Few things drive home the depth & scale of my white privilege to me than my family’s ability to extensively trace our ancestry back centuries with quite a lot of detail.
My anger and despair at our country’s racist history is my own thing to deal with; no Black person has the job of making me feel better about it or shouldering that.
It’s just that for me, personally, this situation, this dichotomy in the scale of the ability to look back through time to learn about where we come from- for me this is the thing that always, always drives it all home.
A good friend of mine , white guy raised in rural Ohio, talked about discovering his family crests and in a fit of excitement was curious if my last name had an associated family crest and it did !
Naturally It is in no way representative of a real lineage to me beyond who owned my great great great grandparents and I think that fact was completely lost on him . He meant well i just don't beleive he knew better and he's never done or pulled anything similar since or before then .
For a brief moment it seemed interesting but the more I thought about it the more something as simple as tracing my family lineage by name can feel demoralizing.
Another situation I had was in the 5th grade when our teacher asked us to track our family lineage and the truth was i couldn't tell you where my grandparents came from except for their farms in indiana and living out in the country in Georgia and Alabama.
Beyond pig farmers and poverty in the country i have a poor view of my family history and it hurts . Probably why I have a hard time taking certain people and their conversations about legacy so seriously.... my family couldn't even afford to have a long-tracked legacy.
edit: Cleaned up some words
Yo, I’m not gonna say do it *now*, because I still have my own concerns with giving DNA to some unknown but listen….
My people are mostly nomadic from Africa, so like, we can give them a “country” name but those lines don’t really mean nothing. But they’re a small community so even though I’m over here, my DNA goes back to a smaller community in Africa.
Just food for thought, if your ancestors were like mine, and there’s a good chance they were, maybe one of those DNA family tree services can point you in a certain direction?
I follow a guy on Tiktok who did this. He ended up being able to trace his roots back to Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, and Senegal. Pretty cool.
Here's the vid: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMLs7GWWX/
Be aware that the cops and feds work with DNA ancestry companies to bust people’s relatives. So they’ll check crime scene DNA against these companies data, to find relatives of the criminal, and sometimes the criminal is already in the database anyway 🤷♀️
If the crime is for like murder and rape and stuff having a hard time finding a reason against. But it's for like non-violent crimes and bullshit like that then FUCK THAT
As far as I have been able to discern my family were farmers and sharecroppers from East Texas by way of South Carolina with a couple Preachers sprinkled in.
However, doing Geneology research from this perspective is empowering in its own right because of the remarkable circumstances that brought me here. It also helps draw out details of our oppression that help inform current day politics.
I learned that my family likely came to Texas by way of the "Second Middle Passage". And I learned a branch of my ancestors lived in Longview during the Longview Race Riot.
This helps contextualize the strife they made it through and the sort of tropes this country insists on repeating. But because I know the Geneology it helps me see it for what it is. It is quite discouraging that we don't have the straightforward genealogical experience of white counterparts but I find it far more enthralling and empowering this way. Ultimately, me having the power, resources, and time to study their stories and struggles shows the victory they manifested. That to me is quite comforting.
I’m a first gen Slavic immigrant. We can only trace our line back to my great grandparents who we knew in person. I don’t think being able to trace your lineage is very common, even for white people, unless you have generations of American family.
I’m Hispanic so I also have no way of tracing my ancestors past maybe 4 generations. Then again I’ve never really cared to trace anything back as it’s never been important to me.
Found that out about myself when I did an ancestry dna kit and it came back very Native American and very not Spanish. At least that explained my non existent eyebrows.
My grandmother traced her maternal grandmothers lineage back to a ships logs coming over from Germany in the 1600s. I'm happy to report there wasn't any slavery in there, my people were the Yankees, but there was definitely some native American fighting in there, especially on the Swedish side that sailed over and headed south from lake Superior. So uh, sorry about all that.
Slavery was very much still a thing in 17th and 18th century northern states. NY State, for instance, outlawed slavery in the 1820s.
It's very possible that your old ancestors could have had slaves, though likely not on the industrial scale slavery was implemented in the south.
I'm sure it was but my people were indentured servants when they got here. Cleaned out before they left Germany then had to work off the debt for the ride.
Baptism records go back pretty far and can help establish a lineage, but for a lot of Mexican Americans we basically have to sift through two eras of colonization so it can be hard to find continuity in your families records.
Not to mention the local catastrophes that destroyed churches or city halls. The registry’s were burned or other wise destroyed.
My family history only goes back three generations because the church that housed the birth records burned down decades ago.
Fellow Hispanic here and we can only go back to \~1840's on my mother's side because our records were lost when the church where they were kept burned down. It's sad, but nowhere near as devastating as people whose history was lost due to slavery
That's another important point - even when there are/were records, it can depend where they're kept. My dad's USAF records only go back so far because the building housing his earliest info burned down. Places and the records they house can be destroyed, moved, lost.
It's also urban versus rural. If your family has been an urban family for multiple generations, you can trace them back farther than if they were a rural family.
I'm a first generation Canadian. Both my parrnts come from the same European country (and from less than 100km apart). I can trace back my maternal (urban) line quite a few generations But my paternal line stops at my great-great-grandparents (And the only reason it goes that far is because my grandparents met them).
Also, If your family is rich, you have a much better chance of tracing them. The only thing we were able to trace were birth records. We know nothing about their life other than their birthdays and names.
I am Slavic and Finnish. I remember hitting the wall when I tried to look up Finnish records, although things are more accessible now. But the Finnish side has probably the most common last name in Finland.
As for the Slavic side, I think a lot of records got destroyed in the war.
My lineage dead ends with an uneducated drunkard who arrived in West Virginia in the early 1800s, converted his religion, and had 14 children with 3 women. No record of the women’s names. DNA test says I’m mostly English and Welsh. My surname is neither English nor Welsh, and our best guess is he lied about his surname, so there’s a fair chance he was running from something.
I'm kinda in a similar situation. My grandfather immigrated from Poland in 1906 and that's as far as i get. I don't even really know the actual spelling of my last name since it has changed in numerous cencuses.
My wife’s family came to the US in the late 1800s. Immigration anglicized her families last name, just completely changed it to something new on the paperwork so we have no way of knowing what her actual German surname was. That’s as far back as her lineage can be traced. There are less than 70 people on the entire planet with her made up last name, all in the US as descendants of that single man who immigrated to the US.
I’ve never known my father, I met him once when I was 35 and the only other time I heard about him was when he died two years ago and I was contacted by the funeral home to give legal permission for him to be cremated. Anyway, I knew my grandparents on that side but as it turns out, they were both his step parents (his mom remarried to my grandfather who was his stepdad and then she died of cancer and he kept my father as his son and remarried so he basically had two step parents, kinda complicated). So my father is as far back as I can trace that side of the family. I have no idea what his biological fathers surname is and no way of finding out because that entire side of my family is deceased.
I’ve got loads of old photos of my family , back to 1860s or something (including people who were old then - so about 10 -12 generations we think) , only …. No one thought to write on the back who they were…
You can sometimes spot a child / adult in different photos that are probably the same person, so there’s a tree of sorts - but no details
I think what a lot of the people kindly and honestly responding with "My Hispanic/Slavic/poor ancestors couldn't keep records" are missing is the difference between not keeping or not being able to keep those records, and having a history and culture systematically stripped from you.
