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Wednesday, June 30, 2021 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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Self-evident truths
Letters to the Editor…
By Jim Cornelius
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Agree with every word
To the Editor:
Passing through Sisters on June 23, I read
Jim Cornelius’ editorial in the then-current
Nugget (“A wrecking ball,” page 2).
I think it is the first time in my long life
that I have agreed with every sentence in
an opinion article. Some of the comments
prompted my enthusiastic “Yes!”
Heather Kerr
Sisters HOT Weather Forecast
Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon
Wednesday
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June 30 • Mostly Sunny
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HAPPY
4th of JULY!
Editor in Chief
The Sisters School District
is on the right track in focus-
ing on creating a sense of
belonging for ALL of its stu-
dents — and stepping around
culture war Claymore mines
and booby-trapped tripwires
such as Critical Race Theory.
As outgoing school board
chair Jay Wilkins noted in a
recent op-ed in The Nugget,
“Creating a sense of belong-
ing — if done improperly
— can feel like a zero-sum
game and create backlash or
resistance. If done properly,
it lifts every member of our
community and makes us all
stronger.”
Critical Race Theory
(CRT) isn’t an educational
curriculum — although it can
influence education — and
it’s not “diversity and equity
training.” As defined by the
American Bar Association:
“CRT is … a practice of
interrogating the role of race
and racism in society that
emerged in the legal academy
and spread to other fields of
scholarship… It critiques
how the social construction
of race and institutionalized
racism perpetuate a racial
caste system that relegates
people of color to the bottom
tiers… (I)t acknowledges that
the legacy of slavery, segre-
gation, and the imposition of
second-class citizenship on
Black Americans and other
people of color continue to
permeate the social fabric of
this nation.”
While CRT may techni-
cally be a legal analytical
framework — and a useful
one at that — it has come
to be used as shorthand for
a range of race-based peda-
gogical approaches, some
of which are truly bizarre:
Treating math as a tool
of white supremacy, for
instance. The “backlash or
resistance” to some CRT-
derived propositions is well-
founded. Parents are right to
push back against programs
that would inculcate shame
and self-loathing in white
students, or advance a para-
digm in which children enact
roles as a “privileged” class
or an “oppressed” class in
a fixed system. Parents are
right to fear that such teach-
ing will harm their children
and further divide people one
from another.
It should be self-evident
that this kind of indoctrina-
tion — for that is what it is —
is psychologically damaging.
That such manifestly out-
landish, divisive, and harm-
ful notions have gained any
traction in the mainstream is
evidence of how far our cul-
ture has strayed into a hall of
distorted carnival mirrors.
Despite all this, we must
seek to honestly address our
history. From the very begin-
ning, the greatness of the
nation and our ideals have
been shadowed by unlaid
ghosts of conquest, dispos-
session, and chattel slavery.
There is no better means to
engage with the complexi-
ties of American history
than through examining the
life and legacy of Thomas
Jefferson, the primary author
of the document we celebrate
this Fourth of July.
Jefferson penned
America’s civil creed: “We
hold these truths to be self-
evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit
of Happiness.”
Yet Jefferson was a
slaveholder, who believed
that Blacks were inferior to
whites. It has been estab-
lished to near-certainty that
he had a sexual relation-
ship with his slave Sally
Hemings and fathered as
many as six children with
her. Hemings was the half-
sister of Jefferson’s deceased
wife, Martha. Jefferson took
a teenaged Hemings to Paris
with him in the 1780s, when
he served as an ambassador
to France. Technically a free
woman in Paris, young Sally
reportedly refused to return
to America with Jefferson
until he granted her “extraor-
dinary privileges” and agreed
to free her children at the age
of 21.
Jefferson struggled all his
life to reconcile his libertar-
ian ideals and his personal
entanglement with slavery.
As the Thomas Jefferson
Foundation notes:
“Throughout his entire
life, Thomas Jefferson was
publicly a consistent oppo-
nent of slavery. Calling it a
‘moral depravity’ and a ‘hid-
eous blot,’ he believed that
slavery presented the great-
est threat to the survival of
the new American nation.
Jefferson also thought that
slavery was contrary to the
laws of nature, which decreed
that everyone had a right to
personal liberty. These views
were radical in a world where
unfree labor was the norm.”
And yet… he enslaved
some 600 people over his
lifetime.
We can learn much about
ourselves from studying
Jefferson. Like the man who
did so much to launch our
Republic, we are brilliant,
complicated, imbued with
noble ideals — and flawed
and fallible. We need not be
shamed by him, but we must
learn something from his —
and our — story.
Jefferson feared that
white Americans and Black
Americans would always be
two “separate nations” who
could never live together
peacefully in the country he
helped to found.
Can we come together,
at long last, to prove him
wrong?