Her name was Sally Hemings
pease
Tech Admin
in Epiphanies
On these forums, the basic idea regarding identity issues is treating people with respect. That includes not introducing them into a discussion as tangents, or using them to make a point about a different issue. Referring to an unequitable relationship between two people in order to illustrate man's capacity for hypocrisy reduces the relationship itself to a rhetorical device. When the example depends on a drastic power imbalance, and the dehumanising nature of chattel slavery, and when the relative importance of the two people is indicated by giving one of them a name while referring to the other as a slave who happened to be involved in the production of a child, it's hard to see how respect has been allocated equitably.To the discussion of Jefferson, my purpose was not to discuss slavery directly, but to bring up a very powerful example of a man who was clearly very contemplative in his life and yet also marked by some rather glaring hypocrisy. His contemplation did not prevent him from being positively horrible to other human beings who, it seems, he was on some level aware of as humans.
Far as the bounds of the discussion, I will happily defer to a host in this matter. You need not apologize, since you lack that authority.
We not only know Sally Hemings' name, we know quite a lot about her life. From Sally Hemings' son, Madison Hemings:
My mother accompanied her [Jefferson's daughter, Maria] as her body servant. When Mr. Jefferson went to France Martha was a young woman grown, my mother was about her age, and Maria was just budding into womanhood. Their stay (my mother and Maria's) was about eighteen months. But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson's concubine, and when he was called home she was enceinte by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia.
Madison Hemings recollections, Pike County Republican, 13 Mar. 1873.
Annette Gordon-Reed on the nature of Jefferson and Hemings' relationship:
That a black woman in slavery would seek out a relationship with a slave master, or if not seek it out, not run away from it, is not a particularly attractive idea. Some view such a person as a traitor, giving the ultimate aid and comfort to the enemy. Our notions about women and sexuality probably play a major role in our discomfort about these situations. Sex between a slave master and a woman who was a slave has always been seen differently than sex between a slave mistress and a man who was a slave, both by whites and blacks. Whites tolerated the former because it posed no real threat to the established order. They claimed it did, but they did not react against it with the same vehemence that they did to relationships between slave males and white women, which were seen as threatening the social order and could never be tolerated. .... Most blacks probably would consider a slave woman who voluntarily joined a relationship with her master as a collaborator. On the other hand, they might see a black man who had a relationship with a white mistress as a rebel who was striking at the heart of the slave system. These ideas, rooted in our visions of sex roles, may have some validity as far as generalizations go. They do not take into account the differing circumstances and contexts in which such relationships could arise. Therefore, we should not allow them to control any serious consideration of an individual case.
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.
Comments
At the risk, of junior hosting myself, it seems that a bit of junior hosting is going on.
And to be honest, I’m also not sure how to read your post as anything other than a rhetorical device to support a point you want to make. You started a thread, most of which is made up of long quotes from another source, but nowhere do you suggest what there is to be discussed.
I suggest that's hard to do in this case as the topic has been framed, because either we have to prioritise the first-hand experience of a marginalised person who lived prior to 1820 who it seems left no first-hand accounts, or we have to talk about them in the third person, knowing that none of us are likely to have lived similar experiences.
What is it that we are to talk about? The phenomena of bringing the examples of people from the past into discussions?
With regard to the more general impact of legacies of enslavement today and how we discuss them, the aim would be to make sure we are hearing the voices of those with lived experience of racism and what they think about those legacies.
If the aim however is to discuss how we should discuss or host legacies of chattel enslavement on these forums specifically then that would be a question for the Styx.
If it's to discuss how we discuss legacies of chattel enslavement today in general in our lives and society then that could stay here.
I think there could be a general question about how we talk about chattel enslavement and who we name when we talk about it but let's see how it develops.
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies host
In relation to Bullfrog's link, I couldn't view that article - I suspect access to the .com version of the website is geo-blocked. In any case, even if we include links to sources, it's the text we include in a post that matters most, that reveals what we think, what we consider germane to a discussion, whether we write it ourselves or (less-revealingly) re-post from elsewhere.
As to what there is to be discussed, which both you and Basketactortale point out, I'm not entirely sure.
In the case of the system of race-based chattel slavery developed in Europe, there are still millions of people living in the world who are descended from enslaved people and who, along with others, continue to experience discrimination arising from the intentionally dehumanising racial ideologies embedded in our societies. We can listen to what they have to say.
