ABSTRACT
Our third president, the prominent theorist of liberty Thomas Jefferson, wrote in his only major book, Notes on the State of Virginia, that black Americans are racially inferior to whites in reasoning, imagination, and beauty. Furthermore, in his view blacks are more adventuresome than whites because they have a “want of forethought,” are unreflective, and feel life’s pain less than whites. In an extreme animalizing statement, Jefferson further asserted that even black Americans favor white beauty, “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan [Orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species.” Blacks are also alleged to have produced no important thinkers, musicians, or intellectuals. Improvement in black minds comes only when there is a “mixture with whites,” which Jefferson argues “proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.”1 As our first major secular intellectual and a major slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson played a central role in the development of racial rationalizations for the enslavement of black Americans, including the dominant white racial framing of this society.
