Thursday, November 22, 2018

Play the Black Friday Quiz! Pick Our Most Racist-Xenophobic President

Take a break from holiday shopping and contemplate these appalling statements from our presidents. Post your selection and thoughts to FB or send me your private (mhl@illinois.edu). 
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First Entry: “Copy of a Letter from Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States,” First Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, at 13, (1818), available here https://archive.org/stream/ASPC0001932500#page/n11/mode/2up.
I received, in the last year of the administration of the general government, a letter from the governor of Virginia, consulting me, at the request of the legislature of the state, on the means on procuring some such asylum to which these people might be occasionally sent. I suggested to him the establishment of Sierre Leone, in which a private company from England had already colonized a number of negroes, and particularly the fugitives from these states during the Revolutionary War; and at the same time suggested, if that could not be obtained, some of the Portuguese possessions in South America as most desirable.

Second Entry: Theodore Roosevelt, Twisted Eugenics, 106 Outlook 30, 32 (1914), stating the case for “race survival” of whites, referring to “the vital problem of the perpetuation of the best race elements . . . I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding.”
Third Entry: President Woodrow Wilson, Third Annual Message (December 7, 1915):
There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to … debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.

Fourth Entry: President Calvin Coolidge, First Annual Address (Dec. 6, 1923), available in http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29564: “New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.”
Fifth Entry: Judges must not Legislate Security... Safety at the Border, or anywhere else. They know nothing about it and are making our Country unsafe. Our great Law Enforcement professionals MUST BE ALLOWED TO DO THEIR JOB! If not there will be only bedlam, chaos, injury and death. We want the Constitution as written!
@realDonaldTrump (Nov. 22, 2018, at 6:21 a.m.)


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