“Somebody with that much privilege has the opportunity and the freedom to really think about a lot of shit, man, he came up with so much stuff. He’s a totally brilliant guy who you want to appreciate, and you want to love that kind of brilliance, but at the same time, totally out of touch and totally able to have the freedom to talk about liberty and freedom and to own six hundred people, that’s a crazy thing. The mental shift that that must require, the kind of blatant disregard - I grant you, it was a different time but— you have to be used to being handed everything to be able to not see something like that, right? And I think that’s what’s fascinating.”
Let that sink in for a bit.
And, on a lighter note:
“So, the more I study about him, the more amazing he gets. Like, his
early crusade for dogs that turned into a crusade against dogs. […] Came back from France, he was like, everybody needs a dog, dogs are great; and by the end of his life he was like, dogs are the devil,
fuck dogs.”
can I just emphasise how important his phrasing is in that last line?
it’s “to be able not to see”, not “unable to see”
saying Jefferson was unable to see in this case would be inaccurate; it implies either a lack of capacity or the presence of an obstruction. but saying he was able not to see means the opposite: that he was neither obstructed nor lacked capacity, but that he had the ability - the privilege - to ignore the dissonance in what he saw. he wasn’t prevented from seeing it, but was able to look away, because he suffered nothing in doing so.
and I just. it might seem like a small thing, but this sort of detail is really important in understanding privilege as a concept. it’s not that oppression and injustice are somehow completely invisible, that the privileged are being prevented from witnessing them; it’s that they have the ability to look away, to view the world only selectively, or - as in Jefferson’s case - to stare the proof of their hypocrisy right in the face and blithely assert that it means something utterly different.