We Destroyed the American Dream So We Wouldn't Have To Share It

I was born in 1951. My childhood coincided with the most prosperous time in history for the American middle class. Harry Truman was President. He had replaced FDR, the insanely popular socialistic President. Our fathers came back from the war and used the socialistic GI Bill to go to college for free or to get low-interest loans to start businesses under the G.I. bill. The corporate tax rate was a socialistic 50.8% in 1951, and the economy grew 7.5% that year. Truman was succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower, who ran on a platform that advocated civil rights, equal pay for women, free education, and collective bargaining. Ike was no FDR, but he built a socialistic national highway system, refused to raise taxes and raise defense spending, ended the Korean War, and warned us against the military industrial complex.

For the first twenty years of my life, America was booming, and the economic explosion favored—get this—the middle and lower classes. Between 1950 and 1960, the poorest fifth of all households saw the largest growth in median income. The richest 5% experienced the slowest growth. This was trickle up economics.

One out of three workers in America belonged to a union during the 1950s. The median household income in 1955 was $4,37. The average house cost $9,100—about twice the annual income. If you had a high-school education and could score a union manufacturing job, uou could buy a nice home and a car and support a family on a single paycheck. Yankee Doodle socialism had taken hold. Studies conducted in 1956 found that 65% of Americans believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country.

Then, in the 1960s, everything began to go terribly wrong. So wrong that now, sixty years later, the richest 1 percent of Americans own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

So what the fuck happened in the 1960s?

Racism, according to Heather McGhee, the author of the compelling new book “The Sum of Us.”

We think of economics as a highly complex science. We study macroeconomics and analyze microeconomics. We track manufacturing, trade balances and employment. We debate monetary policy and the influence of technology. Given the multitude of financial factors, McGhee’s notion that the past seventy years of American economics has been driven by a single social problem—one that is almost never even mentioned in economic discussions—seems insanely simplistic and naïve.

It’s not. “The Sum of Us” makes a compelling case for racism being the cause of the death of the American middle class, and then goes further and proves that this demise was a suicide and not a murder. For me, the book definitively answered a multitude of questions I have been asking myself for decades. It was also a lesson in humility, because those answers should have been brain-dead obvious to me all along.

The first sentence of McGee’s book is the biggest of those questions: “Why can’t we have nice things?”

Her answer is “because then black people would have nice things, too.”

When I was born, 90% of my fellow Americans were white, and McGhee shows how black Americans were frozen out of much of the socialistic programs that were vastly expanding the middle class. As she notes, “The New Deal era of the early 1930s—a period of tremendous expansion of government action to help Americans achieve financial security—was also a period in which the federal government cemented residential segregation through both practice and regulation.” Redlining kept black segregated, and home loans favored purchases in white neighborhood. McGhee quotes a typical assessment by the government’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation: “The neighborhood is graded D because of its concentration of negroes, but the section may improve to a third class area as this element is forced out.” During the 1950s, fewer than 2% of African Americans were able to get a home loan from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority. Most black Americans were not covered by the new minimum wage and overtime laws.

In the 1950s, African Americans began using the courts to fight for their fair share. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Two years later, the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ordered the desegregation of public schools. That same year, President Eisenhower sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The bill was watered down by Southern Democrats in Congress, but the act Eisenhower signed established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department and empowered federal prosecutors to obtain court injunctions against interference with the right to vote, and a federal Civil Rights Commission with authority to investigate discriminatory conditions and recommend corrective measures. In 1964, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which not only outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin but prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination.

These, then were the dramatic events that should have expanded the economic boom but instead brought it to a screeching halt—at least for most Americans. The changes that explain that chart.

Whites, especially in rural areas and in the South, responded not by embracing the right of African Americans to share in the American boom, but by declaring war on it. White America adopted what McGhee calls a “zero-sum hierarchy” that holds that when black Americans win, white Americans lose. That is what changed in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was the ascendancy of this suicidal mindset that ended America’s support of socialistic programs and started the long record of white America voting repeatedly against its own economic self interest.

