Our Declaration of Independence says we’re endowed by our Creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The identity of our nation is colored (bad pun, sorry) by this ideal of “unalienable” human rights.
Regardless of what color your skin or whether you’re rich or poor, your rights are protected in the United States of America, thanks in part to words penned into our Declaration of Independence by former slave-owner Thomas Jefferson. As the owner of over 600 slaves during the course of his lifetime, our Tom is only a “former” slaveowner now because he’s dead.
Founding Father
This distinguished founding father of our country stood a strapping 6’2” tall, which was “a good bit over six inches taller than the average male” of his time, which is a shame. Basketball wasn’t invented until 65 years after Jefferson died, but without question, our redheaded 3rd President would have had a physical advantage on the basketball court, even over our current President Barack Obama, who only stands 6’1”.
Still, it makes you wonder whether Jefferson, a Virginia planter who lived ostentatiously, would have been a player or a trader. More to the point, if alive today, would Thomas Jefferson own a team in the NBA? What qualifications would his players have to meet to be on his team?
After recent remarks by Donald Sterling, regarded almost unanimously as racist, one player, J.J. Redick cited the example of “white center Chris Kaman, who [was] traded to the New Orleans Hornets in 2011” to reveal why he felt discriminated against because he was white.
Employees or Property?
When Sterling’s girlfriend reminded him during a taped phone call that every player on his team was black, Donald Sterling said the following:
I support (black players) and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? … Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?
Donald Sterling looks at himself as a “benefactor of actual players” rather than their employer. In other words, he “gives” the members of his team money and expensive gifts, rather than seeing their salaries as something they earn. If it doesn’t point directly to slave owners, then it does to the peon camps where “freed” slaves were often recaptured and forced to purchase their own food and clothing from their bosses at an inflated price, keeping them indebted to the company.
This attitude may seem shocking, but it is not in the least unprecedented. Thomas Jefferson himself was once quoted as having said:
Brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, [blacks] are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young. In the mean time they are pests in society by their idleness, and the depredations to which this leads them.
Thomas Jefferson believed that freed slaves should be returned to Africa and not permitted to intermarry with whites. Citing “the real distinctions which nature has made” Jefferson believed that Blacks and whites would eventually try to exterminate each other. He believed, among other things, that “Blacks lacked basic human emotion” and that “Blacks’ ability to reason was much inferior to that of whites’.”
Though he was three times her age, Thomas Jefferson, the man who openly expressed his belief that blacks and whites should not intermarry, reportedly fathered six children with Sally Hemings, his slave-mistress, who remained his companion until his death nearly 40 years later. To further complicate matters, Sally and Martha, Jefferson’s first wife, were half-sisters, their father being John Wayles, a white attorney. Sally’s mother, a slave concubine, became Jefferson’s property when his father-in-law passed away, nine years prior to the death of his first wife, Martha. The children Jefferson conceived with Sally were three-quarters white and were freed after Jefferson’s death.
In her online article Sally Hemings from the Perspective of Women’s History: Paternity and Patriarchal Power, Jone Johnson Lewis writes:
A ‘women’s history’ perspective on Sally Hemings’ relationship to Thomas Jefferson would have us look at questions relating to the different roles men and women were expected to occupy. In this particular situation, where Sally Hemings was a slave of mixed racial heritage, a more complete picture of the ‘truth’ of the situation also requires looking at the ways in which race and slavery were part of the context of their relationship.
Wife and Family as Property
Yet another similarity exists in the wealthy white male selecting a mixed-race female for companionship. It wasn’t so long ago that a white woman was considered the property of her husband once married, as were their children; an interracial companionship today serves to reinforce a gender hierarchy of simpler times, when it was socially acceptable for a man to beat his wife as though she were a slave.
In the person of James Callender, our new nation had its own Andrew Breitbart. Callender, who had ended the political careers of both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, blackmailed Jefferson and eventually publicized the scandal of his mixed-race progeny, in much the same way Donald Sterling’s relationship with V Stiviano caused an outcry when he recently complained that she was associating with Black people and his remarks were recorded and revealed to the American public.
These attitudes toward Blacks and mixed-race individuals are shocking, but ingrained in an older generation “marinated in racism,” as Oprah Winfrey recently remarked in an interview.
If Donald Sterling is found unworthy to own a basketball team, then Thomas Jefferson certainly could not be President in today’s America. Others will argue that “we the people of the United States” were not ready for the Black President we elected in 2008. But, over and over, we are forced to realize there is no such thing as “a nation ready for social change.”
No one can be all bad. Sometimes I wonder if my dad was a good guy those times in his life when he wasn’t a rapist. Did he ever have children? Did he love the ones he knew about? It feels good to talk to black men. I like it when they smile at me and tell me I got swag. I like to snuggle. I’m a cuddle toy, too, not just a bad girl.
OlivierCrafting 