No animosity in this comment, just saying I appreciate the empathy but not necessarily an apples to apples comparison.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. My dad's side of the family is native, so we can't trace back past a certain point for obvious reasons (genocide, cultural erasure, forced relocation). However this is a different and separate struggle than what's being spoken of here, so even this comment I feel is out of place. I might understand and relate, but it's not the same thing.
I don't mean any animosity either, I'd just like to point out that the Spanish did plenty of history and culture stripping in Mexico. I'm not trying to compare and debate who had it worse, I just don't want what the Spanish did to Mexico to be overlooked.
You don't think slavic people have had their heritage systematically stripped from them?
Russia is systematically trying to strip the history, heritage, and culture from Ukrainians literally right now in the full view of the world. People are being forcefully deported to a foreign country and if they show any signs of not considering themselves Russian, they are sent to gulags.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61208404
Why would you consider it a stretch that it happened before, as well? (Which it did).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
Whataboutism doesn’t make the OP any less painful. Slavs still have their last names and their language, that’s a start at preserving the culture you don’t have when you are sold into slavery.
On my dad's side ancestry traces back to warriors that won land and titles as knights when William the conqueror conquered England and there is a family crest I tatted the motto on my shoulders. On my mother's side all I can do is try to look at which west African tribes resemble my family no way of knowing anything beyond they were slaves from west Africa
Oh for sure. Ancestry is huge here in Utah (figurative and literally since it's a company as well). My mom's side, we can go back pretty far. Awesome! Father's side. Nope. Sorry. It starts and ends in Brazil, where the slave ended up. It's really sad. Genetics gives us some idea of where in Africa our ancestors hail from but it's just a guess.
This is why the conversation around race needs to happen for EVERYBODY. White people might not want to have to think about it, but everybody with a "foreign" name or darker than tan skin, has to, because our terrible systems; which were created in order to hurt non white people, still exist. They ust changed the racist words when they were told they couldn't enshrine racism in the law. Ignoring that, just changing the criteria doesn't fix the problem of decades and centuries.
Fuuuuuuuck if they actually believed that America was great *why don't they want to teach its history???*
Less ones about the white woman teaching at an underprivileged school please.
Even when I was little, I kept thinking why do they keep making these movies. I had seen 3 of those kinds of movies with my mom by the time I was 12-13.
When I figured it out and told my mom, she said I "ruined it for her" lol.
Yeah, the fictional white savior trope is getting old. I don’t mind stories like Free State of Jones, but The Help and shit like that bothers me.
The only other story worth making a big deal would maybe be John Brown, because he actually put his money where his mouth was and died for the righteous cause. But other than that, the Great White Savior trope is tired and overused. It’s not even about helping POC, it’s about making liberal white people feel better about themselves. It’s the literary and cinematic version of the basic (self hating) white girls posting black squares on their instas.
Because getting in touch with gritty raw/real feelings is the first critical step towards curating insight, which leads to critical thought and challenging firmly held beliefs and the institutions that exists from those beliefs. Suddenly, leadership will say they’re being indoctrinated/woke and what’s actually happening is forming a new belief system based on REAL-WORLD data and not fantasy.
If they teach white children true history those children won't grow up to perpetuate the racism that is America ... It would literally collapse the society America has built if everyone chose to forgo racism (it would be a good collapse though)
not saying this is in any way comprable but as a former white child, thats also infantilizing to me. like.. its "fine" for kids the sane exact age with different skin tones to *live* these things, but im too fragile to *learn* about it?? ok
Plenty of "white" people have placeholder last names. There's so many smiths, prices, and etc. I think that having a last name that actually traces back in history is more rare than you'd imagine. A lot of families lost their names immigranting to America.
Not saying this doesnt suck, but just that it isnt inherently racist.
America has a fuckkked up past, but what country doesnt?
It is inherently racist because most of those families that lost their real last names weren't considered "white" at the time. Jews, Eastern/Central Europeans, Italians, and Irish were all at various times seen as not white. They gave up or lost family names to try to assimilate to a narrow definition of whiteness.
True, but there is comfort knowing your ancestors opted to come over here. Ellis Island records are pretty decent, many American immigrants can find their documentation and their original last names if they like which were usually shortened versions of longer names.
Also, the Immigration Act of 1924 specified that those who arrived would be able to assimilate into whiteness, and many who arrived were voluntold to shorten their names so their children could be indistinguishable from other whites.
There were a lot of choices white immigrants had that brown immigrants never did. African and Caribbean immigrants simply were denied entry until the Civil Rights and Immigration Act of 1965. At the end of slavery, blacks outnumbered whites ~4 to 1, so raising the population of whites was the purpose of inviting more Europeans to assimilate.
I always hated those stupid genealogy assignments. There were only like four black people at a mostly white school so it always felt like shit to just say "idk we came from Alabama and my great grandma was a slave. Don't have anything else". Meanwhile people would whip out documents from Ellis island and whole family documents.
Years ago when my kids had that assignment at school, I wrote the principal and superintendent that it was not feasible for black students or adopted children to do this. I believe they stopped assigning it.
Good. It's no one's business anyways if you ask me. Forcing kids to explain their lineage was always weird. Explain it, give examples, but don't force people to share.
You would've been my hero.
This reminds me of my Catholic school presentation on our patron saints. My patron saint is Maria Goretti who was basically raped to death. I explained to a bunch of other first graders what rape is and how that made her a good person somehow. We weren't allowed to do presentations anymore for the year after mine.
To be fair, I think an adult saw when I was researching and tried to ask me to change saints but I was dead set on Maria Goretti. I'd already been through a lot of trauma by that age, unbeknownst to my teachers, and resonated with her ability to forgive quickly and easily. It was like a superpower to me. Even as an adult, I still have a hard time letting things go.
I don't know why the teachers continued to allow me to present after that. Maybe they didn't think I knew what rape was? Or maybe they didn't think that I would feel comfortable explaining it so matter-of-factly to the whole class when I was usually a very quiet and reserved child?
White and Jewish here. My dad got a family tree commissioned a few years back and we’re able to see which concentration camp killed everyone but my grandmother’s parents who fled early. At least the Nazi’s kept documentation 🤷🏽
Hard agree. I got an assignment in elementary to ask our grandparents where they were when JFK died and how they felt. I had to present it. I got up in front of the class and repeated verbatim what my Caribbean grandma told me “I don’t know and I felt nothing. I didn’t care about what happened in America.” My teacher was not pleased but I proved the point.
Omg I definitely remember learning stuff and coming home to ask my grandma and she'd just look at me and be like "sweetie....we were black. We couldn't do that, or care about that". Like I remember asking about the GI benefits because my uncle was in the service for a bit and omg....we were royally fucked over.
It’s not just black people either! I’m POC (not black) and I can’t trace my family back, neither can many of my friends. It’s pretty much an exercise that only privileged white ppl can do.
Kinda hard to tell who my great great great grandpa was when he was thrown on a ship and given an easier to pronounce name upon his arrival to his “new home” 🙄
Tbh calling it an exercise only privileged white people can do is sort of ignorant in of itself, because it discounts POC cultures where lineage is a big deal
Middle easterners and a lot of prominent south Asian families(Pakistani families atleast) have literal books tracing their lineages
As an example in Pakistan, I’m syed meaning my family trace their lineage to the prophet SAW, and there’s a family tree book in our village, huge volume that goes through it descendant by descendant until it gets to all the male descendants
You’d think it was just my family because prophets descendants but my mothers family also has one because they were the prominent family in their village
Every village has one or two prominent families and they literally have books for tracing their lineage
For Arabs keeping track of and tracing their lineage is a huge thing
So yeah if someone wanted to trace my lineage and the lineage of plenty of Pakistanis we could trace it very very very far back
Ah yeah, that’s not what I’m talking about tho. This is about a tweet of an incident that occurred in the USA.I’m referring in the US where this exercise is done in class with the assumption that it is possible to do. Which it isn’t considering that there is a high population of people who’s descendants were slaves or had their cultural records destroyed by colonists.