The central metaphor in McGhee’s book is the public swimming pool. Between the start of the twentieth century and the onset of World War II, the public swimming pool was a symbol of civic pride. More than two thousand public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands, were constructed. Then, in 1958, a federal court ordered the desegregation of the zoo, the city parks, community center, and the swimming pool run by Montgomery, Alabama’s Parks Department. The city responded by dismantling the Parks Department. It closed every single public park and padlocked the doors of the community center. The zoo was shut down and the animals sold off, and the grand public pool was filled with cement.

Of course, these actions hurt the white citizens of Montgomery, too. “The Sum of Us” musters countless examples and statistics to show how racism has boomeranged on the white Americans who have worked so hard to institutionalize it. Once the courts held that social programs must be open to black Americans, white America turned against them, even though those programs benefited far more whites than blacks. Such programs were now defined racially. Ronald Reagan, a former FDR Democrat, criss-crossed the country telling stories of the black welfare queens who drove their Cadillacs to the supermarket to purchase vodka with food stamps.

This racialization, inspired by civil rights laws, quickly defined everything that had contributed to the growth of the white middle class.

Black voting had to be suppressed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Southern states adopted poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to suppress the black vote. Those tactics worked, but the numbers of white voters plummeted as well. McGhee shares the stunning statistic that in the presidential election of 1944, when national turnout averaged 69 percent, the states that had poll taxes managed a scant 18% turnout—of both black and white voters. The only states that allow people with felony convictions to vote while they’re in prison are Maine and Vermont, the two whitest states in the nation.

White workers began to abandon unions. As one white union member puts it, “The unions are for putting people on equal ground. Some people see that as a threat to their society. The view is, even without a union white people are in charge. I’m in charge.”

Healthcare was racialized. It is no accident that the right wing quickly named the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare.” “This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it,” railed Rush Limbaugh. Over a dozen red states have refused to expand Medicaid to its citizens, and most of those are white. Red states have been systematically closing rural hospitals instead of investing in healthcare. Texas has half the number of hospitals that it had in the 1960s despite a population increase of more than 15 million people.

White enrollment in private school spiked and whites began reducing funding for public schools, even though this hurt white children whose parents couldn’t afford private-school tuition. Today, eight of the ten states with the lowest funding for public education—Idaho, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—are controlled by the White Supremacist QAnon Party.

 “Everything we believe comes from the stories that we’ve been told,” McGhee reminds us. The curriculum had to be racialized, too. Racism has also denied white Americans our real history. A 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center report examined the curriculum standards in fifteen states and found that “none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery…or about how enslaved people’s labor was essential to the American economy.” Only 8 percent of high school students surveyed by the SPLC across the country knew that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War. Seventy-eight percent could not explain how slaveholders benefited from provisions in the Constitution.

The problematic history of white America has not only been suppressed, it has been cruelly and purposefully inverted in truly monstrous fashion. McGhee quotes this statement by Abraham Lateiner,  a white class activist: “Because white men have raped Black and Brown women with impunity for centuries, race comforts us with the lie that it’s Black masculinity that is defined by hypersexual predation. Because white people penned Black people in the ‘ghetto’ via redlining, race tells us that this ‘ghetto’ is an indictment of Black pathology. People of color weren’t the ones who created whiteness or violated my spirit with it. That was my own people. That is my peers. That is me, too.”

Support of the role of government has collapsed among white Americans over the past fifty years, and this in turn has led to falling support for taxes, a brain drain from the public sector, and a failure to add to (or even steward) the infrastructure investments of the early twentieth century. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Every new legal victory by African Americans increased the pathological sense of victimhood amongst whites. Today, white people are by far the whiniest and most paranoid American demographic. The majority of white moderates (53%) and white conservatives (69%) believe that African Americans take more than they give to society. Three out of four White Supremacist QAnon Party voters agree with the statement “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,” and 40% of that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

“The Sum of Us” reminds us that all this hard work to institutionalize racism has made whites the most segregated people in America. “Few people today understand the extent to which governments at every level forced Americans to live apart throughout our history.” McGhee writes. “Only Apartheid South Africa and Nazi German have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the cover of law.” In a survey taken during the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown an unarmed Black teenager, the majority of white Americans said they regularly came into contact with only “a few” African Americans, and a 2019 poll reported that 21 percent “seldom or never” interacted with any people of color at all.

