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This is chiefly to acquaint you, that I have visited the Negro School here in Company with the Revd. Mr. Sturgeon and some others; and had the Children thoroughly examin’d. They appear’d all to have made considerable Progress in Reading for the Time they had respectively been in the School, and most of them answer’d readily and well the Questions of the Catechism; they behav’d very orderly, showd a proper Respect and ready Obedience to the Mistress, and seem’d very attentive to, and a good deal affected by, a serious Exhortation with which Mr. Sturgeon concluded our Visit. I was on the whole much pleas’d, and from what I then saw, have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children.1 You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them. ---
I'm not sure that really that excuses being so racist that he thought _Germans_ weren't sufficiently white for america in his 50s, but he did change his views over time.
50s!
I repeat, 50s!
This was no teen edgelord.
This was a man in his 50s in a time when most people he grew up with didn't get any more life experience than that.
You can meet some old people today who still have very wrong views about minorities and immigrants, let alone people who lived in the 1700's.
You're simultaneously underestimating the people who were here before us and our ability to adequately scrutinize their moral fiber. Of course, if by "people", "person" or "anyone", you mean the powerful, wealthy elite of the US, it's another thing entirely.
These kind of biases are impossible to remove just with laws.
If you turn off binary thinking and start thinking in degrees of effect, the fact you may naturally have some aversion to people that are not like you isn't a fucking excuse to genocide a group of people because of what they look like.
Almost all the excuses worded like the ones above that I've seen are from hard racists on why they shouldn't have to change there harmful behavior to others by wrapping in infantile sayings like "Jon was born gay and I was born to burn crosses".
How?
Franklin would not be different.
We like to idolize these historical figures but if this guy was alive nowadays he'd probably be rage posting in alt-right forums only accessible on the dark-web.
>Ben... was an American polymath, a leading writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher.
Doesn't sound like the profile of your average alt-right rage poster.
Just like people today who think they would have resisted the nazis in 1930s Germany but hold all mainstream opinions in the modern day
So what determines that intrinsic and inevitable social status?
Terence McKenna's take on it, fwiw:
https://ehsto.com/blogs/undertone-journal/terence-mckenna-cu...
Nah. True rage posters don't have the attention span for Tor. They want the instant feedback of X. And for all the talk of echo chambers, they want to get people angry. So they want their material to be discoverable by outsiders. So, again, X.
He strikes me as a good candidate for Q adjacent stuff also.