From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
One particularly compelling legend for Jefferson mashed up mythologies of sex and the animalistic nature of slaves, and then aimed that myth at Africa. Crafting this mythology was the most influential philosopher for Jefferson’s thinking on equality: John Locke, the father of classical liberalism. In Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, he writes that all men are created equal. But that statement only raises a question. What exactly is “man”? We don’t really know because the “real essence…is impossible to know.” Locke often takes gold as an example. Not everything that glitters is gold. So too, not everything that looks human meets the gold standard for full humanity. “Take my word for it,” Locke writes as he takes an ancient insult and begins sowing the seeds that cast African as animals and African women as secually depraved, that there are creatures in the world that look human but have “hairy takes.” “If history lie not, women have conceived by drills [baboons].” Locke continues: “We have reason to think this not impossible since mules…from the mixture of an ass and a mare…are so frequent in the world.”
For Locke, Africans are, at least potentially, the offspring of sexual liaisons between humans and monkeys. What to do with those with different skin colors and hair textures whose nature might lean closer to that of monkeys than that of Europeans? For Locke, that is a “new question” for a world being made modern. And this question was in no way merely philosophical speculation but was intentionally etched onto America’s collective consciousness and cultural common sense. If you ever wondered why people who shared European and African descent were referred to as “mulatto” – the Spanish word for mule – this is it. The very word our forebears used to refer to interracial community members signified their conviction that interracial meant less than fully human and implies that interracial sex is a moral crime akin to bestiality.