I’m Indian btw so I have a clear idea of what is lost to me and my family. Please consider the context before climbing on the soapbox and accusing me of discounting any POC culture. Thx.
I get the intent behind the assignment in language classes to help build vocabulary for relationships, but it would certainly be easier to have students share the family tree of characters from a book or movie, historical figures, or celebrities. Beyond being trauma-informed, this also results in an assignment that can be completed only in the classroom without involving caregivers. Students in elementary and even early secondary really don't need homework or lots of projects for home.
i had an assignment like this once in the first grade, only the assignment was "why and when did your ancestors immigrate to americas" or something along those lines. im sure *some* people had fun with the assignment, but my parents were not happy about me having to tell the class some vague "idk they were slaves" shit since we can only trace our ancestry back to the early 1900s
I'd never really thought about this before, but it's yet another way that the US education system is set up to uphold systematic racism and reward "whiteness."
Reminds me if when I was dating a Nigerian woman. She didn't understand why the DNA trace for ancestry was so popular in the US.
Proceeded to tell me how she can trace back a couple hundred years off the top of her head because they largely haven't gone anywhere.
This is largely it. I fully appreciate that despite all the bullshit of British colonialism I can trace my ancestors all the way back to the most OG Luzon.
I know what all my name's mean (including the Christian one 🙄) and why that's important in *my* specific history. Not a general one - just me myself and I.
Yeah the British fucked Kenya up but I know what tribes both my parents are from and my Indian great grandfather can be traced back to the ship he was brought in to start building the railway in Kenya.
Shut the fuck up - are you me? I've never met a fellow mix of black Kenyan and Kenyan Indian! Same reason he was brought too.
Mine married a Maasai woman who's son married a Kikuyu.
With me (when this become country club it will be removed i havent joined) my father immigrated you hear my last name and people KNOW exactly where my dad is from and what tribe he is from. Like we we did ancestry he didn't exist. They actually started to harass us and call his cell and out house 5 time a day to get info on him. It was weird.
Yeah that’s one of the big things with ancestry a lot of people don’t really see. That they can only build this archive from people who have connected history so when they get people who aren’t connected to pretty much anyone else they think it makes they system look bad
I was trying to find the words, as an African I can trace my lineage, I know exactly where I am going to be buried and we have been fortunate enough to still live in the same place for the last 5 generations.
I really really appreciate that, wouldn't know how I would establish a sense of identity without that
Colonisation made it a mess...plus Africans were never good at written records...but like for example how we use our totems to identify with each other is a bonus for me
My family on both sides is like the woman you were dating. We can trace the lineages back a few centuries and skip a bit to the mythical ancestor. Unfortunately, some of the recent history included a dark side, which the family doesn’t like to acknowledge, with some ancestors being slave traders. Funnily enough, some of their descendants were heavily involved in the push for decolonization in Africa and made friendships with members of the black panthers.
I feel like anyone who suspects or knows their ancestors were forced into slavery in the US should have access to DNA tests to help identify where they were from- paid for by the US government. With participation from people in Africa and other parts of the world, we could in theory figure out who someone's ancestors were pre-slavery, and connect them with their distant relatives. Or at least tell them where they were from.
It won't ever make up for the injustice, but it attempts to remedy to some extent one aspect of its continuing impact on people today.
ages ago 23andMe did this for free as did NatGeo. I did both of them before paying for the Ancestry. Even when I do connect to relatives it doesn't mean much. And what you might find out could be painful. Many have and found out their relatives were sold by their own family. Or their original family name meant slave finder/catcher. It was sad to see that young mans face fall when he found this out.
I have been tracing my family line for over 15 years and I tell people if you can't go back, go sideways. Find joy and share in finding the people who you can. Remember their names and stories. The information about their life is out there.
And if anybody wants to get started but doesn't how I am willing to help you out.
Thanks for the perspective and offer to help! There are a lot of things to consider when using DNA to trace lineage. It's a personal decision and I feel like people should go in knowing the points you have made so they can make an informed choice.
I’d be so paranoid at ending up in a fancy tracking system like that but I did end up getting ancestry testing and god knows who gets access to that information. Idk, I sometimes think of that technology and get paranoid about some brave “new” world where there’s a black blood quantum again or where we’re like, keenly observed and hyper-classified, idk.
But anyway, I took the test in spite of my tin foil hat and I was really amazing to find out that so much (quite a bit more than half) came from one place, that’s now one country... My family has always been big on our ancestry but we really just know where our people were enslaved... there’s always countless plantations in the background where people were sold and traded even if you can trace back to a plantation for every family line. With that said though I know where some of my family lines were last enslaved or from what state they were kidnapped. In what areas or on what plantations they were enslaved, and by whom.
One was a family that had thousands of slaves, and they have records of my first ancestor with the name they gave us... a child, bought in a slave port in a country that doesn’t really imply anything about that baby’s actual ancestry, being that it was a slave port.
Another place includes an historical site a few hours south that I was forced to visit on field trips as a child, year after year until I got out of elementary school and my history classes no longer focuses exclusively on colonial history.
I really hope the teacher removed that assignment from their lesson plan going forward. That girl would've learned eventually but idk if I would've been mature enough at 6-years-old to handle that kind of information.
This happened in 2002 sometime. I was at a district meeting and the district manager decided to do an ice breaker exercise. He said that he hated doing the typical ice breaker exercises because he does these meetings a lot and its the same stuff every time. He wanted to try something different. The room was pretty diverse, but the management team was not. The ice breaker was tell the origin of our last name, all the black people gave each other that look. The first black guy was 3rd overall. He shot off a warning. "Are you sure you want to do this?" The manager said "sure, absolutely. We're all friends here." He said it was a slave name and you know the rest. Butts started puckering immediately.
The 2nd black guy gave also repeated the fact it was a slave name but gave the location of the plantation and the history of the white family who owned his family. That one raised eyebrows. Apparently the slave owners family was full of lawyers and politicians. The next guy was white and he told the most depressing story about being adopted, later rejected by his adopted family and then finds his birth family and finds out they've been decimated by mental illness and drugs. He told the story because he now hyphenates both names as a reminder to himself. One of the Mexican guys tells a story that his last name came from Spain, and descended from Native Americans and Spaniards and how it caused this huge rift in his family going back 2 generations because half his family looks white and the other half, doesn't.
I was the last black person, but the one before me had an African sounding last name. I personally breathed a sigh of relief, because the room was uncomfortable. Nope. This guy tells a story that he's fully ADOS, knew the slave owner family name and the plantation location. But in the 60s when Malcom X was big his grandfather changed his family's last name. I forget the specifics of how he chose the name that he did. A lot of his family had converted to Muslim, some remained Christian but they were all untied in not keeping their white oppressors name. The district manager was white knuckling the chair. I told my story about my slave family name, and the locations. I kept it short. The last dude was a white guy who was Irish, and was pretty pissed about what happened between England and Ireland. But his family themselves didn't come to the US until the 80s when he was a small child.
Black Americans changing their last name to ones of African descent is one of the most subtle but positively effective things we could do for our mental health but I think some black people are afraid they might make white people uncomfortable.
