Comments by "" (@tekannon7803) on "Lincoln was a race pessimist | Randall Kennedy and Lex Fridman" video.

  1. Randall, it is very interesting to hearing you and Lex talk, because you obviously know your subject inside and out, and Lex has become a master interviewer. What I think is very, very delicate is to go back in the heads of, say, Jefferson, Lincoln, Alexis de Tocqueville. Not because you have got it wrong in what they wrote---because they probably knew they couldn't say what they truly felt, so they adlibbed a bit. Look at it this way: less than 1% of artifacts of antiquity have survived to the present day. We try to get our heads around what Socrates thought and said and Plato and Roman Emperors and some writings have survived, but can we honestly analyze them as people correctly after centuries of time have passed? Can we honestly come up with Thomas Jefferson's actual motives and mindset with more than 2 centuries having passed? What I think we tend to forget is that there were not modern-day conveniences back in Lincoln's day and life must have had a grit and charm to it in his day that no matter how we try, we will always come up with turning Lincoln's own words to mean things that I am convinced in his time meant slightly different things. If I were President of The United States, my way of solving the race problem would probably go this way. I would say to people that everyone has to try to not think bad things of other people and when they do to try and say to yourself to avoid thinking that way. That's the end of the race problem in my mind. If people get to know themselves a little better and start to realize that when they begin to think negative things of whomever it is they find themselves in conflict with, I think the only thing we can tell them and keep telling them is to try their darndest not to let yourself think that way about other people. Now this is never ending, because every day you wake up you've got a mind garden full of weeds to pull, but it just may be the way to turn the page on the current way of looking at the problem...
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