I truly appreciated reading this column again. This time, I saved it to my personal files. One day soon, I plan to share a copy with family members who are Tennessee Trump acolytes. It will take courage on my part. Since having two strokes, I depend on my sister in many ways to help me through the physical limitations I have. I drive, I read, I write, I attend my house plants and outdoor porch plants, but my sister is my sister, and we have silently agreed not to talk about politics. Still yet, I wish she would understand the dynamics of my political position, understand the dynamics of racist ideologies that plague this lovely state of Tennessee. Thank you, Lucian. I hope this essay reaches far and wide.
I wonder about this a lot. I want to believe that the founders and other "dead white guys" that I've admired in the course of my life would have evolved and grown with the times. Whatever their faults, they were intelligent and very much aware of the wider world. But admitting you've been seriously wrong, e.g., about Black people, and/or about women, and that your error had serious repercussions (like a cataclysmic war) -- that's not easy for anyone. Nevertheless, I hope . . .
I've read where in a Wikipedia article on Jefferson that he wasn't quite sure about his moral stance on slavery and he was rather conflicted on it, hence his silence on the subject:
"During his presidency, Jefferson was for the most part publicly silent on the issue of slavery and emancipation, as the Congressional debate over slavery and its extension caused a dangerous north–south rift among the states, with talk of a northern confederacy in New England. The violent attacks on white slave owners during the Haitian Revolution due to injustices under slavery supported Jefferson's fears of a race war, increasing his reservations about promoting emancipation at that time. After numerous attempts and failures to bring about emancipation, Jefferson wrote privately in an 1805 letter to William A. Burwell, "I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us." That same year he also related this idea to George Logan, writing, "I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject."
He was silent on what he thought about slavery because in Virginia at that time it would have been political suicide to come out and admit he had children with Sally and say what he thought about it.
A story so beautifully expressed and a remarkable slice of history. Sad too that some essentially blood descendants of Jefferson were ashamed of other blood relatives to the degree that they wanted them excluded from family gatherings and indeed from their entire family history. As was also mentioned; even several state legislatures are currently writing laws to disallow the teaching of a big part of our history -- the buying and selling of human beings and that the practice was as common as the buying and selling of domestic animals. (Except that for the most part the animals were treated better). Also what about the post slavery era? The inhuman treatment and discrimination of these now free people didn’t suddenly end. Will our children not be taught about the period when it was commonplace for out of control mobs to deny justice to accused people, often pulling them out of jails and hanging them from trees? Will the period of segregation be stricken from the history books as well as the struggle for the right to vote, and even up to the present day; continued discrimination and voter discrimination?
The wholesale slaughter of Native Americans seems to have been omitted entirely in all this. They have been completely forgotten as have certain immigrant groups who are quietly working hard without complaint to better their lot. Lastly, as has been recently noted, certain holders of political office have already re-written history regarding the savage assault on our Capitol building where brave defenders lost life and limb. Will future history books describe that day as a normal tourist day?
I’m not sure what this “theory” is about or if it makes any difference at this point: the GOPigs are bigots, fascists, crooks, traitors—you name it, they’ve demonstrated it. Doesn’t “white Supremacist” and “neo nazi” say it all? This so-called “critical race theory” sounds like a red herring designed to whip up the wing nuts— a meme put out by Cambridge Analytica or The GRU aiming to increase division. Somehow, this country needs to address the disinformation directly, starting with Cambridge Analytica. I just don’t know why the Mercers, wanted for tax evasion, are allowed to operate Cambridge Analytica at will from Great Britain.
Your original posting, and as reposted, dovetail exactly with the New York Times' Book Review for a new, and highly relevant title, "How the Word Is Passed. A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America, by Clint Smith (Little, Brown and Company) $29 (NYT: "Reckoning With Reckoning, How we memorialize our slavery past.", page 13). Along with reliving the trauma, we need to deal with the shame and the embarrassment, not only of our recent past, but with the present day, engaged in by people who, by any objective standard, ought to know better than to try to propagate these myths, along with a happy face narrative that bears no resemblance to the truth: historical tours feature docents will continue to spread the vicious and pernicious falsehoods that have repeatedly been shown to be the bedrock of the post-Civil War mindset, both within the South, and by others elsewhere in our country, and indeed, in the world beyond our borders. The following passage I am quoting from the review makes the point:
"The result is a tour of tours and a reckoning with reckonings, which sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America's historical conscience. The book's standout quality is the range and sincerity of its encounters. Smith walks with tourists, guides, teachers, scholars, ex-convicts, local historians and heritage zealots, managing to catch nearly everyone in a moment of unscripted candor. His ease with strangers is charmingly apparent. After a tour at Monticello focused on Jefferson slaveholding, one conservative Southerner says, "This really took the shine of the guy." In the chapel of Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, which honors each rebel state with a Tiffany stained-glass memorial, a nervous docent admits that "we try and fall back on the beauty of the window" whenever the topic of slavery arises. Later, Smith attends a Memorial Day event at the cemetery organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, where a member earnestly tries to convince him that Black men served as officers in the Confederacy."