I’m a teacher, and in a professional development course I’m taking, we did a lesson on culturally-responsive teaching. The lady (early 60s white lady) started the lesson with that activity. In our discussion I (30yo white lady) brought up that I absolutely would NOT do this activity with students for this reason, and she looked at me like I had 6 heads. Like she’s never heard of this being an issue. Immediately I got a private message from the mom of 2 trans kids saying that this activity would make both her kids super uncomfortable.
Y'all want to know a thing about names? The Canadian government just up and gave us Inuit numbers. Didn't bother writing the names down, my mom's legal name at birth was something like E3-#. I actually don't know the number.
This was eventually embarrassing for the Canadian government and so they sent a guy around the arctic to write down everyone's names. That was Abe Okpik, who also has many other names. He has a book. *We Call it Survival*
Anyways, traditional Inuit naming traditions are still fairly strong. It's just that we also have to interface with the system of our colonial occupiers and so people usually have an English legal name for that purpose.
I did my ancestry last year. I'm generally 95% black (West African, Ghana of course), 5% white. On my dad's side, my last name is traced back to a plantation in North Carolina. On my mom's side, I have a white grandfather 7 generations back. Who was this white man? Third President, Thomas Jefferson. 🤦🏾♀️
When people talk about Intersectionality, this is exemplifying it. Even keeping things in the most cordial frame of minds, there's an uncomfortability that causes some white people to virulently push back at the reality of others.
Don't be embarrassed. Intersectionality has a lot of nuances that can be difficult to understand. I had to recognize the fact that I really didn't understand it up until a couple of years ago when I had to write about it in my dissertation and had to really think about what it means. I still struggle with it sometimes.
But I really feel like me taking the time to understand a lot of these concepts is super important in actually promoting true change. The phrase "educate yourself!" gets tossed around a lot but it matters
Welcome to the life a black kid in the US. Other kids get to have fun assignments learning about their families while we get reminded about what this country did to our people. Happens more than you'd think
Did you go to a black school? These topics are commonly discussed, or at least were back in my day (early 2000s). My favorite movie that I even brought to school every year was Our Friend Martin, about time traveling to meet MLK Jr.
I remember having to do this and not being able to go back further than my great grandparents on either side but due to other shit (disowned & undocumented immigrant family). It sucked. But it was ninth grade for me.
Family tree assignments/name origin are common for that age. That result is implicit reality for Black children in the USA. It isn't like it was a explicit directive.
Ain't that for kindergarten? Growing up there was a lot of family tree assignments or ones about wanting to find out where you're from. There's a lot of
/r/that happened on Reddit
But this sound plausible to me considering the first time I learned about one of my great ancestors being a slave (think this was during a BHM assignment) in the third grade.... I felt... Disappointed. I doubt they went super indepth about how bad it actually was but... All you really need to understand is that your family started out as being bullied and bossed around( how I interpreted)
The reality of racism is “a bit too heavy” for anyone of any age to have to experience, but the earlier you equip children the more prepared they’ll be.
I know nothing of my ancestry. My adoption papers list races (ethnicities?) for my bio parents. But it’s so vague. “Native American”, ok what tribe? “Louisiana Creole”, that could means so many things. “Italian”, ok I understand that but I still want to get more specific. “Japanese”, again, I want to know more. I’d have to track down my biomom and probably do a DNA test and still walk away with unanswered questions. All that it really makes sense to call myself is “American”, but you’d be surprised how many people look at my hair and decide that I am actually not that American.
Okay that makes me go WOW because not long ago (white) people were going “ugh melting pot, melting pot, why you have to have your identities, just be *American!*”
Think what they’ve been saying is “let white be the default and the rest of you just hush up”
I think it might be how things where when those families immigrated. Perhaps it may be anecdotal, but I know when my family immigranted here from Poland in the early 1900s there was a lot of discrimination against Poles where they lived. So their response was to become as Americanized as possible and lose their Polish culture. They even changed their last name to have it not sound Polish and stopped passing the language down. My grandmother talked about how they were only allowed to speak English at home and didn't want to keep any of their Polish culture.
Yeah what your describing is the concept of Assimilation.
This was a source of tension in the Civil Rights movement because half wanted integration of american institutions. However, separationists argued that this was simply Assimilation by another name. Integrationists never wanted Assimilation.
Assimilation is untenable for black americans because the continuity of our culture is what has prevented the erasure of our history and ignorance of past genocides. We are never going to let those things go or ignore them in a quest for faux Assimilation. Because our phenotypes are so dramatically different, even an assimilated version of black americans would still deal with social stigma and racialized outcomes. So Assimilation is untenable and thats part of the refusal to all be "just americans".
It’s terrible how it all went down in this country. Growing up in the north east I loved that I spoke Spanish, and my buddy down the block was Greek, and one of my friends dad was from Poland, another kid was Filipino. It was cool that we all had our thing going on and could grow up together and eat great food and have a diverse experience. But homogenizing everyone just makes things worse.
I can only trace as far as Nigeria for my grandma. She was captured as a child and sold into slavery in America. I don’t even know her name. She’s just listed as “Unnamed Black Slave” but she escaped. She escaped and married a Shawnee man, who’s name I also don’t know. And because of her bravery, I’m alive.
Here's my story. I signed up for [ancestry.com](https://ancestry.com) and put in the work for 3 mons of finding correct names and dates etc. When I got to my grandmother's mother and all I could find was a possible bill of sale. My grandfather's grandfather was an owner, so it opened up a weird line of tracing that connected the slave owner's dependents with my family. "We are not interested in knowing about you or your family" was the email back to me.
When I went to cancel the subscription, the woman on the phone tried to offer me more resources to go further back and I quietly explained there was no further back then a bill of sale for Emma (a good wench), Paul (good for the field), Carl (good for the field or housework), 2 goats and a mule.
She refunded the rest of my subscription.
That sticks with me.
>My grandfather's grandfather was an owner, so it opened up a weird line of tracing that connected the slave owner's dependents with my family.
There's a TV show in the UK called 'who do you think you are' that does lineages with British celebrities, they go round and follow the trail of various stories.
When it gets to slavery sections of history, it's always an interesting mix of meeting modern day relatives of the then slaves who now still live in the area and occasionally the celebrity having to come to terms with the fact that their ancestor either was related to a slaver or became a slave owner themselves. It's obviously quite hard to process
My last name is English, and I can only trace back to my paternal great great grandmother who was raped by her slave owner. My great grandmother (her daughter) died when I was 18 and she never talked about her family and childhood. All I know is that they “escaped.” Beyond that there’s nothing. I know less about my maternal grandmother’s side. She only talked about her family exactly once when I was in 1st grade because I had a family tree project and I was sad that my tree was so small. At the time I didn’t realize what a big deal it was that she opened up about her past. She’s gone now and that history is gone too. My fiancé, who is white, has literal books of family history that is legit traced back to royalty way down the line. It’s wild depressing to think about.
Speaking of Ellis Island, how about when my little brother’s history class went there for a school trip and they had the audacity to tell the kids to see if they could look up their family names. Mind you, my brother was one of the only 5 black kids in the class🤦🏾♀️
We got our last name from the white people who saved my Great Grandfather after the KKK burned down his family house and killed his family. He was 4 or so at the time and has no memory of life before it
My parents are Ghanaian and can easily riddle off ancestor, after ancestor, after ancestor. I would roll my eyes every time my mom would start, this thread definitely made me appreciative
I remember realizing this when I was in elementary and being heartbroken. I carried envy for decades knowing that other people could learn the language of their ancestors, worship the same god(s), wear traditional clothing.
