Debating Protests, Safe Spaces, Jefferson

May I be forgiven for posting from the National Review. The article was a nice gloss on some of the logic operating...
Posted by Laura Bilhimer on Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Part II of "We're Worried About Thomas Jefferson Again, or Why Progressive Social Justice Agendas Should Not Always Be Taken Seriously"

I continued the post as follows:

Gordon Wood says it best: "Everyone, it seems, sees America in Jefferson. So the shame and guilt that Jefferson must have suffered from his involvement in slavery and racial mixing best represent the shame and guilt that white Americans feel in their tortured relations with blacks….Jefferson for this present generation has become the problem. The Jefferson that emerges out of much recent scholarship therefore resembles the America many critics have visualized in the past four decades: self-righteous, guilt-ridden, racist, doctrinaire, and filled with liberal pieties that under stress are easily sacrificed." ("Revolutionary Characters", p97) 

And then I noticed the Online Petition from U Missouri:

Sloppy, sloppy handling of history: https://www.change.org/.../the-university-of-missouri...
 They quote scholarship on Sally Hemings without ever including Sally's closest, most careful scholar Annette Gordon-Reed. Gordon-Reed is African American Pulizer Prize winning historian of great reputation. They just casually drop in "This was a man that raped 16 year old Sally Hemings, a young innocent house slave (Burstein, 2005)." Burstein is a guy who wrote a book with the titilating title of "Death and Desire at Monticello." Great. No one knows or will ever know the nature of the relationship between Sally and TJ. She could have stayed in France, but came back to Virginia with him in 1789 after earning wages and living as a free woman for about two years. We'll never be sure, but these people seem comfortable using Sally for their argument without real responsibility. 

And I went on because at this point I was all wound up:

Our first clue as to the intellectual seriousness of the petition is the hyperbolic first sentence: "The need to project a progressive environment is just as important as food and shelter to survive." NO, not quite. I have to eat before I care about Foucault and structures of power. Let me be clear that I agree college campuses are places where a continual questioning of many things should take place: our assumptions, our history--really, how we see ourselves. The whole point of a liberal arts education is to realize that how you think you see the world is not merely "how it is" but that that perspective is shaped by culture and history among various other factors. But to breezily assert that a statue of Jefferson is sending out micro-aggressions of nothing other than hypocrisy, racism and sexism--this is intellectual thuggery at its worse, especially when it poses as the enlightened assertion of Social Justice. Talk about hypocrisy. Everyone has the right to an opinion. We've been calling out TJ for slavery for as long as he's been dead, as we should. But there are informed opinions and there are opinions informed by breeze-reading, intellectual editorializing, and cultural bandwagoning. 

My mentor outside the English department at KU commented that she was "proud" of me. Which would move me to tears had I some scotch on hand. Besides the many classes I took with the inimitable Dr. Valk, the two seachanges of my college education were Western Civ II and Islam in Europe--both with Dr. Urie. Her classes were oases of intellectual diversity and independent thinking.

I'm trying to--right now--write a term paper on Jefferson, and a lot of this stuff about the recent protests and intellectual coddling has made it into a footnote.

We're Worried About Thomas Jefferson Again, or Why Progressive Social Justice Agendas Should Not Always Be Taken Seriously

I would love to rant about how much of a joke salon.com is getting to be. That historian is cut out to be one of their...
Posted by Laura Bilhimer on Friday, December 4, 2015