. Frankly I think it's time for Schumer to tell Moscow Mitch to get the man under control, or failing that, Schumer will work with NASA to relocate the Huntsville facility to Colorado.
We have finally started taking the names of treasonous losers like Bragg, Hood and Hill off bases. The next logical step is moving those bases from anti-American MAGA run shitholes like Ally-Bammy.
Thanks to the recent “Supreme” Court ruling in Creative LLC v. Elenis, a hair salon in northern Michigan is now banning the LGBTQ community from its shop. This surprises no one, and I’m sure is just the beginning of the discrimination in the business community. The SC has definitely lifted the lid on a Pandora’s Box. Absolutely disgusting.
Speaking from Australia, one of the 5 colonialist countries that still possess a barely covert white nationalist skeleton beneath their thin modern skin of human rights enlightenment .... New Zealand to quite a significant extent is a hold out from the attempted genocide of its Indigenous peoples club, unlike Imperialist Canada, Australia, England and America.
My theory about NZ is that in 1839, Queen Victoria' Ordinance, 2 Vic 29, 1839, which plainly stated that the Aboriginal peoples in the Imperial possessions were British Subjects with subject rights, including a right to a Coronial Inquest if violently slain by Mounted Police, to dignity, and to being consulted, came too late to save the Australian Aboriginal Tribes from the successful mass slaughter carried out by the Mounted Police and settlers (with Government blessing and assistance).
The quite warlike Maoris of NZ had suffered invasion by Europeans later than New Holland/ New South Wales/ AKA Australia, and by 1845, a significant date considering the Queen Victoria Ordinance and the British anti slavery campaign, had negotiated themselves a moderately effective Treaty, better than what Australian Aboriginal people still don't have.
Australia's powerful, vicious and deepseated racism is manifesting itself in its true colours now, coming roaring and gibbering out of its musty cracks, spouting all manner of cruel lies and misinformation about the threat to long cherished privilege, because of the current Labor Government's legislated proposal to include the Aboriginal people in the Constution and to provide them with a Constitutionally guaranteed, advisory Voice. Only 184 years on from Queen Victoria's Ordinance! Mind you, there have been two recent Coronial Inquests in the Northern Territory, the first to tell the truth about the true, shockingly brutal and racist attitudes of the Police towards Aborivinal people ... no Police in Australia's history to this point have ever been charged with negligence or with the murder in custody of Aboriginal people. Sound familiar?
So the screaming, hate filled hysteria of the racists has hit a howling crescendo on social media, right wing media and on our repulsive Fox Murdoch Australian clone, Sky News.
As recently as 1975, when the Labor Government accepted and enshrined the UN's Anti Racial Discrimination stance as domestic legislation, my NSW Education Department official Teachers' Handbook still stated that any Headmaster could exclude any Aboriginal child if any parent objected to their enrolment in school! Sound famililiar?
I wrote an article referring to this and to Queen Victoria's 1839 Ordinance which noone else ever refers to because the NSW Government ignored its directives completely. If you're interested, (and of course with Lucian Truscott's permission for me to include it here) here's the link to my Southern Cross University Law Review article, surely the only one ever to manage to have four poems in a law journal publication, anywhere? http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/SCULawRw/1998/10pdf
Because the self satisfied, arrogant men who own and run just about everything in a patriarchy are angry, scary control freaks who will do anything they can to quell opposition?
Soon to be USA had Thomas Jefferson's 27th grievance against King George in the Declaration of Independence:
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
As an ass-ide, to demonstrate how ass-inine Senator Tubby is, he’s now boasting how he brought money to Alabama for internet access for the state, when he voted against Biden’s Infrastructure bill which provides the money for this project.
Thanks, Lucian. Agreed. Thanks to you and your siblings for challenging the status quo, and inviting all of the family. I was afraid outside that meeting, and also at the Unite the Right Rally here in Charlottesville. The vibe was anger evil and fear. No peace offered.
I think racist AND moron. Explaining his “not racist” persona, he said “I was a football coach.” Thereby exonerating himself from racist tendencies. What????
There are millions of people just like Tuberville and in fact, your cousin.