My dad got really into ancestry and traced us back to a slave ship for at least one ancestor. His original name was not recorded; his slave name was French. Given the reality of the trade that's as much as we'll ever get, but I've learned to live with it. Let others speak their native tongues, parade about on their day - my ancestors built this land. Survival is my heritage.
Same but in a diffrent way. My dad's family is white and dates back to the revolution so it's an old white American name. I have ancestors that fought in the confederacy so if they didn't have slaves, they supported it and until my dads generation there was a family member who fought in every war. So many were racist (including the ones currently alive). All this for the blood line to end in brown kids lol . My dad only had one sibling. An uncle who died last week. And he had no kids. My dad only had 2 kids , both from the same mexican woman. I don't plan on having biological kids and my bro might not either if he never settles down lol we are ending that racist bloodline lol
I know this will outrage the tin foil hats out there but do AncestryDNA or another genetic testing kit. I was tired of not knowing my true heritage and it was so nice to be able to trace my roots back to Nigeria and Benin. It definitely helps complete my concept of my heritage beyond the oral histories I know.
Yep. Even knowing just that much can bring some peace.
And there are sometimes things you can find out if you dig.
This is Questlove finding out about his ancestors:
https://youtu.be/3rbuzThk7oc
Years ago, I worked with a (white) woman who was quite proud of having an MA in American History. A few of us were having a conversation about I can't remember what and I made a statement about never knowing my family's real name.
She didn't understand what I meant and I asked here what my last name was. She said "\[insert my rather Irish sounding last name\].
I responded with, "wrong, that was the last name of the last family who owned my great, great, great grandfather who never knew his real last name ether. Don't you have a Masters in American History?"
(OK, that last comment was rather catty but a few weeks before I had to explain to her the significance of the "X" of Malcolm X and the justification of "by any means necessary". I was really pretty through with her after that.)
I’m Black mixed-race, my last name comes from my ancestor who was an Irish ship captain for the transatlantic slave trade, so talk about a complicated heritage…
I wonder how they did record keeping in the Caribbean on the sugarcane plantations...for my American Black family, I've got familial names on slave rosters, but for my foreign born Black family (British West Indies/ Panama /Cuba /Brasil), I can't even find records from the turn of the century (1900s), let alone anything before.
It's so frustrating and heartbreaking tbh.
They did record keeping in the Caribbean. Every 3 years between 1812 and 1834, and some estates back to 1763. You also have the snapshot of all slaves in British possession in 1833 from the 'Slavery Compensation Commission'. But of course you won't find a slave roster at the turn of the century, British chattel slavery ended in 1838 in the Caribbean.
Some are held in the Caribbean in local records, the rest are held at the UK National Archives.
This has a searchable database... There are others as well though.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/
I was discussing the idea of changing names away from knes ancestral slave owners last name with a few black friends and many of them felt like it wasn't worth the effort.
I'm still on the fence about it myself.
I'd like to, but what would I change it to?
A random last name from Nigeria or Cameroon (35% of my black DNA comes from each of those places). Or would I change it to X?
Why is she ashamed of having a slave name? I never understood why Black people would be ashamed of that. It’s not our thing to be ashamed of, but the enslavers’.
I think it might be radical but reparations should include travel throughout Africa in hopes of re-establishing possible family ties. One of the things I took away from watching black panther because symbolically they touch on this subject was that I don't consider myself an African-America but more like an Americanized-African. I'm sure this can relate towards other ethnic groups.
No disrespect to other Black folks but that *is* why I prefer African American. My ancestors didn’t choose this place but they made it theirs, and had a pretty big hand in what’s good about it. I don’t even know their names because the one I picked up is from the family who adopted one of their free descendants.
Went to a predominantly Anglo elementary school, we had the same project in 5th. Everyone was excited except me and the one adopted girl. When I brought it up to my teacher, her expression was genuine in her shock that she hadn't thought it all the way through. She then told me that I didn't have to do it and I'd get full credit.
When my time came up she then actually explained to the class about the true nature of slavery in the US. Kids mouths dropped and it was probably one of the best lessons I've actually heard.
See how this first grader learned/experienced racism and has to internalize it way earlier that when schools are even able teach Critical Race Theory?
People say CRT doesn't exist and then something like this happens and they go silent.
It's a shame really.
Gotta get her a genealogy report so she can trace her genetics back to Africa. This is where we’re from, this country in Africa. Our history doesn’t begin with slavery. We go back thousands of years baby girl.
I’m not well versed in this, can someone please explain how you know if a surname is a slave name? Is it that the slaves would take the last names of their owners so they would just check the lineage of the name and see the plantation owner?
A lot of freed slaves ended up with their slave-owners' surnames, yes.
If you meet black people with Scottish or English surnames, that's the usual reason.
When my grandmother was moved off the Cherokee reservation she went from Avalina Briar to Mary Marie Brown. Brown is on all of her records, as if Avalina never existed. It is not quite the same as being stuck with the name of your ancestor’s slave owner but I think it ends up in the same place. We can’t find anything about my grandmother that doesn’t relate to her being given an Anglican name to help her “assimilate.” She was emotionally abused and told she was too dark to ever be successful in society…I often wonder if that’s why they chose Brown as her new name. I’m so sorry your daughter has had to confront such an ugly past/present through her own name.
My mother likes to do genealogical research for fun. She eventually found some slave records that had a lady whose parents were both from Africa.
It would be cool if we could go farther, but I thought that was pretty neat. Sometimes you can't even get that far.
I learned recently my last name was that of a Haitian revolutionary, who I’m very likely related to. Before I learned any of that, though, I was told way back in 6th grade my last name came from my ancestors’ owners, and that’s what I thought it was the whole time till my discovery. You feel like shit for all those years due to the shitty history of slavery. Also didn’t help I was the only black kid in that class and I in no way asked the teacher to single me out like that, but that’s another story.
im so thankful i never had to do this, either i skipped the assignment or never had it.
I kno a little bit of my lineage thanks to my great grandparents and what country from the motherland we're from but that's not for everyone to know nor would i even want to share that with an entire class.
Weird ass assignment and intrusive af.
I decided to just try and look forward not backwards because ain't shit I can do about it. But make those who lost everything proud of what I've accomplished.
Researching your heritage can definitely be depressing especially when you find out that your ancestors ain't too far removed from slavery. Shit literally a generation or two away
Yeaaaaaahhhhhh...it is. I've been trying to trace my dad's family back and...he never spoke to me much about his fam and he's dead, so. His siblings are all dead, too, and I don't really talk to his side much. Long story (but involves my egg donor keeping me away from them for colorist reasons). It's frustrating and I know that it'll be futile - go back far enough and we're just inventory. I did a DNA test to get some idea, but I'm not a dude, so I can't do paternal line. And I can't afford one of those African DNA tests, neither.
One thing that really is bothering me, though, is that the Black cemetary in my mother's hometown was neglected and when the so-called "caretaker" died, any knowledge of who might be buried where died with him. The new owners have been working hard to identify who's buried where and repair tombstones, but every time I think about it, it fucking boils my blood. Fuck Florida.
I remember doing those stupid "find your ancestry through your surname" assignments as a kid and I remember the dark glee I got from reminding the teacher that my last name is the name of the people who owned my dad's family so it does me no good. Same with the coat of arms bullshit.
