In the United States specifically, it’s easy to see that for African Americans, the most damaging of the works of these Enlightenment philosophers were the arguments made by Thomas Jefferson about the nature of enslaved Black people (not forgetting his outrageous speculation about the sexual relations between orangutans and African women on the African continent). The reason should be self-evident: along with Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson was the American embodiment of the Enlightenment, and he penned the words that “all men are created equal”—which he clearly did not believe, judging by these
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