1. Worth looking at @jbouie's feed for today as he deals with nimrods & knuckleheads who can't grasp simple historical connection (attested to by many historians) between ideological racism & Enlightenment.
2. There are a few details you could quibble with in @jbouie (new scholarship* has complicated our understanding of Locke & slavery) but what he's articulating is the overwhelming mainstream consensus of historians of Enlightenment.
3. This thread is good & the scholars recommended are super-salient. Key point is there is distinction between venerable phenomenon of xenophobia (distrust of other cultures) & ideological racism (posited hierarchy of humanity in age of global imperialism)
4. Here's the relevant thread with excellent recommendations:
5. One interesting thing here is that @jbouie is looking at Enlightenment as historian does (as a complex, evolving, time-bound thing). His right-wing critics are treating it as an etherial, ahistoric talisman offering perfect wisdom on individualism, freedom, democray
6. There is a fetishization of the Enlightenment similar to way fundamentalist believers treat sacred texts: it was perfect so can't be challenged or seen as complex, ironic, paradoxical, etc. "Racism is bad," implicit logic goes, "So Enlightenment can't be racist."
8. One paradox is that contemporary right, by fetishizing mythical Enlightenment, cuts itself off from rich, still-pertinent conservative tradition of criticizing failures & limits of Enlightenment.
9. Some of the earliest & sharpest observations on hypocrisy & limits of Enlightenment came from Tories & reactionaries. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Samuel Johnson owning Jefferson, 1776.
10. In fact, a large part of what's valuable in conservatism comes from comes from reactionary critics of its false claims to universality (think of Burke contrasting abstract "rights of man" to concrete "rights of Englishmen")
11. (This is tangential but the discovery of the value of cultural difference & contingent identity came from the reactionary right. It's not an accident that visiting Hindus in 18th century England found hospitality in the house of Edmund Burke).
12. Speaking of smart reactionaries, this is a good tweet by someone who knows what historical (as opposed to fetishized) Enlightenment was all about:
13. Completely agree here. The point is not to jettison Enlightenment (impossible in any case since it is too formative) but to improve by critique:
14. * Footnote on Locke: this is the paper that is revising consensus on Locke & slavery. Linkage of slavery with monarchy is very interesting & suggestive: academic.oup.com/ahr/article-ab…
15. I want to say one last thing about the way this Enlightenment business played out on twitter. What seems to have sparked this off is this thread by @jbouie which offended @bdomenech
16. @jbouie original thread was a response to a David Brooks column which claimed Locke (or, cagily "a story we tell about Locke") "paved the way for human equality, pluralism, democracy, capitalism" etc. 
17. Now, Brooks claim might be defensible if it at least acknowledged all the ways Locke was not a champion of "human equality" etc. (he denied natives had land rights, was complicit in slavery, had very hedged view of Catholic civil rights, etc.)
18. Brooks himself seems to know grand claim he's making is, in scholarly terms, bullshit. That's why he had hedge: "That belief, championed by John Locke, or a story we tell about Locke, paved the way for human equality": "a story we tell about Locke." LOL
19. Now, @jbouie is an extremely careful & conscientious writer with a much better grounding in scholarship than most journalists. The stuff he tweeted out was very mainstream intellectual history
20. The guy who went after Bouie is Ben Domenech, a very dubious character, who was able to send chittering flying monkeys, almost all of who argued in bad faith or ignorance, to harass Bouie for a whole day. That's twitter for you.
