March 12, 2022
FAIRStory 4: Standing Idly on the Road to a Better America

In its Video #5, The Road to a Better America, FAIRstory profiles civil rights leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Chief Standing Bear, and Martin Luther King. Later, FAIRstory explores the abolitionist movement among White Americans in some detail, profiling William Lloyd Garrison and others.

FAIRstory’s treatment suggests that change occurs when articulate, relentless members of oppressed groups and their allies gain the ear of … it’s never made clear who, but someone sees the light and change happens. Of course, it hasn't quite worked that way. Our history is one of oppressors using raw political power and extra-legal violence to deny all but a select group of us fundamental human rights, activists be damned. Rarely has the arc of United States history bent toward justice without bloodshed. Before activist rhetoric has changed us for the better, it has driven us to the point of the sword.

People who cannot express and celebrate their identities are not free. FAIRstory sidesteps this simple truth in the interest of mollifying those on the right who are more interested in assimilation than in free expression. FAIRstory cherry-picks quotes from Martin Luther King and others in support of the fiction that civil rights leaders wanted a colorblind society, and wanted it right away. The FAIRstory curriculum explicitly states that legal discrimination ended in the 60s as a result of the efforts of King and with Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act. It’s over, nothing to see here.

On the matter of antisemitism, a quote attributed to Sigmund Livingston is particularly egregious: “Jews must work to dissipate the notion that the Jew differs from the general public in any manner except in his religious faith.” Of course, members of the Jewish community are the general public, can defy normative expectations at will, and have no obligation to explain themselves to anyone. Subtle notes are everywhere in FAIRstory to reinforce the notion that some collectives stand outside the mainstream of American culture and need to assimilate for their own good.

Should members of the LGBTQ community be included in stories about the expansion of civil rights in the United States? FAIRStory doesn’t seem to think so. Google cannot find evidence that they exist on FAIRstory’s website.

FAIRstory’s videos omit the pernicious use by Christians of Bible passages to justify slavery, a tactic prevalent in the run-up to the Civil War. Was FAIRstory mindful that doing so might excite comparisons to evangelists’ political maneuvers in the present and rile right-wing Christians?

A curriculum which charts the midpoint between the harsh realities of our history and the feel-good expectations of triggered White, straight Christians is no curriculum at all.

March 12, 2022
FAIRstory 3: The Jefferson Paradox
by Hal Wright

I first became aware of the existence of Sally Hemings when I watched an episode of Head of the Class in the late 1980's. In the episode, called "The Way We Weren't," Darlene, a brilliant Black high school student (played by Robin Givens, in her breakthrough role) wrestles with the knowledge that she is a descendant of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

It's not that I had never before heard of or read about Hemings. It's that I had never felt even some of the weight of the story until I saw a Black girl tell it.

Yesterday, I bought and rewatched the episode. It wasn't as groundbreaking as I thought at the time. And the script was... awful. The episode ends with the student's history teacher, played by series star Howard Hesseman, whitesplaining that Jefferson and Hemings were in love and that the times demanded he keep her enslaved, as this was the only way they could continue to have a relationship. Magically, Darlene's anguish disappears.

The teacher cites statements by Sally's son Madison as proof of the nature of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship, that Jefferson's having brought Hemings to Paris is proof of his affection for her, and that Jefferson granted Hemings her freedom upon his death. All of these statements, presented as fact, are false.

We will never know what Hemings and Jefferson held in their hearts. But we can learn a great deal more about the circumstance of their connection than what this television show and most popular sources reveal.

Hemings was a child of 13 or 14 when she accompanied Jefferson's daughter Maria to Paris as her maid-servant. According to Madison Hemings, at age 16 she agreed to accompany Jefferson back to Virginia from France (where she could have remained as a free woman) so long as he agreed to free her unborn children at age 21. That Hemings was worried about unborn children in Paris, and that she gave birth to Jefferson's child shortly after her return to Monticello, provides important context.

