Originally published at: America's history of slavery ruins U.Va campus tour for a Republican - Boing Boing
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Jefferson did indeed own and raped his slaves. Folks who can’t handle the truth are not leaders. 
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Ug. It took a couple of centuries for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and some of the organized groups of white descendants to finally acknowledge the reality that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’ children, but I naively thought that people were finally agreeing on the same basic facts now. But today I learned that there are organizations like this one and other non-profits like “The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society” that have sprung up explicitly to deny or cast doubt on that reality. There’s solid DNA evidence on top of all the other historical evidence, but some of these guys are now saying “hey, we don’t know that it was Thomas Jefferson! It must have been one of his visiting nephews or cousins!” (Seriously, that’s their claim now.)
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Pretending the Founders got everything right from the start completely undermines the best thing about the American system of government: its capacity for positive change and self-improvement.
Michelle Obama once gave a beautiful speech about how her Black daughters played on the lawn of a house built by slaves. This enraged right-wingers who want to forget our nation’s racist legacy, but it was really a message of hope. “We have come so far in the last two and a half centuries of the great American experiment. Imagine what we can become if we continue that progress into the future.”
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White Southerners: Actually slavery was good.
Also white Southerners: How dare you smear Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, by calling him a slave owner!
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Seems that those three words alone would trigger them, regardless of context.
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Conservatives confronted with important historical facts and context…
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Oh, they don’t want to forget about it. They just don’t want to be made to feel bad about it. They actually quite like thinking about it, as it was a “better time” when “people knew their place” and a dogwhistle’s as good as a foghorn.
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More than 50 years later, the Southern Strategy of appealing to racists has been deeply embedded in the Republican party to the point where denying history is second nature to its members.
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And how does that make it any better?
WTAF. We have a malicious and aggressive group of people actively trying to rewrite history to serve their agenda. These fuckers literally destroy words. Heritage? So beside wanting to erase slavery existed, they want to bring back slavery. Totally on brand with these assholes. These fascists need to crawl back to where they’re from.
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I guess in their minds enslaving whole families is just the natural order of things, but miscegenation is a step too far? And since there’s incontrovertible evidence that children of mixed race were fathered by someone, they’d prefer to blame some unknown Jefferson rather than the guy that they built all those statues honoring. But who the hell knows what these assholes are thinking, really.
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I suspect they’ll somehow remember this fact when convenient, to forgive Dolt 45 for his sexual assaults. “All the Founding Fathers were rapey, so it’s nbd.”
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Don’t confuse them with facts; it only makes them even more angry.
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