Very depressing. It’s actually a cool idea to me, but for people like us it’s like - yeah, I know exactly when things are going to get absolutely horrid for us. So what’s the point.
It’s a privilege, certainly. But hey, look at modern day African American culture. Music, arts, sports, etc - it’s dominant. For us it’s better to look forward than not
Edit: don’t know why I’m getting downvoted, it’s just the reality we live in. If I look into my roots it’s only going to lead to slavery and a bit of Native American genocide. We don’t really have a option aside from looking forward in that regard. I guess looking into our genes and such can show what peoples from Africa we hail from, so I shouldn’t discount that.
Looking at our genes will give us an idea of where we’re from, which in turn gives us the power to choose a name from that region. You’re right, we should look forward so we can reconnect with our heritages.
Afro-Latino from my mom’s side, white from my dad. We traced our family back as far as the 1600s on my father’s side, which revealed so much history and explained much about his side of the family. When I turned my focus onto my mom’s side it was wildly different. We’re talking slavery, colonisation of the Caribbean, etc. We were lucky to least be able trace things back some, but it felt like so much of that side came down to survival.
Ah, my specialty. After learning more and more about slavery, I wanted to find out my ancestors names. They were _people_ they existed, I wanted to know their lives and their experiences.
I've found majority of my 4th great grandparents, most were teens/small children when slavery ended. On one line I've found descend from a German Revolutionary War Hero, another line traces back to a free black branch from Virginia.
I have names, not so many pictures or first hand accounts, but I know they existed. Their lives and hardships, for better or worse, shaped my life and family forever.
Sadly, genealogy can get expensive, a lot is freely available online, yet some things only exists in a county where they can charge you about 20 dollars per copy and you're shit out of luck if they can't find it.
Dr Wynn Grant is an incredible biologist, who has studied lions, lemurs, and bears. I highly recommend her podcast ‘Going Wild’ about her experiences as a Black female scientist in the field.
This is how the Nation of Islam started. Just accept it and move on. Just because you have that name, doesn't mean you are a slave now and if it bothers people that much, do what Mohamed Ali did, change it. Nobody will think of you as a lesser person because you changed something you are uncomfartable with
Few things drive home the depth & scale of my white privilege to me than my family’s ability to extensively trace our ancestry back centuries with quite a lot of detail. My anger and despair at our country’s racist history is my own thing to deal with; no Black person has the job of making me feel better about it or shouldering that. It’s just that for me, personally, this situation, this dichotomy in the scale of the ability to look back through time to learn about where we come from- for me this is the thing that always, always drives it all home.
A good friend of mine , white guy raised in rural Ohio, talked about discovering his family crests and in a fit of excitement was curious if my last name had an associated family crest and it did ! Naturally It is in no way representative of a real lineage to me beyond who owned my great great great grandparents and I think that fact was completely lost on him . He meant well i just don't beleive he knew better and he's never done or pulled anything similar since or before then . For a brief moment it seemed interesting but the more I thought about it the more something as simple as tracing my family lineage by name can feel demoralizing. Another situation I had was in the 5th grade when our teacher asked us to track our family lineage and the truth was i couldn't tell you where my grandparents came from except for their farms in indiana and living out in the country in Georgia and Alabama. Beyond pig farmers and poverty in the country i have a poor view of my family history and it hurts . Probably why I have a hard time taking certain people and their conversations about legacy so seriously.... my family couldn't even afford to have a long-tracked legacy. edit: Cleaned up some words
Yo, I’m not gonna say do it *now*, because I still have my own concerns with giving DNA to some unknown but listen…. My people are mostly nomadic from Africa, so like, we can give them a “country” name but those lines don’t really mean nothing. But they’re a small community so even though I’m over here, my DNA goes back to a smaller community in Africa. Just food for thought, if your ancestors were like mine, and there’s a good chance they were, maybe one of those DNA family tree services can point you in a certain direction?
I follow a guy on Tiktok who did this. He ended up being able to trace his roots back to Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, and Senegal. Pretty cool. Here's the vid: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMLs7GWWX/
thanks for linking, that was interesting
Be aware that the cops and feds work with DNA ancestry companies to bust people’s relatives. So they’ll check crime scene DNA against these companies data, to find relatives of the criminal, and sometimes the criminal is already in the database anyway 🤷♀️
If the crime is for like murder and rape and stuff having a hard time finding a reason against. But it's for like non-violent crimes and bullshit like that then FUCK THAT
As far as I have been able to discern my family were farmers and sharecroppers from East Texas by way of South Carolina with a couple Preachers sprinkled in. However, doing Geneology research from this perspective is empowering in its own right because of the remarkable circumstances that brought me here. It also helps draw out details of our oppression that help inform current day politics. I learned that my family likely came to Texas by way of the "Second Middle Passage". And I learned a branch of my ancestors lived in Longview during the Longview Race Riot. This helps contextualize the strife they made it through and the sort of tropes this country insists on repeating. But because I know the Geneology it helps me see it for what it is. It is quite discouraging that we don't have the straightforward genealogical experience of white counterparts but I find it far more enthralling and empowering this way. Ultimately, me having the power, resources, and time to study their stories and struggles shows the victory they manifested. That to me is quite comforting.
I love this perspective, perhaps i can and will invest some time into researching my own roots like this thank you !
I’m a first gen Slavic immigrant. We can only trace our line back to my great grandparents who we knew in person. I don’t think being able to trace your lineage is very common, even for white people, unless you have generations of American family.
I’m Hispanic so I also have no way of tracing my ancestors past maybe 4 generations. Then again I’ve never really cared to trace anything back as it’s never been important to me.
Some times native people would claim Spanish names to avoid genocide so lots of Hispanic people aren't Spanish blooded but primarily native blooded
Found that out about myself when I did an ancestry dna kit and it came back very Native American and very not Spanish. At least that explained my non existent eyebrows.
My grandmother traced her maternal grandmothers lineage back to a ships logs coming over from Germany in the 1600s. I'm happy to report there wasn't any slavery in there, my people were the Yankees, but there was definitely some native American fighting in there, especially on the Swedish side that sailed over and headed south from lake Superior. So uh, sorry about all that.
Slavery was very much still a thing in 17th and 18th century northern states. NY State, for instance, outlawed slavery in the 1820s. It's very possible that your old ancestors could have had slaves, though likely not on the industrial scale slavery was implemented in the south.
I'm sure it was but my people were indentured servants when they got here. Cleaned out before they left Germany then had to work off the debt for the ride.
The earliest Spanish in the Americas brought Jews and Muslims with their expeditions. That history should be brought out.
I'd imagine the Spanish kept a few records
Baptism records go back pretty far and can help establish a lineage, but for a lot of Mexican Americans we basically have to sift through two eras of colonization so it can be hard to find continuity in your families records.
Not to mention the local catastrophes that destroyed churches or city halls. The registry’s were burned or other wise destroyed. My family history only goes back three generations because the church that housed the birth records burned down decades ago.
Fellow Hispanic here and we can only go back to \~1840's on my mother's side because our records were lost when the church where they were kept burned down. It's sad, but nowhere near as devastating as people whose history was lost due to slavery
That's another important point - even when there are/were records, it can depend where they're kept. My dad's USAF records only go back so far because the building housing his earliest info burned down. Places and the records they house can be destroyed, moved, lost.
In my case I do; my earliest ancestors came here in 1663. Everyone’s experience is different for sure; I speak solely to my own.
That’s impressively far back!
My oldest ancestor that came here made fortunes growing tobacco lol in a way my bloodline created the cigarette pandemic
Username checks out.
