Sample Quote Analysis for RAP
From Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
"It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."
Jefferson’s conflicted ideas about race and slavery are evident in this quote; however, despite his conflict, Jefferson seems clear in his placement of whites at the center of his worldview in order to obliterate black concerns. His protestations about the evils of slavery are suspect because they are tempered by his clearly racist position. Jefferson proposed that “All men are created equal” but his use of the word equal never intended to extend to slaves. Jefferson notes that, upon abolition, former slaves should be resettled in a colony on the African continent or in the West Indies, and that former slaves are not fit to become part of American civil society (they cannot be “incorporated” into the state). Jefferson seems to place the blame for this on both whites and blacks, but whites bear less of the burden of guilt, and certainly none for reparation. He notes that whites have “deep rooted prejudices” which make it more challenging for blacks to be accepted on equal footing with whites when it comes to civic engagement (voting, schooling, public office holding). This puts whites automatically in the position of power – they are the ones rejecting the blacks based upon a whole host of characteristics he describes in other sections of the document. He also notes that blacks may have “recollections of injuries” they have sustained at the hands of whites. What blacks might do, or how they might act based upon these injuries is unclear. The hint here, however, is that blacks will disrupt civil society because of their lingering recollections of injury. However, despite the fact that blacks are the ones who have ben wronged, Jefferson does not say that it is up to whites to make it right. Rather, he suggests that the “real distinctions” – here he is using the notion that nature (an Enlightenment idea—was Jefferson a precursor to the field of eugenics?) has created differences that will keep whites and blacks from engaging together in meaningful/productive ways to make society functional. What Jefferson notes at the end, however, is most troubling. The permanent, fixed, and unalterable division he assumes exists between the races pits the two against each other in mortal struggle. His assertion that only one of the two can exist, and that extermination is the outcome of an attempt at co-existence, underpins the many legal ways in which the United States has supported separate lives for whites and blacks. The life and death struggle (“convulsions”) that Jefferson suggests by the language of extermination foreshadows the Civil War, and even more, the ensuing desperate struggle for Civil Rights that was prevented by both violence from whites and laws that maintained the status quo for white hierarchy.