let’s play a little game. word association. i say a word, you say what the first word that comes to mind.
ku klux klan = _________
confederate flag = _________
lynching = _________
slave trade = _________
dred scott = _________
jim crow = _________
james earl ray = _________
church bombings = _________
thomas jefferson = _________
check your reality: did you answer either “slavery” or “racism” in each blank? if yes, good! if not, which one of these things is not like the others?
BERKELEY, CA — Parents, students and teachers at Jefferson Elementary have approved changing the school’s name to Sequoia Elementary because the nation’s third president owned slaves.
Students at the school, named for Thomas Jefferson, voted 161 to 111 in favor of the name change, the staff voted 11 to 5 in favor, and parents and guardians voted 67 to 61 in favor.
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Debate over the name of the school, which has 305 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, has gone on for more than two years after several teachers, including an African American mother of three former Jefferson students, said Jefferson’s moniker offended them. [news]
as tom points out, the irony in this decision is ubiquitous.
6 Responses to “thomas jefferson elementary school sequoia elementary school”
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George Washington owned slaves, too, guess we’ll have to disown our Founding Fathers… Very weird. The real issue is to destroy patriotism, of course. Supplant it with anger or at least apathy.
Many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, inheriting the practice from Liberals’ favorite place (Europe). Perhaps Thomas Jefferson had an extramarital affair with one of his slaves. Perhaps other Founding Fathers were a**holes to people. Whatever their flaws, we can gaurantee that they all had many. And even maybe, as Roger Wilkins has said, the practice of slavery is the only thing that allowed these men to dedicate time to statesmanship. None of that changes this fact:
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Thomas Mckean, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams…(and the list goes on), all men who have been criticized for either practicing slavery, or being slow to work towards its abolition, provided the principal difference in our way of life in America, as opposed to that in most of the other historical British holdings. Lets take a look at this list of all stars: Palestine, Uganda, Iraq, West African Settlements, Nigeria, Mauritius, Malaysa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Eritria, and the list goes on. There are a few besides these that actually pulled it together, but their either had tons of help from the U.S.A., or they followed in its footsteps doctrinally.
We are not more virtuous than the inhabitants of the may suffering countries that I listed above. We do not merit the freedoms we enjoy any more than they would merit the same freedoms and prosperity. After all, the declaration (written by the the evil slave owner) points out that all men have a right to these things–even if they did not take the step of making this statement fully practicable in their time. Nonetheless, they, the rare, inspired individuals in that dangerous and tumultous time, risked their lives to draft, approve, and put their names to a document that would doom them either to death as traitors, or Founders of a new, righter nation. We know what the result was. We also know that many of the other victims of colonization have never had the group of men or women who combined the same powerful and key virtues that enabled our Founders to enact the Declaration of Independence, win public support for it, lead our ancestors in a war to live its precepts, and to write the supreme document that liberals wave with the fieriest of zeal while simultaneously scorning the men who gave it to them.
i think we could even take it one step beyond trying to destroy partriotism. it seems to me that more and more people are just looking for something to argue and kick about. the man lived 200 years ago. i am sure that if we tried we could find something in any school name that might be offensive to someone. toyota makes a sequoia and it offends me because … i … i don’t like cars to be named after trees. there! we need to change the name again. granted, this may not be the best example, but i think you know what i mean. now, if the school were named after stalin or hitler, i think i would definately take offense to that. but thomas jefferson was a great american and should be remembered as such.
Before he died, Jefferson told James Madison that he wanted to be remembered for two things: writing the Declaration of Independence and co-founding the University of Virginia.
[…] defense,*[FN1] and have some left over to pay for the renaming of thomas jefferson elementary.*[FN2] instead, they are going to have a lot of people using their laptops on buses, only to have themswiped by crack addicts who promptly hop out the back door and on to a pawn shop payday. but other than the cost, and the fact that it will never work, i think it’s a great idea. […]
[…] bills from the michael newdow defense,*[FN1] and have some left over to pay for the renaming of thomas jefferson elementary.*[FN2] instead, they are going to have a lot of people whipping out their laptops on buses, only to […]