New York Times Article about Jefferson Descendants

Date: Mon, Sat, 03 Mar 2001 23:38:27 -0600
From: “A.D. Powell” powell@danenet.wicip.org
Subject: New York Times Article about Jefferson Descendants

In a March 3 New York Times article [“Accepting an Extended Family”] , Reporter Madison J. Gray quotes the “white” Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings descendant Julia Jefferson Westerinen as saying that “white members of the Monticello Association would eventually admit that Thomas Jefferson fathered black children.” BLACK children? We are talking about the offspring of a three-fourths European mother and a father of “pure” European descent. That equals “white” in my book if anyone is “white” at all. It was also “white” to the laws of Virginia at the time the unofficial (not “black”) Jefferson offspring were manumitted. Every Puerto Rican in New York City has more “black blood” in one finger than any one of Sally Hemings’ children had in his entire body. Is Mrs. Westerinen, a resident of Staten Island, too dense to notice this? Evidently she is being miseducated into hypodescent ideology by her newfound “black” (actually mulatto and mixed-white with few “blacks”) cousins who also claim descent from Hemings and Jefferson (even though the “white” Hemings descendants are the only ones who’ve passed a DNA test). Mrs. Westerinen accepts the myth that her ancestor Eston Hemings Jefferson was “passing for white,” but she does not say when the line separating “passing” from “true” whiteness was crossed. Oh, how do we know that the Monticello Association has “white” members? Has anyone traced ALL their ancestry?

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/03/nyregion/03JEFF.html

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