More context comes with the knowledge that Sally Hemings was Martha Jefferson's sister-in-law. Martha's father John Wayles enslaved and raped Sally's mother Elizabeth.

Sally Hemings bore seven children by Jefferson, four of whom lived to adulthood. All remained enslaved until the age of 21. Sally was never legally released from bondage, though Martha allowed her to leave Monticello and to live as a free woman in Charlottesville with Madison after her father's death.

Jefferson enslaved Black Americans for the entirety of his adult life, over 600 in all, and granted freedom to only a few of them.

In Head of the Class, classmate and rival Allen expresses envy that Darlene is related to a founding father. Darlene says "I win the snob contest because Thomas Jefferson slept with a distant relative of mine? He owned her Allen. He could have set her free but he didn't until after his death. A little late. Am I supposed to be proud of that?"

The teacher presses the false narrative that Jefferson brought Hemings to Paris as the "woman of the house."

Darlene says, "A happy slave story? No thank you." No thank you indeed. The episode should have ended right there. But the writers couldn't abide giving a Black girl the last word, nor could they abide moving on without scrubbing the blood and misery from Jefferson's effigy.

Where Jefferson is concerned, little has changed since the 1980s. The backlash sidestepped by Head of the Class has reached full intensity, directed at initiatives to meet head-on the impact of Jefferson and other enslavers on enslaved persons and their descendants.

In response to the removal of Confederate statues and place names, Donald Trump and his acolytes warned that progressives would be coming for Thomas Jefferson next. To activate fear, they have propagated the false claim that, in revealing Jefferson's legacy as an enslaver, progressives intend to destroy the country. Of course, the fissures being exploited by right-wing politicians weren't put there by progressives. They exist because Jefferson embedded in our country the same internal contradictions we find in Jefferson's own mind.

It’s no surprise that FAIRstory treats Jefferson gently and with a little spin.

After a fleeting acknowledgement that he owned slaves, FAIRstory praises Jefferson for condemning slavery in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, he condemned the slave trade, targeting the Crown for their role in creating the slave trade and for granting freedom to the enslaved as a means of destabilizing the simmering rebellion of the Colonies. Jefferson could have freed his slaves on any day of his adult life. He freed only two in his lifetime and five in his will.

In FAIRstory’s Video #8, Jefferson’s signing of the bill to end the transatlantic importation of slaves receives mention without the context that the market value of the people Jefferson and others enslaved increased as a result.

Any public reckoning of our history must include an unabridged account of Jefferson’s words and deeds: the good, the bad, and the ugly. FAIRstory panders to the right by skirting this essential responsibility.

March 12, 2022
Democracy Begins at Home
by Steve Cickay

Most Americans are rightly inspired by the bravery of Ukrainians fighting to preserve their democracy in the face of a military invasion initiated by a murderous fascist dictator. The horrific and senseless destruction unleashed by a power-hungry autocrat on innocent civilians is truly despicable and should not be supported or praised by any true American. The sight of ordinary Ukrainians willing to fight and die for their democracy is an inspiration to all who cherish democracy and we should stand with them in solidarity.

But we need to remember that our democracy was also attacked on Jan. 6, 2021 and continues to be besieged by voter suppression legislation, gerrymandering, and continued efforts to make it easier for partisan hacks to interfere with the vote count. We can show bravery similar to that of the Ukrainians by supporting and voting for leaders who make voting more accessible and inclusive instead of restrictive and exclusive, who believe voters should choose their leaders instead of leaders choosing their voters to guarantee gerrymandered wins, and who champion the free and fair elections of a democracy instead of the phony elections of autocracies. True Americans should wholeheartedly support bringing to justice all those who were involved in attacking our democracy on that horrific day in January.

It is time for Americans to defend their democracy at home now before it is too late and we lose what should be a shining example and inspiration to our citizens and to the world: our beloved American democracy. Yes, it is time for Americans to be as wise and brave as the Ukrainians in defense of democracy both here and abroad.