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| Jefferson's Monticello |
By Sikivu Hutchinson
Sally Hemings, the black
female slave who was raped and forced to bear children by third American president
Thomas Jefferson, died in Charlottesville.
At his last press conference in the
aftermath of white terrorist violence in Charlottesville, President Trump sarcastically
noted that, since Jefferson and Washington owned slaves, their monuments, like
those of white Confederates, could be next in line for removal. In his repeated failure to unequivocally blame white nationalists for the bloodshed and murder in Charlottesville, Trump inadvertently
highlighted the problem of fixating on Confederate monuments in a vacuum. Statesman racists like Washington, Jefferson
and other “founding fathers”, are rarely viewed through the same withering
public lens as Confederate standard bearers, even though they were at the
forefront of enshrining white supremacist policies that codified the
hypocritical lie of American democracy.
In 1791, shortly after the publication
of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of
Virginia, black scientist Benjamin Banneker wrote a letter rebuking
Jefferson for his white
supremacist views on African Americans:
[B]ut sir how pitiable is it to reflect, that
although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of
mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and
privileges which He had conferred upon them, that you should at the same time
counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part
of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should
at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you
professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.
As Christopher Deaton notes in a recent article
about Banneker’s letter, “Jefferson built Monticello
into a machine. He came to realize the birth of black children on his property
was providing him a 4-percent annual profit.”
He presided over a mini-manufacturing hub, fed his white family on the
profits of a nailery worked by black boy slaves the same age as young Baron
Trump, and viewed slaving as the most profitable “investment
strategy” a good businessman could pursue.
Generations of Hemings’ family worked at Jefferson’s plantation estate
and kept its enterprises running. As a Virginia
state legislator, Jefferson “blocked
consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state”.
In mainstream America, the furor over
white supremacy and organized white supremacists has obscured how the U.S.
profits from the institutionalization of white supremacy every second of every
minute, hour and day. Jefferson and company made their vast personal fortunes and
national reputations on the back of slave labor. They laid the foundation for a Western empire
which is still powered by the exploitation of low wage black labor and bondage;
from service industries to prisons. In
the popular imagination, Jefferson’s predatory history has often been spun as a
revisionist comment on complicated family lineages and the cultural intrigue of
DNA results (for example, the genealogy company Ancestry DNA recently featured an ad with Douglas Banks,
one of Jefferson’s black descendants, expressing pride about his presidential
heritage and how he got his nose from his famous white ancestor. Banks fails to specifically name Sally
Hemings).
Despite historical efforts to parse and nuance his “relationship”
with Hemings—who was only fourteen years old when he famously took her with him
to Paris—school children force fed the image of Jefferson the American visionary
should be taught that he was a predator slave master whose vast wealth was
forged in black blood. As African
American historian Annette
Gordon Reed (author of landmark scholarship on Hemings/Jefferson) has argued,
Jefferson’s status as a kind of tortured philosopher planter, rather than a
slave master, was crucial to shaping romanticized notions about his
statesmanship. Echoing this criticism, a
Chicago pastor has
called for Mayor Rahm Emanuel to rename public parks named after Jefferson
and Washington. And why not? Taking down
Confederate statues without a willingness to engage the full legacy of slavery,
and the ways in which so-called founding fathers enforced racial terrorism, is merely
a stopgap.
Indeed, conservative and centrist
commentators keep telling us that the violence in Charlottesville was not
representative of the “American values” slain protestor Heather Heyer was
fighting for. The domestic terrorism of unhinged
white supremacists, fueled by bloodthirsty screeds on the Daily Stormer, is an embarrassment
to the illusion of American exceptionalism perpetuated by the Bushes, the Joint
Chiefs, and the business titans who rushed to decry Trump’s “moral
equivalencies” but still cosign his racist neoliberal imperialist policies. Calling
out violent troglodytes is a necessary smokescreen for these corporate
multinational and military white supremacists. As Jefferson’s spiritual heirs,
their brand of white supremacy is represented in the very institutions which perpetuate
global capitalist terror and inequality in finance, jobs, housing, education,
military deployments and drone warfare.
As Virginia
abolitionist Moncure Conway acidly commented
about the divide between Jefferson’s public persona and his deeds, “Never did a
man achieve more fame for what he did not do.” Though there is no
Charlottesville monument commemorating Sally
Hemings, her life and influence stand as powerful testaments to the real American
values that Jefferson embodied.
