Are you saying that our founding fathers, and specifically Thomas Jefferson, suffered from ignorance and prejudice? Would you concede that people have different ideas/notions of what constitutes beauty? These are subjective judgements. Do you begrudge Jefferson such a judgement?
I do thank you for posting that quote. That Jefferson didn’t find beauty in the black race assures me that he had no relationship with Sally Hemmings because it couldn’t have been a relationship in that situation. I appreciate, also, that he said that it ought to be able for us to quantify beauty. For me, as a woman, John Kerry is absolutely, strikingly ugly. It derives largely from the fact that his eyes are set downward. In everybody, but especially in women, I like the ‘cat eye’. Most people have their eyes straight across. Jean-Forbes eyes are set downward in an orientation I’ve never seen before, and that weirdness is compounded by the fact that his eyebrows look set to slide off his face.
Here’s another famous Americans position of pulchritude that I think might interest you:
Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare....Where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out, unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly. I could notice this as a boy, down South in the slavery days before the war. The splendid black satin skin of the South African Zulus of Durban seemed to me to come very close to perfection....
The white man’s complexion makes no concealments. It can’t. It seemed to have been designed as a catch-all for everything that can damage it. Ladies have to paint it, and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic, and enamel it, and be always enticing it, and persuading it, and pestering it, and fussing at it, to make it beautiful; and they do not succeed. But these efforts show what they think of the natural complexion, as distributed. As distributed it needs these helps. The complexion which they try to counterfeit is one which nature restricts to the few—to the very few. To ninety-nine persons she gives a bad complexion, to the hundredth a good one. The hundredth can keep it—how long? Ten years, perhaps.
The advantage is with the Zulu, I think. He starts with a beautiful complexion, and it will last him through. And as for the Indian brown—firm, smooth, blemishless, pleasant, and restful to the eye, afraid of no color, harmonizing with all colors and adding a grace to them all—I think there is no sort of chance for the average white complexion against that rich and perfect tint.
- Mark Twain, Following the Equator
Samuel Clemens might have been the original tanorexic or tanaholic. He was a redhead; his wife was white and he wrote testaments of love to her that make grown men cry.
I loved your comments! I was judging Soliton’s post from a political angle. Some people want to degrade this nation from its Founders; we’re seeing it as Obama’s popularity increases. You addressed the beauty of people and the contradiction of Jefferson’s [uncited] writing and his affairs.
I never thought of that angle, but you brought it to center stage with a proper entrance and presentation.
The response should be most interesting, if tendered.