White America has denied itself the humanizing freedom that comes from racial understanding. As Robin DiAngelo says in the book, “It’s actually liberating and transformative to start from the premise that of course I’m thoroughly conditioned into racism. And then I can stop defending, denying, explaining, minimizing and get to work actually applying what I profess to believe with the practice of my life.”

Heather McGhee ran the liberal Demos think tank before taking time off to write this book and one of the most compelling aspects of “The Sum of Us” is how well she documents how much racism has cost the American economy. “Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet,” she writes, “where you financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born.” According to a 2020 Citigroup report, not closing racial gaps for black twenty years ago has cost the U.S. GDP $16 trillion dollars.

I personally don’t believe that white America will ever willingly own up to its racism (we have proved that over and over and over again), and that real progress will only be made when whites are such a minority of the population that even the Electoral College, the Senate, and voter suppression will no longer be enough keep us in power. It saddens me that I probably won’t live to see that day.

McGhee is still optimistic. She points out how immigrants have made up nearly 85% of the population growth in rural America since 2010. (Lewiston, Maine, rebounded economically after an influx of Somali immigrants.) Several red states have voted to expand Medicaid despite rabid opposition from the White Supremacist QAnon Party. McGhee argues that there is a growing awareness that the racist zero-sum economic model has nothing more to offer and that there is a growing awareness that diversity is our greatest economic asset and that, thereby, the races truly do need each other. (She calls this the “solidarity dividence.”) McGhee understands that whites and people of color have to get on the same page before we can come out of our seventy-year tailspin, and she believes that a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) movement could play a huge role in bringing this about.

I truly hope that she is right.

Cancelling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jefferson

I had a Facebook exchange with an old friend the other day. My friend is liberal, free-thinking, and educated, and a good and spiritual person. He was decrying the “cancel culture,” which he defines as “erasing” people from history. He was fine with removing the Confederate statues, but he felt “differently” about historical figures like Washington and Jefferson, who he felt needed to be looked at “in the context of their time.”

Like millions of other Americans, he was saying that you can’t fairly apply today’s standards of beliefs or behavior to people who lived two hundred years ago. The implication is that today’s standard of beliefs or behavior didn’t exist then, or weren’t accepted to the degree they are now.

Well, okay, let’s take a look, then, at Thomas Jefferson. He is a good candidate because he made some remarkable contributions to this country and therefore could never be “erased” from our history, he had conflicted beliefls about racism (still the biggest issue in America), he had the opportunity to address racism in his country, he is a person who behaved monstrously, and because if we don’t understand a person as historically prominent as Jefferson for what he really was, we have no future as a nation.

We have forgotten how long humans have debated slavery. Movements to end the practice of slavery began in Europe in the thirteenth century, In 1315, Spain abolished slavery (inside its border, not in their colonies). The Catholic Church condemned slavery in the seventeenth century. The debate about slavery in American began with the first settlements. In 1732, Englishman James Oglethorpe founded the American colony of Georgia and abolishes slavery there. A strong abolitionist movement was founded in Canada during first half of the eighteenth century.

Let’s map Jefferson’s actions to what was going on in his world during his own lifetime.

Thomas Jefferson is born in Virginia in 1743.

The first court cases in the British Isles challenging the legality of slavery take place in Scotland in 1755 and 1769.