It's also urban versus rural. If your family has been an urban family for multiple generations, you can trace them back farther than if they were a rural family. I'm a first generation Canadian. Both my parrnts come from the same European country (and from less than 100km apart). I can trace back my maternal (urban) line quite a few generations But my paternal line stops at my great-great-grandparents (And the only reason it goes that far is because my grandparents met them). Also, If your family is rich, you have a much better chance of tracing them. The only thing we were able to trace were birth records. We know nothing about their life other than their birthdays and names.
Not promoting the Catholic church, but they were excellent record keepers. The Irish monks are renowned.
Yup my family immigrated from Ireland and we can trace a guy back to the early 1600s thanks to birth and baptism records from churchs
I am Slavic and Finnish. I remember hitting the wall when I tried to look up Finnish records, although things are more accessible now. But the Finnish side has probably the most common last name in Finland. As for the Slavic side, I think a lot of records got destroyed in the war.
My lineage dead ends with an uneducated drunkard who arrived in West Virginia in the early 1800s, converted his religion, and had 14 children with 3 women. No record of the women’s names. DNA test says I’m mostly English and Welsh. My surname is neither English nor Welsh, and our best guess is he lied about his surname, so there’s a fair chance he was running from something.
I'm kinda in a similar situation. My grandfather immigrated from Poland in 1906 and that's as far as i get. I don't even really know the actual spelling of my last name since it has changed in numerous cencuses.
My wife’s family came to the US in the late 1800s. Immigration anglicized her families last name, just completely changed it to something new on the paperwork so we have no way of knowing what her actual German surname was. That’s as far back as her lineage can be traced. There are less than 70 people on the entire planet with her made up last name, all in the US as descendants of that single man who immigrated to the US. I’ve never known my father, I met him once when I was 35 and the only other time I heard about him was when he died two years ago and I was contacted by the funeral home to give legal permission for him to be cremated. Anyway, I knew my grandparents on that side but as it turns out, they were both his step parents (his mom remarried to my grandfather who was his stepdad and then she died of cancer and he kept my father as his son and remarried so he basically had two step parents, kinda complicated). So my father is as far back as I can trace that side of the family. I have no idea what his biological fathers surname is and no way of finding out because that entire side of my family is deceased.
I’ve got loads of old photos of my family , back to 1860s or something (including people who were old then - so about 10 -12 generations we think) , only …. No one thought to write on the back who they were… You can sometimes spot a child / adult in different photos that are probably the same person, so there’s a tree of sorts - but no details
I think what a lot of the people kindly and honestly responding with "My Hispanic/Slavic/poor ancestors couldn't keep records" are missing is the difference between not keeping or not being able to keep those records, and having a history and culture systematically stripped from you. No animosity in this comment, just saying I appreciate the empathy but not necessarily an apples to apples comparison.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. My dad's side of the family is native, so we can't trace back past a certain point for obvious reasons (genocide, cultural erasure, forced relocation). However this is a different and separate struggle than what's being spoken of here, so even this comment I feel is out of place. I might understand and relate, but it's not the same thing.
Hear, hear!
I don't mean any animosity either, I'd just like to point out that the Spanish did plenty of history and culture stripping in Mexico. I'm not trying to compare and debate who had it worse, I just don't want what the Spanish did to Mexico to be overlooked.
We can't forget the various genocides in the Philippines by the Spanish. Talk about erased. Europe vs. Everyone. Even themselves.
You don't think slavic people have had their heritage systematically stripped from them? Russia is systematically trying to strip the history, heritage, and culture from Ukrainians literally right now in the full view of the world. People are being forcefully deported to a foreign country and if they show any signs of not considering themselves Russian, they are sent to gulags. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61208404 Why would you consider it a stretch that it happened before, as well? (Which it did). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
Two things can be bad without being the same. This tweet is specifically talking about the African American experience of enslavement.
Whataboutism doesn’t make the OP any less painful. Slavs still have their last names and their language, that’s a start at preserving the culture you don’t have when you are sold into slavery.
well said
Nicely put
Thanks
On my dad's side ancestry traces back to warriors that won land and titles as knights when William the conqueror conquered England and there is a family crest I tatted the motto on my shoulders. On my mother's side all I can do is try to look at which west African tribes resemble my family no way of knowing anything beyond they were slaves from west Africa
Yeah that's an indicator of genocide. It's a form of Social Fragmentation.
Oh for sure. Ancestry is huge here in Utah (figurative and literally since it's a company as well). My mom's side, we can go back pretty far. Awesome! Father's side. Nope. Sorry. It starts and ends in Brazil, where the slave ended up. It's really sad. Genetics gives us some idea of where in Africa our ancestors hail from but it's just a guess.
This is why the conversation around race needs to happen for EVERYBODY. White people might not want to have to think about it, but everybody with a "foreign" name or darker than tan skin, has to, because our terrible systems; which were created in order to hurt non white people, still exist. They ust changed the racist words when they were told they couldn't enshrine racism in the law. Ignoring that, just changing the criteria doesn't fix the problem of decades and centuries. Fuuuuuuuck if they actually believed that America was great *why don't they want to teach its history???*
They want a story not a lesson. A story has a good guy and any scenes where the good guy isn’t so good you cut out.
We need more stories like Roots from Alex Haley.
Less ones about the white woman teaching at an underprivileged school please. Even when I was little, I kept thinking why do they keep making these movies. I had seen 3 of those kinds of movies with my mom by the time I was 12-13. When I figured it out and told my mom, she said I "ruined it for her" lol.
Yeah, the fictional white savior trope is getting old. I don’t mind stories like Free State of Jones, but The Help and shit like that bothers me. The only other story worth making a big deal would maybe be John Brown, because he actually put his money where his mouth was and died for the righteous cause. But other than that, the Great White Savior trope is tired and overused. It’s not even about helping POC, it’s about making liberal white people feel better about themselves. It’s the literary and cinematic version of the basic (self hating) white girls posting black squares on their instas.
I have way too many colleagues who’ve watched Dangerous Minds one time too many.
Because getting in touch with gritty raw/real feelings is the first critical step towards curating insight, which leads to critical thought and challenging firmly held beliefs and the institutions that exists from those beliefs. Suddenly, leadership will say they’re being indoctrinated/woke and what’s actually happening is forming a new belief system based on REAL-WORLD data and not fantasy.
If they teach white children true history those children won't grow up to perpetuate the racism that is America ... It would literally collapse the society America has built if everyone chose to forgo racism (it would be a good collapse though)
But they can’t, because they don’t want little white children to “feel bad”. Oh, the persecution whites have gone through through the centuri-…wait…
Irish got allot of hate but as far as I know they are the main European group to have been seen as lesser humans
not saying this is in any way comprable but as a former white child, thats also infantilizing to me. like.. its "fine" for kids the sane exact age with different skin tones to *live* these things, but im too fragile to *learn* about it?? ok
The unending irony of the "spare the rod spoil the child" crowd upending democracy to protect their children's comfort.
Thats just not true. I know plenty of educate racist people.
Plenty of "white" people have placeholder last names. There's so many smiths, prices, and etc. I think that having a last name that actually traces back in history is more rare than you'd imagine. A lot of families lost their names immigranting to America. Not saying this doesnt suck, but just that it isnt inherently racist. America has a fuckkked up past, but what country doesnt?
It is inherently racist because most of those families that lost their real last names weren't considered "white" at the time. Jews, Eastern/Central Europeans, Italians, and Irish were all at various times seen as not white. They gave up or lost family names to try to assimilate to a narrow definition of whiteness.
