Jefferson’s racism remained static for four decades despite counter-evidence

Evidence

In this work, Jefferson attempted once again to secure his antislavery credentials, after training for a lifetime as a slaveholder: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote. “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” In forty years, nothing had diminished his need to produce racist ideas—not the Black exhibits, uplift suasion, letters from abolitionists, Sally Hemings, or the loyalty or the resistance of enslaved Africans. Jefferson shared the same view in his Autobiography in 1821 that he had in Notes in 1781. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 408

Categorization

• XREF: Test case for the reader’s stated goal: here ideas seem to precede and persist; but Kendi’s reading is that the racism is produced by ongoing self-interest, not by evidence — Black loyalty and resistance were never counted as counter-evidence.
• QUESTION: This is a good pressure point against the causal inversion — Jefferson’s view was constant across forty years; does that count as an idea preceding policy, or as an idea continuously re-produced by policy interest?