We learn further on that the myth of Black Confederate officers originated in the 1970s, as part of a propaganda campaign to safeguard the Sons of Confederate Veterans' reputation. Really! It begs the question whose reputation is at risk; certainly not the reputations of the Confederate veterans themselves. They certainly were not shy about their intense and hateful opinions about Blacks, enslaved or otherwise. We see the same sort of thing going on in Poland, and Hungary, and certain parts of Germany, where the descendants and admirers of the Waffen SS well prefer not to discuss the details of the Holocaust, but who are more than capable (and enthusiastic) about detailing their forebears' heroic struggles against the Red Army.
Whether it is accepting the human cost of slavery in the United States, or acknowledging the systematic murder of millions in the death camps of the Holocaust, it is always the same, highly selective memories that prefer not to dwell on some of the worst behavior in recorded history, even when they are presented with the bloodstained receipts of what they had done. We cannot change the racial attitudes of the polls, the Balts, the Ukrainians, or the Russians; they are who they are, and their bloodstained histories attest to that. We are not responsible for them, but we certainly are responsible for the narrative that we allow the reprobates of our history to tell, and we certainly are responsible for our own self-censorship when it comes to tolerating that kind of behavior in the interests of not stirring up any more trouble than we already we have. We certainly outnumber them, even as under current circumstances, we cannot outvote them in Congress, specifically in the Senate. These people have pushed the envelope so far into the realm of hyperbolic fantasy that we cannot in good conscience, and to save our own sanity, accept the false narratives that they continue to propagate because somebody might feel bad that they and their kith and kin over the past one and two-thirds centuries have engaged in serial misbehavior, and whose only excuse has been to maintain social and political power. The further they fall behind in demographics, as the numbers of them shrink, the more strident and belligerent they have become. It used to be that this was nobody else's business; this is all about state's rights; that Blacks and other minorities of color were intrinsically not fit to enjoy the benefits and to bear the burdens of American citizenship, and so on ad nauseam.
One way we deal with this is to be honest about it ourselves. As I mentioned in a previous posting, the fundamental facts of our national history that enable sociologists and philosophers to conjure up something they call 'Critical Race Theory' frequently abbreviated as CRT, is simply to acknowledge that which we overwhelmingly know to be true. We created a society in which black people were essentially and expressly left out. We did not start to do it out of malice, although that became a part of it at the behest of our Southern brethren, who reveled in the thought that we could be as equally corrupted as they were, but the econometric conditions under which we live here, and which we pursue our careers, and grow our businesses, make is risk aversive to anything that might cost us some money for doing the right and proper thing. As the saying goes, 'No good deed goes unpunished'. Nonetheless, the problem never goes away, and it gets more exacerbated the harder we try to ignore it. The harder we try to ignore the problem, the more serious it gets, with no resolution possible without negotiation and some form of reconciliation. The 'politics of feeling good' is like taking opioids, and with a good chance of killing yourself if you do not clean yourself up. We all know something about that, and it is not at all surprising that many of the people addicted to opioids come from the same Southern culture that spawned Trumpism and race hatred.
So we settled into an uncomfortable gray area in which we are content to engage in a feckless tokenism, that hurts us but does not help anybody else. Neither can we be seen as good Samaritans, treating our obligations to justice and equity as some sort of charitable giving. Human nature is not like that, and nobody wants to be seen as an object of sympathy or guilt. Kids growing up in tough neighborhoods need to know how to hold their own against bullies, and sometimes it takes bruised knuckles and bloody noses to make the point. But sometimes, the bullies happen to be our friends and family members too, and we need to get them to back off. There is no 'kiss and make up' if the underlying problem goes unresolved. Frequently, it does take an intervention, coupled with serious and measurable consequences, to get some people to change their ways. This is obviously one of those occasions.