I think there's a more general point I have in mind, which is still unclear to me, which might be illustrated by considering the extent to which we, here on these forums, can legislate for respect.
My understanding is that we try to centre the voices and first-hand experience of those with lived experience because that is how we respect them. We look for own-voice accounts in order to see and understand the issue from the point of view of those who suffer discrimination and marginalisation in respect of the issue being discussed.
I don't think that having respect for the people we introduce into a discussion is inconsistent with the Epiphanies guidelines as they stand. (I've more confidence that we should avoid pursuing discussion of Epiphanies topics outside Epiphanies.)
I don't know how other Shipmates or Crew see this.
If someone tries to argue that bureaucrats should not be held responsible for moral wrongs they commit at the behest of superiors, and I reply "Well, that didn't work for Eichmann", am I guilty of using that person's victims as a rhetorical prop?
If I’m being honest, when I see posts with long quotes, or where the majority of the post is quotes rather than the shipmate’s own thoughts, I rarely really read the quotes. At best, I skim the quotes; at worst, I just skip and ignore them.
These victims also have names (lots of names).
Rudy Kennedy (born Rudi Karmeinsky) was born in Rosenberg, Germany (now Olesno, Poland) a small town of around 6,000 people including around 50 Jews. He survived two years at Auschwitz, working as an electrician (from the age of 15 to 17), ending up at Mittelbau-Dora working as a slave labourer on the V-2 programme. He eventually made it to England in 1947, graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, and worked on missile guidance systems. He later set up his own company which he sold to Röche Pharmaceuticals where he was made a Director of Research and Development, managing R&D projects worldwide. He died in 2008.
Rudy Kennedy is one of the individuals on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust's Memorial Pages. The above details come from his memorial page, which contains a much fuller account of what he experienced.
That's also fair enough.
Regarding a point you made previously, I presume that if it's reasonable to skip chunky quotes contained in posts, then it's also OK to ignore links to (lengthy) articles. Apologies for the juxtapostion with my reply to Stetson. Maybe that was also just a rhetorical device.
Copyright's often at the back of my mind when I quote something.
What would you have us say?
Reminding others and ourselves that "great men" had incredibly dark sides by pointing to the lives of people they abused would appear to me to be troubling. But in the right way. Troubling that politicians are hypocrites. Troubling that people can have two lives, one public and another private. Troubling that people existed who other people decided were worthless. Troubling that history basically idealised the one and very largely forgot the other.
And yet there is something really aching on the brain to contemplate the utter human filth on his own. A petty bureaucrat doing the paperwork when the bureaucracy itself is an integral part of genocide.
On the other hand, a post that uses lengthy quotes held together by a few sentences typically cannot stand on its own without with the quotes. Skip the quotes, and the poster has often said little to anything that contributes to the discussion.
Does that extend to - say - the deployment of phrases like 'the banality of evil' ?
Hannah Arendt had a lot of criticism for using this phrase because people seemed to think it diminished Eichmann's responsibility for what he did.
It's a whole other topic to interrogate these criticisms both to understand what Arendt meant by what she said as part of her political philosophy and what her critics thought she meant and then objected to.
My limited reading suggests that Arendt was being very negative about Eichmann by calling him a bureaucrat and she possibly considered it a considerable failure of him as a person to he in the public realm but simply pushing a pen. That in some sense that disgusting but hidden efficiency was as much a part of the machinery of the Holocaust as the crimes of others. I know even less about her critics on this point but they seem to have taken the view that she was in some sense "letting him off the hook".
It seems today that the phrase has entered the lexicon without fully understanding/listening to either her or the critics, which to me seems like a mistake. I'm increasingly thinking that throwing a phrase like this around is probably not good if we are not speaking from a position of understanding (or struggling to understand) the position from where it came. There's something of a lack of rigor and authenticity in a conversation which consists of trading blows with phrases plucked from works we haven't actually read, which I'm sure leads to phrases being used in contexts that they were not written for.
Okay, how far do you want to to take this? Every time someone brings up Eichmann, how many of his victims should be named? How much detail should be provided in such cases? You named Sally Hemmings, but what about her children? Why didn't you give their names?
If you mention Roche Pharmaceuticals, do you have to discuss the mixed bag of their WW2 actions? They moved their Jewish employees to the US for safety, but also used forced labor. Seems relevant, given Kennedy's experience.
