Ununified

“Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state,” wrote [Thomas] Jefferson after describing his plan to remove free blacks in the event of emancipation, before answering with a litany of reasons: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” He simply couldn’t imagine an American democracy that wasn’t fully white.
Jamelle Bouie “Racial Blindness”

This is all true enough. In the end, it's not much different than the idea that "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Where President Jefferson may have had a failure of imagination is in the idea that a multi-racial society is, by it's very nature, a house divided against itself. It's been nearly two hundred years since President Jefferson died. And if you ask me, the "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained [and] new provocations" that Jefferson spoke of are just as real today as they were in 1818. Whether "the real distinctions which nature has made" are more than skin-deep is open to debate, but since, even at skin-depth, they are prominent enough that they have become very clear dividing lines, that debate may very well be moot. And so, the question becomes this: Why should President Jefferson have imagined a multracial America in the future?

One can argue that the convulsions between the parties have ceased in a way that didn't require the annihilation of either group, but I suspect that one would have to argue it, and in the face of any number of rational arguments to the contrary, one of which would likely be that the bombings in Austin, Texas that feature in Racial Blindness are only perhaps the most recent of an unbroken series of convulsions that has started long before President Jefferson's time. This is not to say that things haven't improved. They're much better than they used to be, even if you only consider the relatively short span of time from when I was in school to the present. But that's different from open, racially motivated violence and unrest to have effectively ended.

The whole point of Racial Blindness is to complain that American media and society treat White murderers more sympathetically than Black victims, and the article is one long list of recollections of other injuries that Black (and other non-White) Americans have sustained. While Mr. Bouie mentions President Jefferson's words as a means of indicting him for not seeing non-Whites as legitimately and properly American, he fails to rebut a single point that President Jefferson has made. There is no indication within the article that any successful effort is being made, by anyone, to heal the division of White and non-White into separate, and at least somewhat mutually antagonistic, parties. In fact:

There are important exceptions, but looking at the broad sweep of American society, to possess whiteness is still to receive, as one of its benefits, recognition as a full person even in the face of criminal behavior.

When we see a police chief defer to the self-spun narrative of a serial bomber or watch news outlets attribute misogynistic violence to lovesickness—while denying the same interiority and full humanity to black victims or offenders—we’re watching this pattern play out.

So... Where was President Jefferson actually wrong? It's been two centuries, and one can use Mr. Bouie's own words to demonstrate that President Jefferson was spot-on. Mr. Bouie argues neither that the convulsions created by prejudice, resentment, continued racism and/or nature show signs of ending anytime soon or these factors need not cause partisan divisions that threaten a broader democracy. Absent are any examples of a functioning multiracial democracy or republic that President Jefferson should or could have known about at the time. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about Jefferson is that if he were so convinced that representative government in a multiracial society was manifestly impossible, he should have made some provision for a genuinely sovereign state for the Native American population.

Be that as it may, it still seems strange to call President Jefferson out for noting a state of affairs that's lasted for centuries and encompassed his entire life. He would have had no experience with a society in which one race or another was not dominant at the expense of non-members. And Jamelle Bouie's point is that he's never lived in the sort of society he faults President Jefferson for not envisioning, either. Given this, the Liberia project (which, incidentally, created the first modern republic in Africa) makes perfect sense, even if one notes that the repatriated former slaves and free Black people from the United States did unto the locals as Americans had done unto the Natives. (Which would only seem to further reinforce President Jefferson's point...)

In light of all this, it seems that rather than complain about an American President's prophetic words, more progress would be made by finally rendering that prophecy inaccurate.