So what do we do about these latter-day Uriah Heaps, these unctuous, and ever-so-earnest docents who lie through their teeth about that which they know to be completely untrue. Where is it written that these people are rightfully dishonest and dishonorable, simply because they wanted whenever they are peddling to be true. We are now stuck with the fact that fully one-third of the American electorate believes in the Trumpian nonsense that he won the 2020 election, despite massive efforts to come up with persuasive evidence have failed to convince anyone outside of their social circles that the allegations are true. How do we deal with, and maintain friendships with, people who are addicted to this delusional fakery? This is very hard, because some of these people are highly congenial, but they have a blind spot that is as large as a solar eclipse.
One way might be, to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission informally, sponsored by, and paid for, our public and private universities, public and private foundations, and its many corporate sponsors as we can get to participate in that effort. We do not need a commission that has the government's own imprimatur. Governmental participation in such an effort would be deemed essential to validate the outcome, but government need not be the organizing force around it, and if Trump Republicans refused to participate, that is on them. But we do need to be honest with ourselves; and those who will pay for and sponsor the sort of effort need to be honest as well. Shared pain is easier to endure than directed pain, and we do need an honest accounting.
Thanks so much for re-posting this. I circulated the original on Facebook and via email, and I've kept it around so I can bring it up as needed. Fwiw, as an editor and writer, I'm obsessed with proper credit to authors, so what I share is the link or the whole email. The speed with which author's and, often, publisher's names come adrift from copy on social media drives me nuts.
The US Fifth Army in 1945 under the leadership of your grandfather is among the most tangible evidence we have that the dream of liberty for all is a living, breathing aspiration that includes every human of every race, color, religion, and gender. Courage to stand up to the haters, to face the challenges of creating a more just world through cooperation rather than exclusion, is the only viable building block of a successful American future.
I could apply many adjectives to this wonderful piece: courageous, heartbreaking, searing, among them. The truth hurts, but it will set us free. Thank you Lucian Truscott for this. It reminds me of another unflinchingly honest treatment of this subject: “Slaves in the Family” by Edward Ball. It was published in 1998 and therefore was ahead of its time in its exposure of the truth that we are all part of one human family — a fact we ignore or deny at our peril.
I truly appreciated reading this column again. This time, I saved it to my personal files. One day soon, I plan to share a copy with family members who are Tennessee Trump acolytes. It will take courage on my part. Since having two strokes, I depend on my sister in many ways to help me through the physical limitations I have. I drive, I read, I write, I attend my house plants and outdoor porch plants, but my sister is my sister, and we have silently agreed not to talk about politics. Still yet, I wish she would understand the dynamics of my political position, understand the dynamics of racist ideologies that plague this lovely state of Tennessee. Thank you, Lucian. I hope this essay reaches far and wide.
Thank you for re-posting this! It makes fools of all those who say we should hide our past and ignore our history.
I think your 6x great grandfather would be very pleased and proud to have such descendants.
I wonder about this a lot. I want to believe that the founders and other "dead white guys" that I've admired in the course of my life would have evolved and grown with the times. Whatever their faults, they were intelligent and very much aware of the wider world. But admitting you've been seriously wrong, e.g., about Black people, and/or about women, and that your error had serious repercussions (like a cataclysmic war) -- that's not easy for anyone. Nevertheless, I hope . . .
I've read where in a Wikipedia article on Jefferson that he wasn't quite sure about his moral stance on slavery and he was rather conflicted on it, hence his silence on the subject:
"During his presidency, Jefferson was for the most part publicly silent on the issue of slavery and emancipation, as the Congressional debate over slavery and its extension caused a dangerous north–south rift among the states, with talk of a northern confederacy in New England. The violent attacks on white slave owners during the Haitian Revolution due to injustices under slavery supported Jefferson's fears of a race war, increasing his reservations about promoting emancipation at that time. After numerous attempts and failures to bring about emancipation, Jefferson wrote privately in an 1805 letter to William A. Burwell, "I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us." That same year he also related this idea to George Logan, writing, "I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
He was silent on what he thought about slavery because in Virginia at that time it would have been political suicide to come out and admit he had children with Sally and say what he thought about it.
I found this article about the Foundation. You're mentioned in it, as one of those who rattled the family tree:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello_Association
Thanks, Mary. Not the whole story, but close enough.
Glad to see this column again—a classic. One of your best, Lucian!
A story so beautifully expressed and a remarkable slice of history. Sad too that some essentially blood descendants of Jefferson were ashamed of other blood relatives to the degree that they wanted them excluded from family gatherings and indeed from their entire family history. As was also mentioned; even several state legislatures are currently writing laws to disallow the teaching of a big part of our history -- the buying and selling of human beings and that the practice was as common as the buying and selling of domestic animals. (Except that for the most part the animals were treated better). Also what about the post slavery era? The inhuman treatment and discrimination of these now free people didn’t suddenly end. Will our children not be taught about the period when it was commonplace for out of control mobs to deny justice to accused people, often pulling them out of jails and hanging them from trees? Will the period of segregation be stricken from the history books as well as the struggle for the right to vote, and even up to the present day; continued discrimination and voter discrimination?