As far as I see it, nobody sensible really sees Eichmann in a sympathetic light - views range from being a grey bureaucrat in a monstrous Holocaust machine through to being a virulent anti-Semite.
There's a measurable difference with Jefferson or, for example, Churchill. Men who are often spoken of in hushed tones as great political heavyweight figures without talking about the other disgusting aspects to their lives. There's a step change to other characters like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King junior, who were also had obvious flaws.
I don't think it is unreasonable to find behaviours of MLK or Gandhi extremely problematic and to take exception to them. I know people who think of them as an utterly deplorable characters. But I personally don't think one can always qualify a conversation about him with a phrase like "..of course he treated his wife in a terrible way" even where it is undeniably true.
Of course these are my subjective moral rankings, others disagree with this.
Right, although that might due a separate thread, I was purely talking about how far the principle extended should apply.
I think the first question to ask is whether we need to mention him at all. I suggest there's a difference between mentioning the Eichmann trial in a discussion of Hannah Arendt's philosophy, and mentioning him in response to a question about bureaucratic ethics.
Indeed. I think my short answer to chrisstiles' question would be to try to avoid trivialising the circumstances to which that expression refers.
I don't know the answer to this. To take a more prosaic example, we can probably all quote Charles Dickens. Do we need to mention his wife's name if we do? Do we not quote Dickens?
I don't know.
I think the need is dictated by the purpose. What is the purpose? What's the point in mentioning her name? What's the point in mentioning his name?
All of these people are dead. What are we to do with them?
Good question. I did give that some thought, particularly because of the part they played in Sally Hemings agreeing to return from France. There's no right answer that I can think of, but some personal detail seems more appropriate than none. From Sally Hemings' wikipedia page: Which I bring up because four of the children have their own wikipedia pages, which suggests to me that several wikipedia contributors and editors think they matter.
That had occurred to me.
I was still thinking about Nick Tamen's point about quoting. The details I selected from the account in Rudy Kennedy's memorial page paint a particular picture of the man. Which is what any of us do in choosing what we do or don't say about someone, rather more than selecting and copying a chunk of text. Looking at my potted narrative now, I'd say it helps make him real for me.
And as Annette Gordon-Reed pointed out about the nature of Sally Hemings' relationship: All these people are individuals, with individual circumstances. Their lives, as are all our lives, are more complex and nuanced than is required for the clear-cut requirements of our rhetorical points.
Thinking some more about this, I am more understanding of the position that naming victims is itself a rhetorical position.
There seems to me to be something of a spectrum of behaviours mentioned here with regard to, using my example, a quotable person like Dickens.
* "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" as Dickens said
* "No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else" as Dickens the awful man said
* "The world belongs to those who set out to conquer it armed with self confidence and good humour." Dickens the wife-beater and scoundrel
* "A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man." So said Dickens who left his wife Catherine for his 18 year old mistress, then petitioned to have her condemned to a mental asylum and have the 10 children she bore him taken away.
* We shouldn't quote Dickens at all or even mention him
Many powerful men are bastards, particularly powerful men before the emancipation of women.
I assume everyone here knows and acknowledges that there were millions of victims of Eichmann. That Jefferson was appalling and that Dickens was a bastard.
Does that mean that anecdotally mentioning something about Eichmann's mental state, Jefferson's hypocrisy and so on can only be done naming a victim?
We all have Wikipedia after all. What does this naming achieve in the context of a discussion?
Well yes, but I'm not convinced that cutting and pasting paragraphs from an encyclopedia is a fitting memorial of them either.
This interests me. I always understood the phrase to be highlighting the fact that EEEVVIL is not, very often, a zombie bursting from the crypt (popular fiction), or a criminal activity safely proscribed by the Mail (popular fact), or even (to re-animate a Ship meme who I miss, and who in recent years appears to once again be sleeping) great Cthulhu arising from the depths (rhetorical hyperbole). Instead, evil might well be a small man with a pen. I suppose to really get this, one has to really get the Truth about the existence of evil - and that is a knack these days when evil is a line from a poster for a horror film and sin is something used in marketing chocolates ( (c) Francis Spufford).
Show them some respect.
Whatever our own beliefs about how we should treat people who have died, we all have ancestors, and a lot of people want their ancestors to be treated with respect. This seems more pertinent with regard to people who were not treated with respect during their lifetimes, but subjected to discrimination, marginalisation and dehumanisation, and especially when we start considering collective, transgenerational trauma.
