I used your actual words, you might quible about "replaced Thomas Jefferson" (your words) vs "Thomas Jefferson replaced?" (my question), but I think that's rather silly.
No you've expanded on what you where saying, "removed TJ from the list of Enlightenment figures and replaced him with St. Thomas Aquinas" is a lot more specific, and doesn't imply any general removal of Thomas Jefferson from the history books, but it isn't what you said in the post I had replied to.
If they placed Aquinas on such a list its inaccurate, but no more so than other things I've seen in lists in schools motivated by politics, or just silly mistakes, for example having Hannibal and Cleopatra on a list of "great black kings", when neither was a king (ignoring the sex issue Cleopatra was close enough, but Hannibal simply wasn't), and claiming either as black was a stretch. Hannibal was from Carthage descended from Phoenicians, Cleopatra was a member of a dynasty of Macedonians, one that had a lot of inbreeding, and that also married Persian nobility. Even if the dynasty had interbred with the locals they ruled (which is likely not the case to any significant degree) declaring the Ancient Egyptians as "black" is rather questionable, to the extent that such race categorization makes any sense in the first place.
OTOH, "other people mess up such lists as well", doesn't mean that this particular list isn't messed up. Aquinas, having lived four to five centuries before the period in question, doesn't belong on that list. |
