Christopher Hitchens was Racist (by 2021 Standards)

i could do a one-hour livestream not
just about thomas jefferson but about this book about thomas jefferson have you heard in the newspapers in the last five years something controversial and interesting with thomas jefferson if so what would be you could just use one word usually like you don't have to write it a whole sentence over if i were to ask you the 25 people in the audience now what is the one thing you've heard about thomas jefferson in the last five years what's the one thing there are also quite a few books i have been reading that i may wish to comment on to some extent and by the way i'll be the first to knew that many of the books i want to talk about i have not finished reading there's one thing i learned honestly in more than five years of being on youtube what am i up to seven years some of that okay so something we've learned in many years in youtube you know um you're better off doing the book review when you're halfway through the book really really really try it try doing 1000 youtube videos and tell me i'm wrong you know and and by the way if you change your mind later do another video when you finish the book with further thoughts or what have you but normally most of your feelings and thoughts and what you want to talk about is going to be before uh you you complete the book and um if in case you don't know me in case we've never met before won't you but you know i've been reading an extraordinary amount about the period in between the american revolution and the writing of the constitution i just mentioned a lot of people don't realize there's a really significant period of history between the declaration of independence and the american constitution and it's a period in which anything could have happened and history would have been changed forever after not just the united states over the whole world and only very certain peculiar things did happen so in terms of just drawing a division between a secular and religious fanatic you know thomas jefferson that's the reason why the reason why hitchens is writing this ridiculous book flattering thomas jefferson thomas jefferson is on the secular free thinking side was he an atheist no not quite he was on the spectrum he was on the atheist spectrum we might say all right and you know again um [Music] certainly someone like governor morris an effete aristocrat uh living in wealth and luxury and you know so and so forth he was a free thinker and if not an outright atheist he was again on on the spectrum and these were people you or i if we got into a time machine and travel back time you could sit and have a delightful lunch or dinner with governor morris or thomas jefferson they're also morally despicable people now puritanical religious leaders like herman husband whether they identified as um quaker or as one of the myriad sex or again most people didn't actually call themselves puritan i mean it's kind of retrospectively in history we look back and say these people were puritans but you're talking about sort of a mixed bag of different protestant fundamentalist eccentric evangelical you know religious movements who call themselves all kinds of things but you know this type of strident christian extremist revolutionary you would not be able to eat lunch with in the time of the american revolution itself and then the struggles that continued after the revolution because again for some people the revolution didn't stop and herman husband keeps on fighting all the way through to what's called the whiskey rebellion or the whiskey rebellion period the period of whiskey rebellions plural that's after the writing the constitution there were poor people suffering under unfair and oppressive taxes to an unbelievable extent and the taxes after the american revolution were much worse than they had been before the american revolution now i'm not going to digress into explaining why and how that was i do know though it's not mysterious but it's technical and complex so you know and indeed it's just worth asking like if you're explaining this to a 12 year old kid they might say oh but i thought the whole reason these guys went out and fought the revolution was because they they were felt they were paying taxes that were too high then after the revolution the taxes are are way too high yeah we'll tell her husband about it so he got his gun and he went back to war i mean he remained at a state of war or siege with the you know supposedly democratic government the new united states america and he also felt that again i think most people would say correctly that the newly created government was not particularly democratic and was not particularly egalitarian bringing this full circle back to what i mentioned beginning why do you think the government was not particularly democratic why do you think it was not particularly calculating because that government was created by and for people like governor morris john adams and yes yes y'all thomas jefferson i mean if if thomas jefferson was not an aristocrat in the strictest sense of the term you know who was when you picture in your mind's eye an aristocrat you know thomas jefferson visiting paris in his you know 18th century you know culotte in his silk uh you know and his irmine and his male accompanied by his slaves thomas jefferson was an aristocrat i can't even say in all but name he was an earthquad in every possible meaningful sense of the word and he was received in paris as an aristocrat by other restaurants he was a land-owning slave-driving aristocrat now some people say that thomas jefferson when he was in paris started having sex with his 16 year old black slave that's grossly misleading according to this book she was 14 at the time i do not know what motivates people like christopher hitchens to write propaganda of this kind but the book really is propaganda it's this kind of awful shameful shoddy dishonest uh rewriting of history i really do not sympathize with christopher richardson writing this book at all um it's poorly written i mean it's not the quality how shall i say this quality of writing is patchy which is like it's not consistently terrible but like yeah but like like maybe one sentence out of eight i say out loud that was really badly written you know what i mean like that's it's not swinging for the fences um but you know obviously the style is not the the most important problem he still does this really teenage thing of trying to show off that he knows words you don't know so i think for you maybe there have been like five words that were not in your vocabulary like words you have never seen in english language for me i think it was maybe just one word but i i have an unusually i have an unusual vocabulary unusual is a good word for my but yeah um not a humble brag but yeah but even then like the other words that like i knew the meaning of and you didn't i was just laughing out loud i was like oh well melissa how could you possibly not know and use this word in everyday conversations it's just like ludicrously obscure vocabulary thrown in for no reason this is the least of the books problems all right so um so there was a 14 year old girl was sent across the atlantic in 1787 to join thomas jefferson in paris so thomas jefferson is on a diplomatic mission in paris and this slave girl is sent to him now according to this book she's 14 at the time other sources claim 15 or 16 you can imagine reasons why some people might want to round up the first clue to the relationship between thomas jefferson and this 14 year old black slave girl the first clue to the relationship may lie in the simple fact that jefferson having met sally and received his daughter from her in good condition did not send her home again as he had planned to do with the original escort he did not require an extra service at the hotel de longiac his well-appointed residence where sally's brothers james was already on the staff being trained as a french chef so her brother