In 1772, Jefferson marries Martha Wayles. The following year, Martha’s father John Wayles dies, and Martha Jefferson inherits several of his slaves, including an infant named Sally Hemmings and her brother James. Under Virginia law, Sałly and James Hemmings are black slaves. But in fact, they are three-quarters European, because both their grandfather and their father were white men who had sexually abused slave concubines and had fathered children with them. Sally and James Hemmings are also the half-sister and half-brother of Jefferson’s wife Martha, as a man named John Wales is the father of all three of them, and this fact is not only known to all but explains why the two slaves move to Monticello with Martha,

The history of the attempts to end slavery in the American colonies begins with Thomas Jefferson in 1775. The slaveholder Jefferson includes strong anti-slavery language in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but other delegates remove it. What does survive is his famous preamble: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The American colonies proclaim themselves to be a sovereign nation, and the Revolutionary War against Great Britain begins.

In 1775 Jefferson’s close friend Benjamin Franklin helps found the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the first recognized organization for abolitionists in the United States.

In 1778, Vermont becomes the first state to abolish slavery.

In 1780, Pennsylvania abolishes slavery.

In 1782, Jefferson’s wife Martha dies.

In 1784, Jefferson is appointed as the American envoy to France. He moves to Paris with his household, which includes Sally Hemmings, who is twelve, and her brother James. While in Paris, Jefferson has both Sally and James tutored in French. James Hemmings, then 19, is also trained as a chef. Jefferson is heavily influenced by his experience living in France during the Age of Enlightenment. He becomes familiar with the writings of several French philosophers who are opposed to slavery and its moral and economical justifications, including Montesquieu and Brissot, who founds the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) to work for the abolition of slavery.

In 1787, the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade is formed in Great Britain, and abolitionism becomes an issue in the parliamentary campaign.

In 1789, Jefferson impregnates Sally Hemmings for the first time. She is 16, so this is legally child rape. Slavery is abolished in France that same year, which means that Sally and James Hemmings can petition the government for their freedom. Jefferson becomes concerned that Sally and James Hemmings will learn of this and writes about his apprehension to another American slaveholder who is a similar position. Jefferson pays Sally Hemmings a monthly wage while they are in Paris so as not to run afoul of the new prohibition of slavery in France. (According to an 1873 interview with Sally’s son Madison, Sally does learn about her right to sue for her freedom and considers doing just that.) In the end, she returns to Virginia with Jefferson after he promises her that he will free her children when they reach the age of twenty-one. Back in Virginia at his estate at Monticello, Jefferson has a passageway built between his room and hers so that he can visit her at night without disturbing the household.

In 1791, Jefferson accepts President Washington’s invitation to serve as Secretary of State. This means moving his household to Philadelphia, which is the nation’s capitol. But slavery is banned in Pennsylvania,, so, to stay on the good side of the law in that state, Jefferson has to pay Sally and James Hemings salaries during his stay there.

In 1793, Jefferson decides to return to Virginia. James Hemmings, Jefferson’s son and chef, is understandably reluctant to return to a slave state, so he negotiates a signed contract with Jefferson that includes this promise: “Having been at great expence [sic] in having James Hemings taught the art of cookery, desiring to befriend him, and to require from him as little in return as possible, I hereby do promise & declare, that if the said James should go with me to Monticello in the course of the ensuing winter, when I go to reside there myself, and shall there continue until he shall have taught such person as I shall place under him for that purpose to be a good cook, this previous condition being performed, he shall thereupon be made free by which he will gain freedom after training a replacement chef at Monticello to take his place.”

In 1792, France grants full citizenship free people of color in that country.

In 1796, during the nation’s first contested presidential election, the newspaper “Gazette of the United States” publishes an article accusing Jefferson of carrying on an affair with Sally Hemings.

In 1796, Jefferson grants his son James his freedom.

In 1801, Jefferson is elected President.

In 1802, political journalist James Callender writes in a Richmond newspaper that Jefferson has for many years "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves." "Her name is Sally," Callender writes, adding that Jefferson had "several children" by her. Callender's article spreads the story widely, it appears in political cartoons, and it is taken up by Jefferson's Federalist opponents and is published in many newspapers. Jefferson does not respond to the charge, publicly or privately..

