Exposure of Jefferson’s Hemings affair did not cost him white voters

Evidence

If Callender thought his series of articles would destroy Jefferson’s political fortunes, then he was wrong. Callender’s reports did not surprise many White male voters, either in Virginia or around the nation. If anything, Callender upset them, because some of them were having their own secretive affairs with Black women—or raping them—and they did not want such things publicly aired. Nationally, White male voters bolstered Jefferson’s party in Congress in the 1802 midterm elections, and they overwhelmingly supported his presidential reelection in 1804. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 342

Categorization

• XREF: A decisive evidence point for Kendi’s causal model: the policy/behavior (white men’s own sexual exploitation of Black women) reinterpreted the ideational exposure harmlessly — self-interest absorbed rather than overthrown by the ‘scandal.’
• DEEPTHINKING: The electorate’s reaction reveals that racist policy structures (here, legalized rape of enslaved women) made a ‘scandal’ about interracial sex affirm rather than threaten the voters’ own worldview — a sharp demonstration that self-interest, not ideas, governs which moral claims land.