I also believe in the importance of broader acknowledgement and reparations. As I’ve said, I believe it’s important to acknowledge the harm my ancestors did, and the legacies of that harm.
(I would also completely understand if they weren’t interested, and out of respect I don’t think I would try to initiate a meeting.)Īs for what I’d say, that would depend. If a descendant of someone my ancestors enslaved wanted to meet me, I would absolutely want to meet them.
Would you want to meet descendants of people your family enslaved? What would you say? Saying, “I think a lot about my ancestors who enslaved people down in Red River it really wasn’t that long ago” is a very different, more vulnerable kind of conversation. Angrily lecturing a resistant neighbor about the history of slavery is less likely to be effective than an open-hearted personal conversation. The new laws forbidding historical discussions that make people uncomfortable have given this acknowledgement a new urgency, but also, I believe in the transformative power of personal stories. And the lasting effects of treating Black people as chattel back then are obvious in our systems today.īut I believe it’s especially important for those of us who come from this history to acknowledge it. So I’ve always known that there were enslavers in my family history. He described it as a benevolent system and considered our ancestors beyond reproach. My father was an overt white supremacist who mourned the end of slavery.
It’s hard for me to understand how anyone wouldn’t find it important to acknowledge that history and ponder its consequences, but in my case there was no ignoring it. A hundred and fifty years is the blink of an eye. Just a little more than three of my lifetimes ago, my ancestors were enslaving people. I was born in 1971, and the Civil War ended in 1865.
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