Regarding 3), there's no contradiction at all! What Jefferson meant to say was that slaves wanted (were disposed) to sleep more, but that they didn't need (require) as much sleep as they wanted, for working on his plantation and having sex with him.

Thomas Jefferson? Brilliant!

I lived in Oklahoma in the mid-to-late '90s.
Pretty much everybody "knew" that the town of LaVerne, up near the neck of the Panhandle, was a "sundown town." But nobody talked much about it. I think they played football, for example, just like everybody else.
About living in Oklahoma: I spent 30 years there-- between 1994 and 2000.

I grew up Livonia, Michigan. I thought everyone knew the color lines, not just the real estate agents who steered "coloreds" to the "right" neighborhoods. The "white flight" from Detroit was really just the VA/FHA fueled post-WWII suburban land rush in which blacks were not allowed to move anywhere but Inkster and Southfield, Michigan.
I'm glad James Loewen's recent book recent book tries to document this, but I doubt it will have any impact.

People used a lot of words differently in the late 1700s than now. Incontinence, for example, back then, meant a lack of chastity in women.

Perhaps "disposition" meant, to Jefferson there, something like "their position on the subject of"?

Seems like you are ignoring the power-lacking position of slaves. Uneducated in Virginia? Virginia was famous for having most of its white population illiterate (compared to 100% literacy in Massachusetts) and they were proud of it. Raise anyone like that and it won't take some flight of fancy or a stretch of reason to see them as inferior, especially to one of the greater minds of the era. Lots of smart people today can't understand why dumb people act so dumb.

bunny, that is definitely still happening today. It was covered on C-SPAN in the last few weeks. Something like 80% of the realtors the ?Fair Housing Authority? (someone, anyway) checked into sent whites to white neighborhoods and non-whites to mixed neighborhoods, to make them less white.

The sub-prime mortgage thing is also quite racist. Something like 40-50% of all the people who were rich who got these lousy mortgages were non-white. You know darn well that most high income people in America are white (not to mention, where it was worse, in middle or low income brackets).

Part of me thinks that the realtors want to avoid problems for themselves, and make the sale, so try to avoid hinting that a person might be tolerant. Another part of me thinks it is a subconscious reflection of the racism which is still around us, if only as a legacy (remember the part above how someone might seem pretty lame if they were raised a slave?)

The effect you're talking about was named the "snafu principle" by Robert Anton Wilson, who analyzed it.

For instance:
"It's what I call the "snafu principle." Communication only occurs between equals--real communication, that is--because when you are dealing with people above you in a hierarchy, you learn not to tell them anything they don’t want to hear. If you tell them anything they don’t want to hear, the response is, "One more word Bumstead and I’ll fire you!" Or in the military, "One more word and you’re court-martialed." It’s throughout the whole system.
"So the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the more lies are being told to flatter those above them. So those at the top have no idea what is going on at all. Those at the bottom have to adjust to the rules made by those at the top who don’t know what’s going on. Those at the top can write rules about this, that and the other, while those at the bottom have got to adjust reality to fit the rules as much as they can."

If knowledge if power, and power makes people stupid, doesn't knowledge make people stupid?

The answer is: power. Most little white children come from families powerful enough to shut out reality. Most little black children do not. Power makes you stupid.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Part of the reason why racial problems endure in the U.S. is that the biggest asset in the White Privilege knapsack is ignorance, deep and wide. Stupidity that would kill another organism on Earth is a virtue for whites here.

Power is a necessity and an inevitability, so we are forced to create rules to regulate it. It cannot be forbidden. But privilege is an unholy thing, unjustified power at the expense of another. All the problems of power, none of the benefits. Hell, all of the examples you gave in the original post are actually examples of power in privilege, not mere power. Being president or dictator or statesman gave the persons in the example a free pass, above and beyond what mere influence would grant.

From the jefferson you linked to:

"Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself;"

....

What the hell is a scarf skin?

scarfskin from answers.com

n. The outermost layer of skin, especially that which forms the cuticle.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is what really irritates me about the folks who argue that the disaster that is Iraq "was all part of the plan", and that "Bush wanted it to turn out this way."

When you believe that the people in power are literally incapable of error, because even their apparent blunders are really just the "success" of a secret plan, well, that's not a very good starting point if you're trying to organize the rest of us to oppose them.

There's another element to the apparent defensiveness of people in power, that seems less of a personality defect and more of a systemic condition.

The more power you have, the more you are responsible for conditions as they are. This is the principle behind the rhetoric of attacks on Washington "business-as-usual."

We see this in action when the current democratic government of Turkey is asked to apologize for massacres committed by the Sultan's troops. We see it when people complain about taxes. We see it when people complain about anything.

Also, I'd bet the reason Jefferson thought blacks liked to stay up all night, get up early, and sleep all day is because that's what they did. That's what they were told to do. So when they were awake and working they were sleep-deprived, but when they got up at 4 AM to start the cooking fires they weren't exactly snug in bed. The powerful always blame the weak for their condition. Don't we all believe fast-food employees LIKE crappy jobs?

Holy shit--I've cavassed in most of PA's sundown towns.

If knowledge if power, and power makes people stupid, doesn't knowledge make people stupid?

Thank you En Ming Hee; I shall herewith consider you partly but tepidly, in my corner.

I'm thinking that with power, comes stupidity, and thus anyone seeking power -- our side or their side -- will eventually turn just stupid enough. So planning the big revolution (the organized big change) will eventually result in stupidity as surely as drinking alcohol results in drunken behavior.

Unless you're really, really fat (er, I mean muscular), and can tolerate a lot of alcohol that is. So, I'm wondering if there's some condition that allows a person to get enough power to influence grand change, but not so much as to turn into one of the four examples above.

(And yes, I'm aware that people can drink smaller amounts of alcohol for social reasons and not get drunk, but likewise, smaller amounts of power are only useful as a social lubricant.)

Ted: The solution, obviously, is for individuals to have power for very brief periods. That way, they accrue very little power. Of course, there's nothing to keep parties and families from acquiring power and handing it to their members, but that's merely a limitation, not proof that this approach won't work.

Revolutions never won
Just another form of guns
And YOU will do
What they have done.---The Moody Blues.

Ted and Baldie, I disagree with Baldie. I don't think any sort of term limit is a fix. You'll just end up with a coallition that monopolizes a set of seats, a.k.a. a political party. Term limits are a pathetic solution, though they can be slightly better than the disease in some cases (e.g., when the parties are small and weak). The best way to balance power is with broad, unambiguous responsibility. Responsibility, of course, requires an external agency to enforce violation of the same. The President could have vastly more power than Bush does, but if we had even a mildly strong external enforcement agency over him (and, no, that's not Congress or the Court) he would already have been executed for treason.

THAT'S WHY I like Voter Initiative on the BUDGET AND TAXES----IT AIN'T revoultionary and in fact IS in line with THE CONSTITUTION and therefore institutional, different, yes indeed, but none the less, directly institutional.

No One of Consequence: HAVE YOU given Nancy a call @1-202-225-0100? Unless Bush is IMPEACHED, then he won't have to suffer ANY consequences. The next administration will have it's hands too full to go for trial.

Well said.