They don't talk about it publicly, but with each other they do. They all agree on the same points and arguments every time, and they regret "The War" wasn't won by the 'right people' and that "it's a shame they shut down the KKK,".
You can quote me on it.
My own mother said it in a letter to a cousin (the same one I wrote about earlier last week) and it was shocking to me, but she had no problem writing it.
She was grateful that "there were no black people" where we lived in Maine. She wrote it far more crudely than I do, and for that you'll have to imagine what the real written words were, but they weren't nice.
Problem is, I came across it un-mailed. I wonder if she ever wrote another one with the same sentiments? I shall never know but I'm pretty much convinced that she probably did.
But she wasn't the only one in her family either, I'm afraid. She had to get the idea that black people aren't human from somewhere.
Because racism, hatred and bigotry are learned emotions.
But once learned, those three attitudes sink in and become part of the individual's identity. And rooting them out, once they've taken hold, is pretty much impossible.
Stop! You're giving me PTSD! You mean to tell me that all those seven decades since 1954 and Brown v Topeka Board of Education, we are right back to this same awful place, again? I've fought this battle throughout those decades, driving racism first out of myself, and then wherever and whenever I encountered it. You fought it too Lucian and much more courageously than I, but it still lives on. What will it take to kill this infamous thing?
It will die only when those infected with it are all dead. Racism can't be uprooted by rational arguments; it's a visceral thing that is damn near impossible to root out. Some racists DO see the light and change, but all too few of them.
Yet another column I wish you didn't have to write. I watched the interview after the fact, and I am still dumbfounded by this behavior when I should know good and well it is coming.
Eloquent and powerful writing as a punch in the face. Tuberville is as he always has been, a jackass with a microphone. Too bad there are so many of him that think (they believe, defiantly) alike. Ironically their idea of defiance is to scream: we’re scared. Then hide.
You used the word ‘pernicious’ perfectly btw. However any of us can support you in your efforts to bring all of Jefferson’s descendants forward to be recognized let us know.
Here's one place to start. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/97780/jeffersons-children-by-shannon-lanier-and-jane-feldman-photographs-by-jane-feldman/
If some genealogist traces my ancestry back to Genghis Khan or the Norman Conquest (good luck with that) and discovers I'm related to Tommy Tuberville, I will absolutely deny it, under oath if necessary.
Seriously, this all comes down to a very deep fault line in American life: the rights of the individual vs. the needs of the community and the nation. Me vs. Us. Tommy Tuberville doesn't seem to know what words mean, so he doesn't know what he's talking about. But a white supremacist cannot take any oath of office, civil or military, without perjuring him/herself. Public schools are to serve the needs of the community and the nation, not the political or religious beliefs of petulant individualists. I think liberals sometimes twist themselves in knots in an effort to be "tolerant." It really is OK to be intolerant of people who are publicly trying to undermine all that is best about this country.
Being intolerant of bigots and their political lunacy is more than OK-- it's essential!
It also edges one into Barry Goldwater territory, which makes me uneasy. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue” was in the text of his 1964 nomination acceptance speech, though (I was just reminded by a Google search) he delivered it a little differently.
Susanna, I quoted from the last two sentences in your post and added some more material, from Thomas Mann and Karl Popper - both noted opponents of the Nazis in the 1920's and on through the "Thousand Year Reich that lasted twelve years." - also shared it to Notes.
Thanks for bringing up the topic in exactly that way!
There's an old adage to the effect that you can choose your friends but you can't choose your relatives. At some point, however, "relative" becomes, well, *relative*. It's highly likely that I have at least one ancestor in common with Tommy Tuberville, but I reserve the right to deny it. ;-)
My MAGAt neighbor, who told me the worst day of his life would be if a person of color tried to date one of his daughters, insisted that he wasn't a "racist"! He doesn't wear a white hood or burn crosses for goodness sake! But minorites should "stay with their own kind" (relationships, housing, schools etc). What's wrong with that?!
Everything......
It must drive him crazy to see the increasing number of interracial couples around today! And that's in ordinary society-- not just the celebrity couples and the ones who are appearing more and more often in advertisements for every conceivable product except KKK costumes.