1804 politica cartoon about Jefferson and Sally Hemmings

By 1804, all the northern states in the United States have abolished slavery.

In 1804, Haiti, a former French slave colony, declares its independence and abolishes slavery. This causes shockwaves in the United States. It energizes the abolitionist movement and creates a surge of fear about slave rebellions among American slaveowners.

In 1807, the British Parliament outlaws slavery in the British Empire. That same year President Jefferson signs the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which means that no new slaves can be imported to the United States. Jefferson has sired five children with Sally Hemmings by this time.

During the period between 1810 and 1826, slavery is abolished in most of Latin America.

During these years, Sally Hemings keeps her children close by while she works as a chambermaid and seamstress at Monticello. According to her son Madison, while young, the children "were permitted to stay about the 'great house', and only required to do such light work as going on errands.” At the age of 14, each of the children begin their training: the brothers as carpenters, and Harriet as a spinner and weaver. The three boys all learn to play the violin, which Jefferson himself plays. Several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believe that he is the father of Sally Hemings's children, and there are several contemporary accounts noting how closely Hemmings’ children resemble Jefferson.

In 1820 Jefferson privately supports the Missouri Compromise, believing that it may help end slavery.

In 1821, Jefferson writes this about slavery in his autobiography: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, then these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government."

In 1822, at the age of 24, Sally and Jefferson’s son Beverley leaves Monticello and heads north. Per Jefferson’s promise to Sally, he is not pursued. His sister Harriet Hemings is allowed to leave the next year, after turning 21. Beverley and Harriet, being seven-eighths European in ancestry, both enter white society in Washington, D.C., and each marries well. 

In an 1824 letter, Jefferson laments that the nation cannot find a practical way to abolish slavery, writing "But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

Jefferson dies bankrupt in 1826. George Washington freed all of his slaves in his will, but Jefferson’s will frees only the five male slaves from the extended Hemmings family, including his sons Madison and Eston. Jefferson’s slaves and and other property are sold to pay off his debts.

Sally Hemings is not granted her freedom in Jefferson’s will. She is withheld from auction and allowed to leave Monticello by Jefferson's daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph—who is also Sally’s niece. Hemings lives free in Virginia with her sons Madison and Eston in nearby Charlottesville for the next nine years until she dies in 1835.

Both Madison and Eston Hemmings marry feee women of color in Charlottesville. After their mother's death, they and their families move to Ohio, where they are listed as “mulattos” in census records. Even though he is legally a free person, Eston Hemings and his family move to Madison, Wisconsin, to be farther away from slave catchers. He lives as a white man from that time on, changes his name to Eston H. Jefferson, and becomes a professional musician and bandleader.

Madison Hemings' family are the only Hemings descendants who continue to identify with the black community. Over time, some of their descendants pass into the white community, while others continue to identify as blacks.

After Jefferson’s death, his white family begins vigorously denying the allegations about Sally Hemmings. Jefferson’s grandson claims in the 1850s that the father of Sally’s children was Peter Carr, Jefferson’s nephew, and this story becomes the accepted history.

In 1873, Madison Hemming is interviewed by an Ohio newspaper and states that Thomas Jefferson was his father. "I was named Madison by the wife of James Madison, who was afterwards President of the United States,” Madison states. “Mrs. Madison  happened to be at Monticello at the time of my birth, and begged privilege of naming me, promising my mother a fine present for the honor. She consented, and Mrs. Madison dubbed me by the name I now acknowledge, but like many promises of white folks to the slaves she never gave my mother anything.” Eston Hemmings also tells interviewers that Jefferson was his father.

For the next 150 years historians deny Jefferson’s paternity.

This begins to change with the publication of Annette Gordon-Reed’s book “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” that analyzed the historiography of the controversy.

In 1998 a DNA analysis shows no match between Peter Carr’s descendants and Sally Hemmings’ descendants, but the test do show a match between Thomas Jefferson’s descendants and a descendant of Eston Hemmings.