I'm surprised the phrase isn't more often read this way. The holocaust in large part was lists, train schedules, and faceless people in closed cattle cars moving through the countryside and small towns where local people did their little jobs and lived their little lives. It was purposely banal and unnoticed. This made it all the more horrific looking back. The fun stuff was in parades and Nazi salutes you could go to see yourself or see at the cinema newsreels. No victims you knew or saw unless you were a hoodlum who enjoyed the Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass.
Me neither, nor the repeated use of the word "rhetorical" in regards to points people are trying to make.
From the OP:
Which rhetorical device, @pease? Here's a list.
...
When Emmett Till was murdered, his mother made the choice to bury him in an open casket.
She was his mother. That was her choice, to politicize his death and turn him into a national symbol. I am not Emmett Till's mother. I am not qualified to touch his corpse. Were I his contemporary, I'd show a little respect and leave that work to people who were closer to him. And if I would politicize his body, I'd only do it with his mamma's consent.
...
There's a theory I picked up in seminary called "circles of grief." The rule is that the closer you are to the trauma, the more qualified you are to speak to it. I can crack jokes about my own suffering that would be in poor taste if I made similar jokes bout @Gwai 's - and they're my spouse. It would be even further out of line for me to speak lightly about a stranger.
Sally Hemings is someone centuries out of time and space. Even the research into her life, which is considerable, is speculative in many details. We don't know what she thought. What we're doing to her is historical critical analysis and part of me feels like getting this far into her in a certain sense is like invading her privacy all over again, reducing her once-living-self to a political symbol for our edification.
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I do own Thomas Jefferson. No relation that I'm aware of, but we share a culture and I do recognize the intellectual type that he was. The kind of politically thoughtful hypocrite he became serves as an anti-model to me. It's one reason I steer hard into being hyper-authentic to the extent that some folks here mock me for being incomprehensible. It beats the crap out of being an erudite, disassociated ra*ist. I'd rather not hide my sins behind a high falutin' "contemplative" intellect the way he seems to have did.
I don't highlight him to elevate him. Quite the opposite! His is a head that I might figuratively dissect and then put on a pike for public display, as European kings used to do.
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I'm not afraid to talk about what monsters people are. Like a lot of mid-rate white guys, I've been - in small ways - a victim and occasionally a perpetrator. That's most of us white guys, and more than a few white gals. But I will be a little careful when it comes to picking up the corpse of a black woman and waving it around like a bronze serpent to try to correct the wrongs that have been done. That's how it'd feel, to me, to be constantly highlighting Sally Hemings as a victim every time we talked about nasty old TJ.
Are we sure that's how she'd want to be remembered? An eternal victim, the recipient of a white man's lust?
...
I try to stay in my own lane and show what I understand to be appropriate respect around other people. I don't always succeed, it is a hard thing to do.
If other people want to do differently, it's not my authority to judge, but one may understand why there's a conversation happening here.
I'm not sure any of us here have the knowledge of having read all the arguments to have an informed discussion along these lines.
We could perhaps have that kind of thread, but I think it would be quite a lot of effort and might challenge what we think we know about the phrase and everything surrounding it.
And I think that's a rub with grand historic tragedies. There are always going to be different views and different interpretive lenses. Add historical distance, pick and choose your sources, selective memory, etc.
One thing I read once - the kind of little footnotes that horrify me because they feel very likely - was that Stalin was popular while alive because the standard of living in the Soviet Union generally got better under his watch as long as you weren't one of his victims. Industrialization is an improvement on serfdom.
And people are right that he was a monster, but when you're doing better, it's very easy to not-see things. I made up that pun on f-book and I'm a little proud of it. It's possible that people didn't see because it was hush hush, and it also might be because they were high on sudden affluence and...nobody wants to take a good hard look down a coal mine tunnel. Nobody wants to look at the way farms depend on prison labor even today, or how the H2A system with the American government is (so I've heard from some smart people) very close to slavery.
The not-see effect is a thing. And it's bloody complicated, you're right.
I'd say it's pathos, an appeal to the emotions and ideals. As the wikipedia page says:
If that's correct, would you mind engaging with our previous questions about where the line is on behaviour, please?
Because I don't think that at all.
I don't really want to repeat myself but all the things I said before.