re: #86 freetoken

Well, I don’t know the teacher and whether they were just being a dick or not. But I think it is wrong to simply assume that Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Hemmings, unless you want to believe that all sex is rape.

More fundamental in this case is the privileged male having a mistress. This would not be unusual, and more the case in 18th century for the elite, than rape. Now, I think it is right to point out that the male-mistress relationship is so one-sided in power that we can argue that it is immoral.

I’m not claiming that TJ didn’t rape his slaves, but if one is going to assert anything like that I too would ask for proof. As I would for any historical claim.

Even though it is undoubtedly true that many slave owners raped their slaves, not all of them did. In the case of TJ, I think the more interesting historical question to ask is whether Sally Hemmings started out a slave but ended up as a mistress.

You’re really missing the fundamentals here in a big way. Slaves cannot, by definition, ever consent to their Masters. Children cannot consent, period. Nominally free women whose children’s potential freedom from slavery is being used to coerce them to return to a state of bondage (Hemmings in Paris, being coerced by TJ to return to VA) cannot meaningfully consent. She was his slave and he serially raped her through most of her life, end of story.