This just in

[weaktwos]

A researcher claims that Obama's Ancestors may have owned slaves.

Doesn't that make him even more qualified to be president? After all, some of our Founding Fathers owned slaves.

All kidding aside, though. Given the practices of certain slave owners, aren't some "authentically black" Americans related to people who owned slaves?

I mean, can you control who your great great grandfather was? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, people. Should it matter where you come from in America? I thought it mattered what you do and where you're going, here.

Comments

[scarcrest.livejournal.com]

I think it depends on time -- both in the sense of the society where something happened (which may or may not relate to the modern world) and in the sense that nearer ancestors will have more of an influence on a person than far-off ancestors.

Far as I can tell, my family was always poor, agrarian, until my parents' generation. As such, there was -- far as the genealogy records show -- no one with enough money to be a slave owner. Both my parents picked cotton as children, and chances are good that at least some of the ancestors might have been white sharecroppers working alongside slaves in the pre-Civil War era.

That said, I don't think that having ancestors who owned slaves really says anything about a person living today -- at least, not for anyone under, say, 80 years old. While we don't have perfect racial harmony, the social setting has changed enough to make it irrelevant.

Parents and grandparents, though, can have an impact on one's views of the world, in a way that ancestors who are dead before we're born are less likely to have.

A person's own Klan membership, or a parent's Klan membership, in the 20th century -- that's more troublesome. I think Robert Byrd has probably atoned for his youthful involvement by now, but he's a Democrat I'd be wary of voting for if he ran for president (even if his age wasn't an issue) because of it.

Ditto for support of Nazis. George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, gave financial support to Hitler's regime and generally fit the profile of a war profiteer, and I find that deeply troubling, especially in light of how Dubya has surrounded himself with people who have had a financial stake in warfare and an ideological stance leaning toward totalitarianism. I'd feel the same if it was a Democrat whose father or grandfather had backed the Nazis, but I can recall none who have come to light in recent years.

[eyow.livejournal.com]

Parents and grandparents, though, can have an impact on one's views of the world, in a way that ancestors who are dead before we're born are less likely to have.

Yeah, but I really think it's more important to see how the person acts now. My grandfather is a racist homophobic jerk, and I'm really not. I wasn't the most open-minded person when I was younger, either...but that's also not who I am now, by any stretch of the imagination.

[scarcrest.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- they CAN have that impact. My grandmother and some of my mom's side of the family still use the N-word regularly. I wouldn't watch the Oscars with my parents this year because I didn't feel like listening to them grumble about Ellen being the host, or any potential shot of Melissa Etheridge and her wife, nor did I feel like arguing with them about it.

I do think candidates who have near relatives who are seriously flawed in some way should speak to the issue. But I'm not talking about guilt by association. (I didn't think Mel Gibson was an anti-Semite just because his father was a Holocaust denier, but after his DUI, I do. That was his own words damning him.)

[unclemilo.livejournal.com]

I'm just so sick of America right now. Apparently, the black community is saying that Obama isn't black because he doesn't come from enslaved ancestors... (and that was before this new news came out).

So apparently, the defenition of black isn't based on the color of your skin to the black community.

Which is absurd, since Obama's father is from AFRICA! He has a closer tie to Africa then the so-called true-black community...

Seems that people will go after you on whatever they want to if they're going to go after you no matter how hypocritical it makes them.

[pacalissanctum.livejournal.com]

I wonder if these people would be shocked to realise that even black people owned slave (granted a minority of those). Some bought back their family members and some just had the means to have slaves. Oi. How the hell is he supposed to rectify something that far in the past?

Now, if he had some indentured servants rumbling around his house, it's time for some explaining.

[bheansidhe.livejournal.com]

In Louisiana, where I'm from, there was a famous black female slaveholder, Marie-Therese Coincoin. She was a pure American-born African who bore ten children with her lover, a French plantation owner who freed her and gave her 68 acres of land upon his death. Her descendents were wealthy slaveowners themselves, and formed the cornerstone of the shadowy "third race," the Louisiana Creoles of Cane River, who were legally differentiated from blacks and allowed a limited set of white freedoms, such as the ability to testify in court and hold property. Creoles lost their freedoms after the Civil War, when their status was eliminated and they were grouped with blacks under the fatal one-drop-of-blood law.

This article in the Washington Post explains it well.

I wish more people understood the complexities of this institution.

[weaktwos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. That's a fascinating story.

It seems to me that slavery is erroneously treated as a race issue, though it happened to be predominantly functioning along race lines over here. Considering there's still forms of slavery going on in Africa today, complete with gang-rape and genital mutilation, it seems unproductive to live in the past unless you can learn and grow from it. If people are making a big deal about who your great-granddaddy was versus focussing on who you are today, then I don't think people are learning the right lessons.

That we're still suffering over the dark part of our past sheds light on how other cultures like the Jews, Palestinians, and the like can hold grudges for a thousand years.