Not a Dog Whistle

In the annals of American racism, one of the oldest myths is that African-American men are stupid. I suspect it came originally from White men seeking a kind of middle ground on slavery. Thomas Jefferson, for one, argued that Black men obviously loved their children and experienced the same emotions that White men did but that people of color were unintelligent. He didn’t believe slavery was justified, and he hoped time would solve the problem, which he did not address.

Jefferson lived among obviously intelligent enslaved Black people, and he had some of them educated. I don’t know how that fit with his other observations, but probably he attributed the intelligence to racial mixing (the enslaved in his house were often of mixed ancestry, and a few were his progeny).

So now we have President Spankbottom calling Black people stupid, the most recent examples being his attack on Don Lemon and Lebron James. That’s pure racism that runs back to 1776. As someone said, it isn’t a dog whistle to racists—it’s a foghorn.