Interracial couples EXCEPT for Ginny and Clarence, of course.
Oh yeah....THAT couple! Well, CT is an honorary white guy, except behind his back, when I'm sure his white "friends" call him by every vile racist epithet known to the English language. If Thomas weren't such a thoroughly rotten human being, he'd be pathetic-- a black man being remorselessly used by cynical, racist white men for their own ends.
Nailed it, Judith
Absolutely correct ....
I've never heard a reporter corner one of these creeps into saying exactly what s/he thinks 'racist' means. I believe that to them, just as 'woke' simply means black, 'racist' means only the person who pulls the noose snug at a lynching or hauls up the rope on the other side of the high branch. To them, the word applies to no one else.
Exactly. They're "entitled" to their "opinions" - which is true - but then their opinions somehow become regulations, codes, rules, laws, and lately Supreme Court decisions.
There is reason opinion is considered the lowest form of hooman knowledge and the lowest form of hooman intellect. Therefore, should come as no surprise Rs/cons rely on opinion.
I'm in a mixed race family and it's fantastic.
I'm entitled to my belief that Tommy T is a racist piece of shit who can't abide uppity women of any stripe either.
Alleluia! Amen!
Throughout my life-- even as a child-- I can recall hearing those "I'm not a racist/not an anti-Semite/not against gay people" circumlocutions, always followed by: "BUT..... there are [certain things] about those groups that I dislike/don't want to associate with, etc." It was disgusting and infuriating way back when, and it still is!
Tommy Tubes is way past a wink and a nod. He is waving the white robe and the pointy hat of the Klan...and daring us to do something about it. Frankly I think it's time for Schumer to tell Moscow Mitch to get the man under control, or failing that, Schumer will work with NASA to relocate the Huntsville facility to Colorado.
What a great idea, moving bases from any state that pulls stunts that hurt troops.
We have finally started taking the names of treasonous losers like Bragg, Hood and Hill off bases. The next logical step is moving those bases from anti-American MAGA run shitholes like Ally-Bammy.
Thanks to the recent “Supreme” Court ruling in Creative LLC v. Elenis, a hair salon in northern Michigan is now banning the LGBTQ community from its shop. This surprises no one, and I’m sure is just the beginning of the discrimination in the business community. The SC has definitely lifted the lid on a Pandora’s Box. Absolutely disgusting.
One of your best.. sadly.
Speaking from Australia, one of the 5 colonialist countries that still possess a barely covert white nationalist skeleton beneath their thin modern skin of human rights enlightenment .... New Zealand to quite a significant extent is a hold out from the attempted genocide of its Indigenous peoples club, unlike Imperialist Canada, Australia, England and America.
My theory about NZ is that in 1839, Queen Victoria' Ordinance, 2 Vic 29, 1839, which plainly stated that the Aboriginal peoples in the Imperial possessions were British Subjects with subject rights, including a right to a Coronial Inquest if violently slain by Mounted Police, to dignity, and to being consulted, came too late to save the Australian Aboriginal Tribes from the successful mass slaughter carried out by the Mounted Police and settlers (with Government blessing and assistance).
The quite warlike Maoris of NZ had suffered invasion by Europeans later than New Holland/ New South Wales/ AKA Australia, and by 1845, a significant date considering the Queen Victoria Ordinance and the British anti slavery campaign, had negotiated themselves a moderately effective Treaty, better than what Australian Aboriginal people still don't have.
Australia's powerful, vicious and deepseated racism is manifesting itself in its true colours now, coming roaring and gibbering out of its musty cracks, spouting all manner of cruel lies and misinformation about the threat to long cherished privilege, because of the current Labor Government's legislated proposal to include the Aboriginal people in the Constution and to provide them with a Constitutionally guaranteed, advisory Voice. Only 184 years on from Queen Victoria's Ordinance! Mind you, there have been two recent Coronial Inquests in the Northern Territory, the first to tell the truth about the true, shockingly brutal and racist attitudes of the Police towards Aborivinal people ... no Police in Australia's history to this point have ever been charged with negligence or with the murder in custody of Aboriginal people. Sound familiar?
