Just a little something about racism and genealogy

So a few years ago, I wrote what I guess would be classified as a personal essay about this peculiar family heirloom that I will be inheriting when Mom passes away -- a quilt incorporating pieces of one of my ancestors' KKK robes -- and everything that entails. I had wanted to post this a few weeks back but I hesitated because of the protests and riots and, thank God, the national dialog that began emerging about institutionalized racism and white privilege. I decided not to post it then because I felt like I would be intruding on a conversation far more important than where I, as a white person, am coming from and how I got here. I still don't want to interrupt that conversation, but I feel like this might be at least a sidebar.

Growing up Southern and white, with the knowledge that my ancestors were slave owners, gave me a pretty disgusting feeling at a pretty early age. I wasn't even sure what to call it, other than "white Southern guilt," until I heard the phrase "white privilege" maybe just a year ago. That's the unsettling knowledge that you inherently benefit from the current system because of the color of your skin. That's the realization that store security personnel or police officers will probably never automatically consider you a suspicious person because of the human-suit your soul is encased in. That's the feeling I have had since I was about 13 years old when I found out that my family's fortunes -- lost as they were during Reconstruction -- were built on the bones of slaves, and their losses avenged by hooded men on horseback wielding guns and torches.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

This was the hardest thing I have ever written, and it is probably the hardest thing I will ever share. But it might go some way in explaining why racial injustices, particularly those involving authority figures, prompt an anger in me that makes it hard for me to even have a rational discussion about it. I can't do a thing about my ancestors' behavior without a time machine, but I can fight the same hatred when I see it today. It is not meant to be my personal diatribe about Ferguson, or Staten Island, or any of the other countless police shootings of unarmed Black men, nor is it meant to drown out the voices of people of color who obviously have more experience and more to say than I do -- this is just the road map of my own experience of white privilege and how I try to cope with a past I can't change. Read it if you want to, don't if you don't.

I'm posting it in three parts because it's a long damn thing and it might be easier to digest in pieces anyway.

The Soft Burden

(Part 1)

I sat in my parents' dining room, waiting for Mom to show me the quilt she was digging for in the bottom of her cedar closet. She came down the hall with it, cradling it in her arms as if it were swathed around an infant.

“Here it is,” she said, approaching me. “Here.”

I looked at it – an unassuming patchwork quilt. A top of purple and white squares, tacked onto a white backing. I could tell that my great-grandmother had taken some care in making it, but as Mom stretched out her arms to hand me the quilt I shrank back in my chair.

“I don't want to hold it,” I said.

“But you said you wanted to see it.”

“Yeah, because I kinda can't believe it's real.”

I stretched out a hand, hesitated, then traced the tip of my index finger over one of the white squares.

“That … this. This that I'm touching. That came from …”

“That's a piece of one of your ancestors' KKK robes,” Mom said, without a trace of pride or shame in her voice. “I'm not sure if it was Granny's father's robe, or her brother's, or her husband's. Could've belonged to any of them.”

I withdrew my hand as if I'd just touched fire. In a way, I had, though it was one that had been lit generations before.

Someday, “The KKK Quilt” – a most unsettling heirloom – will be mine. I'm my mother's only child, so there is no one else for her to pass it on to. But, like the culture of hatred attached to the garment used to make the quilt, it is not an inheritance I want.

Because of an intersection of geography, curiosity and open-mindedness, other cultures have bled over into my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up on an Air Force base among people from all over the world, and Mom and Dad raised me to believe that no race or nationality was any better than another. I began learning to count in Japanese shortly after I learned to read and started learning Spanish before I was 5. The friends I made when I was very little came from such far-flung places as Germany, Alaska and Barrio Pescado in San Marcos, Texas. I fell in love with old-school blues and jazz when I was in college and was nearly 20 before I learned that the fried chicken, watermelon, chitlins and grape soda I had grown up with were “a Black thing.” As far as I knew, it was all just food, much like my childhood friends were just friends.

I was not raised to look down on others – I was raised to learn from them. And as an adult, I believe in equality, human dignity and freedom and fighting ignorance with reason. Yet I don't feel as though I have found the kind of grace that washes me completely clean of the history of racism and hatred in my family -- the Southern version of original sin. Like the Judeo-Christian concept, this sin is something I was born into, though I didn't ask for it and would certainly prefer not to have it. But I don't know where to look for salvation, so I walk through this world feeling irredeemable. I might not want this inheritance, but it's not something I can just throw away, because it seems to cling to me.

So many of my friends' relatives were drawn to America because of the Potato Famine, the anti-Semitism in Europe and Russia ahead of World War II, or the crushing poverty and despotic governments in Asia and Latin America. These families were fleeing some kind of oppression and looking for freedom. Their immigration stories are beautiful and heroic.

My “coming to America” story is less noble. My privileged ancestors, all of whom came to this country before 1865, loved freedom -- but mostly their own. The story I usually tell is that my people came over from England, Scotland and France, where most of them had been aristocrats. They settled largely in the South, then made their way to Texas, where we've been for five generations. I don't mention that they owned plantations and people in several states. I don't say that we were impoverished after the Civil War because some of my ancestors abandoned their homesteads and fled to Mexico to avoid surrendering to Union authorities. I will announce with pride that my ancestors have fought in every war in U.S. history; I just don't mention that my family still talks about what our forefathers were doing during The War of Northern Aggression. I certainly don't mention the quilt.

Mom has done genealogical research for decades; books on the various branches of our family and notebooks full of pedigrees and photocopied letters and pictures fill shelves in her library. She was the one who found incontrovertible proof that our ancestors owned slaves. Court records and estate inventories she discovered in her research list people among my ancestors' property: “Sixty acres of land. Two mules. House servant, George, age 31. Four cattle.” Some of the court records give a person's name, age and value in dollars.

Over the years, I've heard dozens of people inside and outside the family give a litany of justifications for slave ownership: It's how the French and Dutch were building their wealth. It wouldn't have happened if Africans weren't selling other Africans to European traders. It's what the economy in the South was built on at the time. People didn't know any better. People have owned slaves since before the days of the pharaohs, so Southern plantation owners weren't doing anything new.

Although the idea of slavery fills me with revulsion, I could almost see how some people could find comfort in these attempts at rationalization. But there is no acceptable justification for the Ku Klux Klan. It was founded with a specific and malicious purpose, and the men who joined it did so with every intention of carrying out that purpose: using an arsenal of violence including lynching, burning and assassination to terrorize Black Southerners and white sympathizers and reclaim supremacy in the South.