(From https://www.facebook.com/Lucian-K-Truscott-IV-106866804690678)
Cousins
by Lucian K. Truscott IV
"You are looking at a photograph of me and my cousin Shannon Lanier.
It’s a photograph that illustrates why the 1619 Project is such a white
supremacist’s nightmare, teaching that racism and slavery played a major
role in the founding of this nation. It’s a photograph of the truth
exposed, at least in part, by critical race theory, an academic
discipline that teaches the same thing. It is not only a photograph, it
is a fact. It is history staring you in the face, history in flesh and
blood, history that cannot be rewritten, cannot be buried, cannot be
denied, because we are alive to tell it.
That’s Thomas Jefferson’s grave we’re standing on. We are 6th great
grandsons of Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president long
idolized as a founding father of the United States. Shannon is descended
from Jefferson’s 36 year relationship – if relations between an enslaved
person and a slave owner can be called that – with Sally Hemings, who is
his 6th great grandmother. I am descended from Jefferson’s relationship
with his wife Martha, who is my 6th great grandmother. Shannon’s great
grandmother was enslaved by my 6th great grandfather. We are tied
together not only by blood but by the stain of slavery on our family and
our country. We are cousins, and we are also blood brothers. We carry in
our souls the legacy of the slavery that brought our great grandparents
together. We are descendants of slavery. It lives within us.
In that way, we are like tens of millions of other Americans who also
carry the legacy of slavery within them, as descendants of slaves and
slave owners. It’s a legacy that has long been put away and hidden,
living only in the shadows. Shannon and I helped bring it into the light
22 years ago when I invited several dozen of my cousins in the Sally
Hemings family to be my guests at the annual family reunion of the white
descendants of Jefferson who belong to the Monticello Association. We
attended the annual cocktail party on the west lawn of Monticello. We
mixed together as we wandered freely through both the public and private
spaces of Jefferson’s house. We gave interviews to dozens and dozens of
members of the media who were there from all over the world to cover the
first time that descendants of a slave had been invited to a social
occasion at the home of the man who owned their ancestor – in this case,
Sally Hemings.
It was quite a scene. My white cousins in the Monticello Association
were not happy. Their cousins from the Sally Hemings side of the family
had never been invited to the family reunion before. In fact, the
descendants of Sally Hemings were not members of the family association,
which identifies itself as descendants of Jefferson. Over the next few
years, the Monticello Association would consider whether to invite our
cousins to join our membership.
In 2002, the members of the Monticello Association voted against
admitting our Hemings cousins as members. The vote was 96 to 6. Five of
those voting yes were Truscotts – me and my brother and three sisters.
I have a very strong memory of a confrontation I had with one of the
employees at Monticello, a docent who led visitors on tours of the
house. He approached me at the reunion red-faced and stopped within a
foot of me and said, “You have ruined the whole thing.”
“What have I ruined?” I asked him. “How?”
“You don’t know what you’ve done. You have brought disgrace on a great
man. It’s never going to be the same after this.”
The next morning, I appeared with Michelle Cooley, one of my Hemings
cousins, on the Today Show. Shannon and Michelle and I gave interviews
to television crews from places like Bangkok and Paris and Moscow. And
that afternoon, the death threats started. They came by email and by
phone at first. Later, they would come in the mail to my home in Los
Angeles, more than a hundred them.
One I remember very, very well because somehow this man had gotten my
phone number, and he called me in the middle of the night. He threatened
me, told me he knew where I was staying in Charlottesville and where I
lived in California. When his threats had finally sputtered to a stop, I
asked him why, and it led to a conversation that lasted about five
minutes. He called me a traitor to my race and several other things
involving the “N-word.” I asked him why he felt so strongly the way he
did. He told me I was trying to change the way things had always been,
that Black people were inferior, that they didn’t deserve to be treated
the same way as whites. I asked him if he thought Black people should
have the right to vote. He said, of course not. They weren’t real
Americans. He said something like, “you don’t know it yet, but one day
we’ll get things back to the way they used to be, before n-----s had
rights and everything went to hell in this country.”
Today on its front page, the New York Times informs us that the state of
Texas is entertaining “a flurry” of laws that would “reframe Texas
history lessons and play down references to slavery and anti-Mexican
discrimination that are part of the state’s founding.” The states of
Idaho, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Tennessee are all considering bills
that would ban teaching about slavery and segregation and ban using the
1619 Project in state school curriculums. One Texas bill would “promote
patriotic education” by omitting the introduction of slavery when Texas
achieved independence from Mexico in 1836. Another bill would ban
exhibits at the Alamo that show major figures in the Texas Revolution
were slave owners. Another bill would constrain teachers from discussing
how racism determined the legal system in Texas. The bills do not
address how to teach about the Texas state constitution which legalized
slavery the day it was passed, but “playing down” references to slavery
isn’t going to help.
Earlier this week, the University of North Carolina refused tenure to
Nikole Hannah-Jones, last year’s recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for
commentary for her role in creating the 1619 Project. She had been hired
by the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media to be Knight
Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a position which in the past
had come with tenure. Stories in the Times, The Hill, the Charlotte
Observer and elsewhere attributed the refusal of tenure to “a backlash
among conservatives” on the UNC Board of Governors. Ms Hannah-Jones
accepted a five year contract as a professor with an “option” for tenure
review on completion of the contract.
This kind of stuff has been going on for a long time and it’s not
stopping. But it is folly. They can pass all the laws they want, but
they’re not going to erase the fact that slaves built Monticello, slaves
built the United States Capitol, slaves built the White House, and
slaves built practically every capitol building in every southern state,
not to mention most of the county courthouses throughout the south. They
can ban the 1619 Project from public schools, but they cannot hide from
what it says about slavery being a part of the founding of this country.
Look at Shannon Lanier. He knows who he is. No law in Texas or Tennessee
or Louisiana or anywhere else can change the fact that when tourists
visit Monticello today, they are taken through the room where Shannon’s
6th great grandmother lived and where she gave birth to Madison Hemings,
Shannon’s 5th great grandfather, and they are told about Thomas
Jefferson’s other children with Sally Hemings, and they are shown the
furniture that Sally’s brother John built that Thomas Jefferson
designed, and they are told about the lives of Jefferson’s slaves and
how they made his life as one of the “founders” possible.
History is alive in us. It flows through Shannon’s and my veins. It is
in the DNA of my children and Shannon’s children. History lives in who
we are and how we live our lives. They can tell all the lies they want,
and they can ban all the books and teaching materials they want, but
they can’t ban us. We are the legacy of our nation’s tainted past in
flesh and blood, and we are evidence that racism and white supremacy and
slavery may be in our past, but we are the future."
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