james you realize is also a black american slave and in france actually their slave contract is null and void these slaves would have the right to run away or even sue their slave masters so he's in a bit of a dangerous position bringing his black american slaves to france under these conditions uh possibly the latter consideration influenced him in inviting sally to stay on now i know something it may not be striking how it dishonestly is possibly the fact that her brother was there training to be a chef she was pregnant immediately after his arrival in paris oh yes well you know it's certainly interesting that he decided not to send her back perhaps it's because her brother was studying to be a chef who would write this sorry i'm going to say who would write this in 2021 obviously this is written a few years ago like i could get the the date was the date of first publication of this right it's not ancient history guys but you know okay uh so this was 2005 this was written what what is the point of writing a book that's going to deal with thomas jefferson's sex life if you can't really be honest with it you know what i mean so by the way uh shout out to shout out to several people in the audience who knew what i was hinting at uh answers to my question rich davin said quote he was sexually open-minded nacho who to us is known as not yet said that he had an affair with his slave so yes in 1788 jefferson began to pay wages to her and her brother james although he had never paid james a regular wage before moreover slavery was not recognized as legal on french soil a fact of which jefferson was aware and one that it would not have taken sally long to find out yes a 14 year old with absolutely no education would certainly be in a position to exercise their legal rights she could have run away but i mean in a country where she doesn't speak the language i mean why would anyone presume she is illiterate in any language 14 year old slave raised very literally on a slave plantation in uh in virginia jefferson and hemmings did not have a master slave relationship in the vile sense that is normally understood period no footnote no footnote no parentheses this is actually the end of the paragraph so he ends up he ends a paragraph saying jefferson and hemings did not have a master slave relationship in the vile sense that is normally understood 2005 christopher hitchens poses christopher hitchens not a genius quote most historians until recently took the view that a sexual liaison was literally unthinkable certainly unthinkable in the sense that historians barely thought about it for two reasons the first was the revulsion that it is simply assumed jefferson must have felt either for any carnal knowledge of a slave or depending upon the prejudices of the historian any carnal knowledge of a black woman now this is even more bizarre because melissa and i know where this is going next hitchens is going to the author of this book is going to proceed to argue that sally hemmings his black slave should not be considered black at all that she was not black that really she was white totally so you're you're saying you're commenting that some historians are prejudiced in that they can't believe thomas jefferson would be attracted to a black woman and then you proceed to argue that this woman was not black um in the case of do malone whose enormous hygiography of jefferson has been standard for far too long one suspects that the historian had great difficulty considering the question of carnal knowledge at all in so here we go here come the excuses in status sally was barely a slave what is that supposed to mean what is that supposed to mean so by the way if you guys don't know christopher hitch let me just disclose ethnically i am considered jewish now in fact i am only half jewish but politically i'm considered jewish right obama barack obama ethnically he's half black and half white nobody ever refers to barack obama as white right his political status in this society is his identity is being a black person okay what what was christopher hitchens ethnic identity he chose to identify as jewish and he was not even five percent jewish he had one incredibly remote jewish ancestor nobody in his family identified as jewish his own brother who was uh further to the right politically than him was more conservative than him his own brother repeatedly publicly denounced him for this and said in our family nobody was raised jewish his brother said that he doesn't identify as jewish that their own father and mother were in no way jewish that neither culturally culturally they were not jewish at all he didn't deny that if you went back and researched the family tree far enough there was this one remote ancestor who was jewish but like guess what if you go back far enough we all come from africa you know so christopher agencies how is it possible that christopher hitchens chooses to identify as jewish on the basis of a tiny fragment of his dna he went his whole life long at speeches charismatically telling the crowd that he identified as a jewish atheist that was his identity his whole life how is that possible and he looks at the life of a 14 year old black slave from the american south virgin virginia specifically state of virginia and he says oh well this person wasn't really a slave and wasn't really black and her relationship with her slave master who got her pregnant six times starting at age 14 wasn't really wasn't really slavery this is too christopher richards in 2005. he was not a young man in 2005. alexa in what year was christopher hitchens born on april 13 1949. he was born in 1949 so his age in 2005 was old okay he was officially old he was too old and what that's old you were old you were old enough about the birds and the bees and you were old enough to know about the blacks and the whites i mean you are old enough to know racism he was if he was 18 years old you know 21 years old like well kid you got some things to learn about racism in virginia like guess what still today in virginia if you are one-quarter black and three-quarters white your political identity is black but back in the 1770s through the 1790s let me tell you something if you were one-quarter black or one-eighth black in virginia like are you kidding is it really plausible that christopher hitchens is this ignorant or this stupid okay so he is he is claiming we continue creating quote in status sally was barely a slave and reckoning by quote race unquote she was by descent and in appearance very nearly white [Laughter] it's just ridiculous he's been i mean he spent time in america i mean i know he's british but still i mean he's well traveled especially with the united states well you know in a lot of these countries whether it's america brazil mexico the caribbean you know like are are you kidding jefferson was later to compose an insanely complicated ethnographical diagram to show how after a certain number of crossings between a black and a sorry so between a black person and a white person the this is a quotation do not okay youtube i am quoting a book i'm gonna hold up the book after a certain number of crossings the taint of africa was removed his words not mine sadly was a quote-unquote quadroon and both she and three of her sons the only slaves jefferson ever freed were able to register as white in the census of 1830. most of the so this is his claim behind this baffling most of their descendants continue to live on the white side of what is still america's most hazardous frontier which surely qualifies sally hemmings whose grave now lies somewhere into the parking lot of the hampton inn in charlottesville as one of the republic's founding mothers um so so there are a series of bizarre and impossible to support claims there from christopher hitchens the first is the claim that thomas jefferson's slave wasn't really his slave the second that she wasn't really black like why what do you have to gain by telling this lie it's just mind-blowing to me [Music] foreign