I am writing this in response to the letter in the July 10 Swarthmorean entitled “Happy birthday, America.” It could be useful to parse the entire letter, but in the interest of brevity I skip to the last two paragraphs in which Thomas Jefferson is quoted: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Mr. Smith holds these words up with the hope that we will determine if they mean what “we hope Jefferson meant them to mean.” The problem is that we know perfectly well what Jefferson meant by those words. He meant whites, specifically white males.