Netflix 11
About 35 minutes in, we hear a discussion of issues surrounding slavery which are central to the race-versus-class debate. It begins with a vilification of Thomas Jefferson.
Dr. Stephanie E Jones-Rogers asks, "You really want me to talk about Thomas Jefferson?...there are few people I despise more."
That is telling. "Despise" is an emotional word, so "Dr." Jones-Rogers abandons any pretense to scholarly objectivity, rather, she is going to tell us just how she feels. And that, of course, is of zero analytical value.
Kendi follows calling him "Thomas 'Contradiction' Jefferson." Then Lynae Vanee says that "Thomas Jefferson was full of shit."
These comments betray an immensity of superficiality. They are wholly negative in regard to a man who has many accomplishments to his credit. While I don't wish to valorize Jefferson, or to minimize his failures, here only his vices are discussed, and with no small amount of presentist hauteur and racial condescension. He does not get anything like a fair hearing in Stamped, he is subjected to ridicule by each and every commentator. Nothing good is said of him--nothing. No effort at balance is hinted let alone attempted. He is the Great White Bogeyman incarnate. Black womanhood has rendered its judgement, nothing more need be said.
Stamped's depiction is not of a real human being, but a one-dimensional, racist stereotype, nor is it a scholarly examination of his zeitgeist and his relation to it. It's a hatchet job conducted by people who admittedly despise him.
Kendi says Jefferson was full of contradictions, and Vanee that he was full of shit. So, then, who is correct, Kendi or Vanee? I will briefly offer an opinion below, but I regard these criticisms as embarrassingly facile and self-important, bespeaking dishonesty or intellectual incapacity--or both.
It may be folly to identify a single statement as the greatest observation ever made, but in my intellectual development there has been one which has been the most bountiful, Antonio Gramsci:
"The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory."
Bravo, Antonio, brilliant. I would humbly add that it is the only starting point. It is the task of those who wish to divine, who wish to understand, to learn how we have arrived at this geo-political moment and what we may be able to do about its injustices. That sacred task is to identify those traces and to begin to construct that inventory. It is to understand and embrace that our time, our era, is a snapshot, a snapshot of a stage in a process, one which began long before our birth and will continue long after we are gone, and one in which we occupy no special place. We are just the latest moment, not an apex. We have no rightful claim to superiority over our predecessors.
Of all sectarian vices perhaps presentism is the worst as it can contain all the others. It is the job of all of us who envision a better world to investigate the past, not to hold it in contempt. Every one of us is a product of socio-historical forces to date. That is the beginning of honest inquiry, and, perhaps, one's own intellectual growth.
The question isn't in what ways Jefferson held to the well-worn intellectual paths and practices of his time, in what ways he, like his contemporaries in Africa and like the Black slave owners in the US, accepted slavery and the sexual license which it afforded. What's important about Jefferson is the extent to which he was able to liberate himself from it, to see through it. Was it sufficient? No. Nevertheless, he is one of the figures pushing in the right direction. That he wasn't strong enough personally or politically to live up to the ideals he espoused, invalidates neither him nor those ideals. He campaigned for a radical form of democracy, but then became the president of that form of government he had proclaimed insufficiently democratic, was that a Kendian contradiction or an Vanee example of his disingenuity? Or was it a realistic assessment of what was possible in the historical moment? I don't know, of course, but Jefferson, to his credit, tried to identify those Gramscian traces and grappled with them. He tried to create that inventory, which is much more than can be said for Kendi and Vanee. There just aren't that many Tolstoys in this world, and Jefferson wasn't one of them, but he is not the brute portrayed in Stamped.
Jefferson devised a polity which nowadays would be called anarcho-communism. He called it "Ward Democracy." It's dated, not consonant with modern industrialism. Nevertheless, it was ahead of its time, and in it he envisioned full Black participation and on an equal footing. Was that implementable in his time? No, so does this constitute a contradiction or a deception?
Jefferson's ethnographical/linguistic studies of indigenous America reveal a brilliantly inquisitive mind. He is several orders of magnitude more intelligent than his critics in Stamped. I've only scratched their surface, but Jefferson emerges as a neutral, honest, circumspect assembler of information, not a villain looking for signs of racial inferiority. I'm sure that Vanee and co. could find something in them to justify their hatred of Jefferson, but what I read is a keen-eyed, open-minded search for knowledge from a man with a deep-seated appreciation for all humanity. The real question, the appropriate one, is how do we get to the historical moment where we have a figure such as Jefferson, unquestionably brilliant, with a modernist if flawed vision of a multiracial egalitarian polity ahead of its time, and indeed ahead of ours, who also could bring himself to transgress those political lines he drew so conscientiously? Financial advantage? Political prudence? Turpitude? Lust? Whichever, were they endogenous? Socio-politically conditioned? Irremediable? Will there always be social circumstances in which men can take sexual advantage of women? Or are they eradicable? Whichever the answers may be, the low-brow invective directed at him in Stamped gets us nowhere. Such is the product of small, inalert minds, ones that haven't really learned anything.