So the screaming, hate filled hysteria of the racists has hit a howling crescendo on social media, right wing media and on our repulsive Fox Murdoch Australian clone, Sky News.
As recently as 1975, when the Labor Government accepted and enshrined the UN's Anti Racial Discrimination stance as domestic legislation, my NSW Education Department official Teachers' Handbook still stated that any Headmaster could exclude any Aboriginal child if any parent objected to their enrolment in school! Sound famililiar?
I wrote an article referring to this and to Queen Victoria's 1839 Ordinance which noone else ever refers to because the NSW Government ignored its directives completely. If you're interested, (and of course with Lucian Truscott's permission for me to include it here) here's the link to my Southern Cross University Law Review article, surely the only one ever to manage to have four poems in a law journal publication, anywhere? http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/SCULawRw/1998/10pdf
Truthtellers understand how to weave ethos, pathos and logos. Respect
It really is everywhere. How did we allow this to happen?
Because the self satisfied, arrogant men who own and run just about everything in a patriarchy are angry, scary control freaks who will do anything they can to quell opposition?
NZ had Queen Victoria's Ordinance, 2 Vic 29, 1839
Soon to be USA had Thomas Jefferson's 27th grievance against King George in the Declaration of Independence:
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
As an ass-ide, to demonstrate how ass-inine Senator Tubby is, he’s now boasting how he brought money to Alabama for internet access for the state, when he voted against Biden’s Infrastructure bill which provides the money for this project.
Again WHAT?????
He's not the only R who voted against the bill and then claim credit for the benefits his/her state is getting from the bills.
All that’s missing are the white hood and sheet🙄🙄
Thanks, Lucian. Agreed. Thanks to you and your siblings for challenging the status quo, and inviting all of the family. I was afraid outside that meeting, and also at the Unite the Right Rally here in Charlottesville. The vibe was anger evil and fear. No peace offered.
Not a racist...just a moron - and there are way too many of them in public office.
How do we ever get out of this Hell?
Same way we got into it: one moron at a time.
Resolve.
I think racist AND moron. Explaining his “not racist” persona, he said “I was a football coach.” Thereby exonerating himself from racist tendencies. What????
There are millions of people just like Tuberville and in fact, your cousin.
They don't talk about it publicly, but with each other they do. They all agree on the same points and arguments every time, and they regret "The War" wasn't won by the 'right people' and that "it's a shame they shut down the KKK,".
You can quote me on it.
My own mother said it in a letter to a cousin (the same one I wrote about earlier last week) and it was shocking to me, but she had no problem writing it.
She was grateful that "there were no black people" where we lived in Maine. She wrote it far more crudely than I do, and for that you'll have to imagine what the real written words were, but they weren't nice.
Problem is, I came across it un-mailed. I wonder if she ever wrote another one with the same sentiments? I shall never know but I'm pretty much convinced that she probably did.
But she wasn't the only one in her family either, I'm afraid. She had to get the idea that black people aren't human from somewhere.
Because racism, hatred and bigotry are learned emotions.
In 1949, the musical “South Pacific” addressed this very philosophy in the song “you have to be carefully taught”
You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught.
But once learned, those three attitudes sink in and become part of the individual's identity. And rooting them out, once they've taken hold, is pretty much impossible.
Stop! You're giving me PTSD! You mean to tell me that all those seven decades since 1954 and Brown v Topeka Board of Education, we are right back to this same awful place, again? I've fought this battle throughout those decades, driving racism first out of myself, and then wherever and whenever I encountered it. You fought it too Lucian and much more courageously than I, but it still lives on. What will it take to kill this infamous thing?
It will die only when those infected with it are all dead. Racism can't be uprooted by rational arguments; it's a visceral thing that is damn near impossible to root out. Some racists DO see the light and change, but all too few of them.
I wish it would die when all infected with it are dead but, sadly and infuriatingly, the infection is passed on to many of their kids.
True! Not all the kids are infected, but enough of them are to perpetuate it.
Perpetuate it and pass it on to their own kids....
Yet another column I wish you didn't have to write. I watched the interview after the fact, and I am still dumbfounded by this behavior when I should know good and well it is coming.