The wholesale slaughter of Native Americans seems to have been omitted entirely in all this. They have been completely forgotten as have certain immigrant groups who are quietly working hard without complaint to better their lot. Lastly, as has been recently noted, certain holders of political office have already re-written history regarding the savage assault on our Capitol building where brave defenders lost life and limb. Will future history books describe that day as a normal tourist day?
I’m not sure what this “theory” is about or if it makes any difference at this point: the GOPigs are bigots, fascists, crooks, traitors—you name it, they’ve demonstrated it. Doesn’t “white Supremacist” and “neo nazi” say it all? This so-called “critical race theory” sounds like a red herring designed to whip up the wing nuts— a meme put out by Cambridge Analytica or The GRU aiming to increase division. Somehow, this country needs to address the disinformation directly, starting with Cambridge Analytica. I just don’t know why the Mercers, wanted for tax evasion, are allowed to operate Cambridge Analytica at will from Great Britain.
Your original posting, and as reposted, dovetail exactly with the New York Times' Book Review for a new, and highly relevant title, "How the Word Is Passed. A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America, by Clint Smith (Little, Brown and Company) $29 (NYT: "Reckoning With Reckoning, How we memorialize our slavery past.", page 13). Along with reliving the trauma, we need to deal with the shame and the embarrassment, not only of our recent past, but with the present day, engaged in by people who, by any objective standard, ought to know better than to try to propagate these myths, along with a happy face narrative that bears no resemblance to the truth: historical tours feature docents will continue to spread the vicious and pernicious falsehoods that have repeatedly been shown to be the bedrock of the post-Civil War mindset, both within the South, and by others elsewhere in our country, and indeed, in the world beyond our borders. The following passage I am quoting from the review makes the point:
"The result is a tour of tours and a reckoning with reckonings, which sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America's historical conscience. The book's standout quality is the range and sincerity of its encounters. Smith walks with tourists, guides, teachers, scholars, ex-convicts, local historians and heritage zealots, managing to catch nearly everyone in a moment of unscripted candor. His ease with strangers is charmingly apparent. After a tour at Monticello focused on Jefferson slaveholding, one conservative Southerner says, "This really took the shine of the guy." In the chapel of Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, which honors each rebel state with a Tiffany stained-glass memorial, a nervous docent admits that "we try and fall back on the beauty of the window" whenever the topic of slavery arises. Later, Smith attends a Memorial Day event at the cemetery organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, where a member earnestly tries to convince him that Black men served as officers in the Confederacy."
We learn further on that the myth of Black Confederate officers originated in the 1970s, as part of a propaganda campaign to safeguard the Sons of Confederate Veterans' reputation. Really! It begs the question whose reputation is at risk; certainly not the reputations of the Confederate veterans themselves. They certainly were not shy about their intense and hateful opinions about Blacks, enslaved or otherwise. We see the same sort of thing going on in Poland, and Hungary, and certain parts of Germany, where the descendants and admirers of the Waffen SS well prefer not to discuss the details of the Holocaust, but who are more than capable (and enthusiastic) about detailing their forebears' heroic struggles against the Red Army.
Whether it is accepting the human cost of slavery in the United States, or acknowledging the systematic murder of millions in the death camps of the Holocaust, it is always the same, highly selective memories that prefer not to dwell on some of the worst behavior in recorded history, even when they are presented with the bloodstained receipts of what they had done. We cannot change the racial attitudes of the polls, the Balts, the Ukrainians, or the Russians; they are who they are, and their bloodstained histories attest to that. We are not responsible for them, but we certainly are responsible for the narrative that we allow the reprobates of our history to tell, and we certainly are responsible for our own self-censorship when it comes to tolerating that kind of behavior in the interests of not stirring up any more trouble than we already we have. We certainly outnumber them, even as under current circumstances, we cannot outvote them in Congress, specifically in the Senate. These people have pushed the envelope so far into the realm of hyperbolic fantasy that we cannot in good conscience, and to save our own sanity, accept the false narratives that they continue to propagate because somebody might feel bad that they and their kith and kin over the past one and two-thirds centuries have engaged in serial misbehavior, and whose only excuse has been to maintain social and political power. The further they fall behind in demographics, as the numbers of them shrink, the more strident and belligerent they have become. It used to be that this was nobody else's business; this is all about state's rights; that Blacks and other minorities of color were intrinsically not fit to enjoy the benefits and to bear the burdens of American citizenship, and so on ad nauseam.