In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, conducts an independent review that concludes that Jefferson was probably the father of all of Sally Hemmings’ children, but other Jefferson descendants continue to resist this finding, with some of them fingering Jefferson’s brother Randolph as the father.

So what is the “context” by which we should appropriately judge Jefferson?

Did Thomas Jefferson make enormous contributions to American history? Absolutely. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, a document that has inspired millions, served as envoy to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president. He engineered the Louisiana Purchase and financed the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Did he live in a Virginia society that legalized slavery and turned a blind eye to the abuse of slaves as sexual concubines? Yes.

Was Jefferson a racist? Obviously, he was much worse than that.

Did he live in a world that unquestioningly accepted slavery? No. The debate about the abolition of slavery began in Europe in the fourteenth century. It was condemned by Catholic Popes. During Jefferson’s lifetime it was outlawed in most of Europe, including France, a country that Jefferson greatly admired, and in most of the United States. Jefferson was a Southerner, yes, but he was also an Anamerican—and a well-traveled, learned one to boot. Many of Jefferson’s friends, such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and John Adams, were committed abolitionists. Jefferson himself believed that slavery was wrong, but, unlike Washington, he did not free his slaves (except for his own slave children) upon his death.

Were these base actions of Jefferson’s rare and unusual—out of character? Hardly. Owning slaves and sexually abusing them was a part of Jefferson’s daily existence for most of his adult life.

Did Jefferson’s sordid personal life have an impact on his politics—specifically, his views on race? Of course. He was unable to square the circle of his racism and his interracial family, and this is reflected in his inconsistent and hypocritical views on race and his politics.

Did Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings lead him to commit acts that were considered monstrous during his life? Yes. Jefferson’s sexual appetite led him to rape a child who was his wife’s half sister, father six children out of wedlock, keep those children as his own household slaves during his lifetime, use the prospect of freeing his slave children as a negotiating tool to keep his slave concubine from leaving him, maintain a fiction of paying his own slave children wages so as not to run afoul of the law, and to not free the mother of his six children even after he died. These were all horrific acts (if not uncommon ones) even according the morality of the time, and the fact that their existence was used against him politically, and then denied for 150 years to protect his reputation, is proof of that such acts were far from acceptable in American society.

Is there really any kind of historical “context” that could ameliorate or soften Jefferson’s horrific acts? No. Jefferson’s long catalogue of behavior agalinst slaves, many of whom where his own children, were never officially accepted as legitimate behavior in early America.

Okay, so Jefferson was both an illustrious champion of freedom AND a loathsome scoundrel. So what?

It’s important to accept trhe historical reality of both sides of Jefferson because his personal duality is a perfect mirror of the history of the United States, which is both revolutionary and despicable. THIS is the discussion millions of us are trying at long last to have in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. If blacks and whites can’t talk about the real Thomas Jefferson, we’re sunk.

U.S, Senator Tom Cotton, who has railed against “cancel culture,” has introduced the Saving of American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who oversaw the 1619 Project, describes it this way:

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

In other words, the 1619 Project is focused on exposing just the kind of monstrous schizophrenia about race that Jefferson embodied. (Just yesterday, Cotton called slavery “a necessary evil” in the history of the United States. He only got the second half right. )

In an interview in 2000, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed said of the change in historical scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings: "Symbolically, it's tremendously important for people ... as a way of inclusion. Nathan Huggins said that the Sally Hemings story was a way of establishing black people's birthright to America."

Having this conversation is not “cancel culture.” No one will ever erase Thomas Jefferson from American history, whether you believe that there should be statues of Jefferson or monuments to him or not. The outraged claims of “cancel culture” are just the latest in a cursed series of dodges that we Americans have used for over four hundred years to avoid having a real conversation or historical accounting of it. And until we have this conversation, there is no possible way forward for us.

Fighting the Real Terrorists

There is no doubt about it.