So, was Jefferson conflicted, full of contradictions? A huckster as Vanee suggests? Or somebody with lofty goals but with a willingness to abandon them when they became too financially or politically costly. Naturally, I cannot answer that, but I'm inclined to the last. All human beings contain contradictions, to say that Jefferson harbored some tells us nothing. The question is whether he was sincere in his abolitionism or whether, as Vanee would have it, he adopted that pose for narcissistic reasons. Honestly, I am not really interested in Jefferson, don't know enough about him to have any confidence in arriving at the right conclusion.
And if slavery is the only measure which is to be applied to this man in our racebot world, then Jefferson deserves some credit as he, more so than anyone else, is responsible for the abolition of slavery in America. Contrary to what many believe, most of the profits derived from slave production didn't go to the slave owners. Some prospered, some teetered, some went bankrupt. The big money went to the northern bankers/traders (sound familiar?). For most of the history of unfree labor in the colonies/US, the South produced and the North managed that produce. Everyone was on the same page, goose and gander occupying different spots in the same business. As the Napoleonic Wars rolled through Europe, President Jefferson signed the Embargo Act which prohibited trade with any of the belligerents. Now industrial products from Europe were no longer available, and the South's produce lost its international market. As a result, northern bankers/traders used their capital to begin to manufacture those products which they could no longer acquire by trade. This is the beginning of capitalism in the US. The North industrialized while the South remained agricultural, and their interests began to diverge. Now goose and gander were parts of different businesses. An impasse arose over protective tariffs and the Civil War ensued with the North advocating "free labor," and the South slavery.
I jest when I say Jefferson deserves credit as he loathed capitalism. He was there in Europe as it was taking hold and was duly horrified, and said so. He observed that European industrial workers had a harder life than American slaves, which I imagine was true in most cases. Jefferson either said or plagiarized that "under capitalism every man is either hammer or anvil." His Ward Democratic vision was of individual yeoman farmers of all races running their own pieces of land and cooperating on matters which affected them mutually. And then federating with other "wards" to address issues which mutually affect wards, and so on. Jefferson despised wage labor.
Jones-Rogers then says "White men like Thomas Jefferson rationalized sexual violence perpetrated against Black women by claiming it isn't sexual violence." Perhaps this is true, but this is the first I've heard of Jefferson's defending sexual violence. It's deplorable, certainly, but she adduces nothing in support and apparently doesn't think it necessary.
Jones-Rogers says "We have to understand that sexual violence was fundamental to slavery, the culture of slavery was a violent one."
Nonsense. Sexual access by White and Black slave owners to White and Black slaves/indentures were an adjunct to slavery. Perhaps there were slave owners whose purpose was to assemble a harem, but what was fundamental to slavery was the wealth extracted from the labor performed by the slave. That was its raison d'etre. And if you are not acknowledging this fact, then you are not meaningfully engaging with the topic. It's absurd.
One unidentified commentator says that "You are considered unrapeable in slavery, legally unrapeable." Despite the inarticulation, we know what she means, and she's largely correct, but not completely. Unfreedom as it existed in Europe in the Middle Ages had a highly developed case law. Slaves had some rights, and could and did occasionally sue their owners in court and win. Indeed, as late as the 1850s in the US, a Black slave, having been taken into a free state, could sue his owner and have his case rise all the way to the Supreme Court. The Dred Scott decision was horrendous, nevertheless, his case was heard. Obviously, between Elizabeth Key's successful 17th century case and Dred Scott's unsuccessful 19th century effort much had changed. The latter decision marked the end of civil rights for Blacks free and unfree, nonetheless, for two and a half centuries in America, the unfree had some legal protections including unfree women of all races against sexual predation from men of all races. Those were insufficient, were eclipsed over time by concerns of greater weight to the planter class than the sexual prerogative of their female unfree, and I imagine they were infrequently enforced.
As this woman speaks, the documentary then shows images of White men abusing Black women. As always in Stamped, the Black male slave owner and the White female unfree are excised. There were literally thousands of Black slave owners in America, but you would never know it from watching Stamped from the Beginning, a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.
As the Stamped explores and condemns the hypersexualizing of Black women, the documentary shamelessly exploits Black female bodies by showing images of young, attractive, Black women dressing, dancing and acting in a provocative manner. If pressed, I'm sure the producers would claim they were just highlighting instances of the vice, not themselves exploiting Black female bodies, but they would be lying.
To be continued.
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