One way we deal with this is to be honest about it ourselves. As I mentioned in a previous posting, the fundamental facts of our national history that enable sociologists and philosophers to conjure up something they call 'Critical Race Theory' frequently abbreviated as CRT, is simply to acknowledge that which we overwhelmingly know to be true. We created a society in which black people were essentially and expressly left out. We did not start to do it out of malice, although that became a part of it at the behest of our Southern brethren, who reveled in the thought that we could be as equally corrupted as they were, but the econometric conditions under which we live here, and which we pursue our careers, and grow our businesses, make is risk aversive to anything that might cost us some money for doing the right and proper thing. As the saying goes, 'No good deed goes unpunished'. Nonetheless, the problem never goes away, and it gets more exacerbated the harder we try to ignore it. The harder we try to ignore the problem, the more serious it gets, with no resolution possible without negotiation and some form of reconciliation. The 'politics of feeling good' is like taking opioids, and with a good chance of killing yourself if you do not clean yourself up. We all know something about that, and it is not at all surprising that many of the people addicted to opioids come from the same Southern culture that spawned Trumpism and race hatred.
So we settled into an uncomfortable gray area in which we are content to engage in a feckless tokenism, that hurts us but does not help anybody else. Neither can we be seen as good Samaritans, treating our obligations to justice and equity as some sort of charitable giving. Human nature is not like that, and nobody wants to be seen as an object of sympathy or guilt. Kids growing up in tough neighborhoods need to know how to hold their own against bullies, and sometimes it takes bruised knuckles and bloody noses to make the point. But sometimes, the bullies happen to be our friends and family members too, and we need to get them to back off. There is no 'kiss and make up' if the underlying problem goes unresolved. Frequently, it does take an intervention, coupled with serious and measurable consequences, to get some people to change their ways. This is obviously one of those occasions.
So what do we do about these latter-day Uriah Heaps, these unctuous, and ever-so-earnest docents who lie through their teeth about that which they know to be completely untrue. Where is it written that these people are rightfully dishonest and dishonorable, simply because they wanted whenever they are peddling to be true. We are now stuck with the fact that fully one-third of the American electorate believes in the Trumpian nonsense that he won the 2020 election, despite massive efforts to come up with persuasive evidence have failed to convince anyone outside of their social circles that the allegations are true. How do we deal with, and maintain friendships with, people who are addicted to this delusional fakery? This is very hard, because some of these people are highly congenial, but they have a blind spot that is as large as a solar eclipse.
One way might be, to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission informally, sponsored by, and paid for, our public and private universities, public and private foundations, and its many corporate sponsors as we can get to participate in that effort. We do not need a commission that has the government's own imprimatur. Governmental participation in such an effort would be deemed essential to validate the outcome, but government need not be the organizing force around it, and if Trump Republicans refused to participate, that is on them. But we do need to be honest with ourselves; and those who will pay for and sponsor the sort of effort need to be honest as well. Shared pain is easier to endure than directed pain, and we do need an honest accounting.
I've said this before, and I'm very confident I'll say it again and again, but God bless you, Lucian Truscott IV.
Shared!
Thanks so much for re-posting this. I circulated the original on Facebook and via email, and I've kept it around so I can bring it up as needed. Fwiw, as an editor and writer, I'm obsessed with proper credit to authors, so what I share is the link or the whole email. The speed with which author's and, often, publisher's names come adrift from copy on social media drives me nuts.
The US Fifth Army in 1945 under the leadership of your grandfather is among the most tangible evidence we have that the dream of liberty for all is a living, breathing aspiration that includes every human of every race, color, religion, and gender. Courage to stand up to the haters, to face the challenges of creating a more just world through cooperation rather than exclusion, is the only viable building block of a successful American future.
The man who called you must have had an orgasm when Trump started his birther nonsense...one of the most effective enrollment schemes in history.
Thanks for sharing again cousin...
So, you and Shannon are also cousins. Yeah!
Yes, Shannon's mom is my first cousin.
I could apply many adjectives to this wonderful piece: courageous, heartbreaking, searing, among them. The truth hurts, but it will set us free. Thank you Lucian Truscott for this. It reminds me of another unflinchingly honest treatment of this subject: “Slaves in the Family” by Edward Ball. It was published in 1998 and therefore was ahead of its time in its exposure of the truth that we are all part of one human family — a fact we ignore or deny at our peril.