Domestic terrorism committed by radical-Christian white supremacists is the biggest threat to our national security, and it is increasing at an alarming rate.

The President of the United States is the leader of a homegrown, fascist movement based on maintaining white and Christian supremacy that we can call Trumpism.

The President of the United States is a professional racist whose actions are influenced by his desire to win and maintain the political support of radical-Christian white supremacists.

The President of the United States uses his bully pulpit to foment racial hatred, spread racist conspiracy theories, and encourage violence against immigrants, non-Christians, people of color, his political enemies, journalists, media personalities, and health-care providers.

The President of the United States has created a political and legal environment that encourages domestic terrorism, emboldens and protects domestic terrorists, and makes American citizens less safe.

The President of the United States tolerates domestic terrorism because he leverages it for his own political advantage.

Trumpism is bigger than Donald Trump and will exist as a political force after the end of his political career.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet—including the Justice Department—have committed themselves to realizing fascist and racist goals and programs of Trumpism.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet have turned against our Constitutional system and jeopardized national security in order to realize Trumpism.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet are implementing a systematic program designed to suppress the votes of American minorities and divide the Jewish vote.

The Republican Party and the current Cabinet are implementing a systematic program designed to end legal immigration into this country by people of color.

The United States Supreme Court now has a conservative majority that seems poised to make Trumpist programs the supreme law of the land.

The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded its task force on domestic terrorism, eliminated funding for programs to prevent domestic terrorism, and removed radical-Christian white-supremacist groups from its terrorism watch lists.

Fox News, the most popular “news” network in America, most particularly the program hosted by Tucker Carlson, regularly promotes the “Great Replacement” and “White Genocide” racist conspiracy theory used as justification by many domestic terrorists in their personal manifestos.

Evangelical Christianity is a key wing of Trumpism. American evangelical Christian organizations have supported racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and white-supremacist teachings since the Civil War and are currently engaged in blatant efforts to promote and fund Trumpist political candidates, despite laws to the contrary.

The President of the United States, the Republican Party, and the Trumpist National Rifle Agency oppose any restrictions on assault rifles and ultra-lethal ammunition, the tools of the trade for domestic terrorists.

One other fact: The majority of Americans do not support institutional, legalized racism.

So how did we end up here? Because we let it happen.

How do we fight racism and domestic terrorism in this country? By actively fighting it. By making racism and anti-Semitism loathsome again. By showing, through our actions, words and physical presence, that we are, indisputably, the majority.

We defeat Trump, because by defeating him we remove the loudest voice for white supremacy, end his power to implement racist policies, and destroy the myth of Trumpism’s invincibility.

We leverage Trump-resistance organizations and platforms like Indivisible to mobilize against racism, anti-Semitism, and white-supremacist groups.

We call out racism, anti-Semitism and hate whenever we experience it in our daily lives. We don’t let fear and intimidation keep us silent. Apathy equals acceptance. Hate increases when the reaction to it is silence.

We show up when white supremacists hold rallies in our community and we shout them down, marginalize them, and let them know they are not welcome.

We show solidarity and support for the victims of racism, anti-Semitism, and domestic terrorism.

We pressure the news media to call racism for what it is. It’s not “racially insensitive.” It’s racist.

We pressure the government to admit that domestic terrorism is our biggest threat and to keep us safe from it.

We pressure the government to end mass incarceration of immigrants and citizens of color by fighting for criminal justice reform.

We pressure the government and law enforcement to ensure that hate crimes are prosecuted and the perpetrators punished with appropriate jail sentences.

We work with our community law enforcement agencies to fund more training for police.

We condemn religious leaders who embrace racism and anti-Semitism. If our own church supports such ideologies, we find another church.

We support voter registration efforts in our community.

We help make the government look like our citizenry by voting for qualified candidates of color.

We contribute to groups like the ACLU that fight racist government actions and laws in court and that file lawsuits against white supremacists to imprison and bankrupt them.

We work to remove all Confederate monuments and make Juneteenth a national holiday.