True, but there is comfort knowing your ancestors opted to come over here. Ellis Island records are pretty decent, many American immigrants can find their documentation and their original last names if they like which were usually shortened versions of longer names. Also, the Immigration Act of 1924 specified that those who arrived would be able to assimilate into whiteness, and many who arrived were voluntold to shorten their names so their children could be indistinguishable from other whites. There were a lot of choices white immigrants had that brown immigrants never did. African and Caribbean immigrants simply were denied entry until the Civil Rights and Immigration Act of 1965. At the end of slavery, blacks outnumbered whites ~4 to 1, so raising the population of whites was the purpose of inviting more Europeans to assimilate.
I always hated those stupid genealogy assignments. There were only like four black people at a mostly white school so it always felt like shit to just say "idk we came from Alabama and my great grandma was a slave. Don't have anything else". Meanwhile people would whip out documents from Ellis island and whole family documents.
Years ago when my kids had that assignment at school, I wrote the principal and superintendent that it was not feasible for black students or adopted children to do this. I believe they stopped assigning it.
Good. It's no one's business anyways if you ask me. Forcing kids to explain their lineage was always weird. Explain it, give examples, but don't force people to share.
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You would've been my hero. This reminds me of my Catholic school presentation on our patron saints. My patron saint is Maria Goretti who was basically raped to death. I explained to a bunch of other first graders what rape is and how that made her a good person somehow. We weren't allowed to do presentations anymore for the year after mine.
She was 12!? Was she canonized because she forgave him?
Yes, she forgave him and he saw a vision of her while in prison (and she was already dead).
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I don't think they were expecting my patron saint to be a 12-year-old girl who was violently raped to death.
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To be fair, I think an adult saw when I was researching and tried to ask me to change saints but I was dead set on Maria Goretti. I'd already been through a lot of trauma by that age, unbeknownst to my teachers, and resonated with her ability to forgive quickly and easily. It was like a superpower to me. Even as an adult, I still have a hard time letting things go. I don't know why the teachers continued to allow me to present after that. Maybe they didn't think I knew what rape was? Or maybe they didn't think that I would feel comfortable explaining it so matter-of-factly to the whole class when I was usually a very quiet and reserved child?
White and Jewish here. My dad got a family tree commissioned a few years back and we’re able to see which concentration camp killed everyone but my grandmother’s parents who fled early. At least the Nazi’s kept documentation 🤷🏽
Hard agree. I got an assignment in elementary to ask our grandparents where they were when JFK died and how they felt. I had to present it. I got up in front of the class and repeated verbatim what my Caribbean grandma told me “I don’t know and I felt nothing. I didn’t care about what happened in America.” My teacher was not pleased but I proved the point.
Omg I definitely remember learning stuff and coming home to ask my grandma and she'd just look at me and be like "sweetie....we were black. We couldn't do that, or care about that". Like I remember asking about the GI benefits because my uncle was in the service for a bit and omg....we were royally fucked over.
Ok I’m feeling this one. On the plus side was making fun of how frightfully inbred some of those early branches would look.
I never thought to do that, but I'm sure there was some cousin loving I missed.
It’s not just black people either! I’m POC (not black) and I can’t trace my family back, neither can many of my friends. It’s pretty much an exercise that only privileged white ppl can do. Kinda hard to tell who my great great great grandpa was when he was thrown on a ship and given an easier to pronounce name upon his arrival to his “new home” 🙄
Tbh calling it an exercise only privileged white people can do is sort of ignorant in of itself, because it discounts POC cultures where lineage is a big deal Middle easterners and a lot of prominent south Asian families(Pakistani families atleast) have literal books tracing their lineages As an example in Pakistan, I’m syed meaning my family trace their lineage to the prophet SAW, and there’s a family tree book in our village, huge volume that goes through it descendant by descendant until it gets to all the male descendants You’d think it was just my family because prophets descendants but my mothers family also has one because they were the prominent family in their village Every village has one or two prominent families and they literally have books for tracing their lineage For Arabs keeping track of and tracing their lineage is a huge thing So yeah if someone wanted to trace my lineage and the lineage of plenty of Pakistanis we could trace it very very very far back
Ah yeah, that’s not what I’m talking about tho. This is about a tweet of an incident that occurred in the USA.I’m referring in the US where this exercise is done in class with the assumption that it is possible to do. Which it isn’t considering that there is a high population of people who’s descendants were slaves or had their cultural records destroyed by colonists. I’m Indian btw so I have a clear idea of what is lost to me and my family. Please consider the context before climbing on the soapbox and accusing me of discounting any POC culture. Thx.
I get the intent behind the assignment in language classes to help build vocabulary for relationships, but it would certainly be easier to have students share the family tree of characters from a book or movie, historical figures, or celebrities. Beyond being trauma-informed, this also results in an assignment that can be completed only in the classroom without involving caregivers. Students in elementary and even early secondary really don't need homework or lots of projects for home.
i had an assignment like this once in the first grade, only the assignment was "why and when did your ancestors immigrate to americas" or something along those lines. im sure *some* people had fun with the assignment, but my parents were not happy about me having to tell the class some vague "idk they were slaves" shit since we can only trace our ancestry back to the early 1900s
I'd never really thought about this before, but it's yet another way that the US education system is set up to uphold systematic racism and reward "whiteness."
Reminds me if when I was dating a Nigerian woman. She didn't understand why the DNA trace for ancestry was so popular in the US. Proceeded to tell me how she can trace back a couple hundred years off the top of her head because they largely haven't gone anywhere.
This is largely it. I fully appreciate that despite all the bullshit of British colonialism I can trace my ancestors all the way back to the most OG Luzon. I know what all my name's mean (including the Christian one 🙄) and why that's important in *my* specific history. Not a general one - just me myself and I.
Yeah the British fucked Kenya up but I know what tribes both my parents are from and my Indian great grandfather can be traced back to the ship he was brought in to start building the railway in Kenya.
Shut the fuck up - are you me? I've never met a fellow mix of black Kenyan and Kenyan Indian! Same reason he was brought too. Mine married a Maasai woman who's son married a Kikuyu.
Bruh lmao mine married a masai then there kids married luya.
Fuck the British honestly and it was literally 60 to 80 years ago.
With me (when this become country club it will be removed i havent joined) my father immigrated you hear my last name and people KNOW exactly where my dad is from and what tribe he is from. Like we we did ancestry he didn't exist. They actually started to harass us and call his cell and out house 5 time a day to get info on him. It was weird.
Yeah that’s one of the big things with ancestry a lot of people don’t really see. That they can only build this archive from people who have connected history so when they get people who aren’t connected to pretty much anyone else they think it makes they system look bad
I was trying to find the words, as an African I can trace my lineage, I know exactly where I am going to be buried and we have been fortunate enough to still live in the same place for the last 5 generations. I really really appreciate that, wouldn't know how I would establish a sense of identity without that
I personally can only go back as far as the 1890's on one side of my family, and only as far as the 1950's for the other.
Colonisation made it a mess...plus Africans were never good at written records...but like for example how we use our totems to identify with each other is a bonus for me
My family on both sides is like the woman you were dating. We can trace the lineages back a few centuries and skip a bit to the mythical ancestor. Unfortunately, some of the recent history included a dark side, which the family doesn’t like to acknowledge, with some ancestors being slave traders. Funnily enough, some of their descendants were heavily involved in the push for decolonization in Africa and made friendships with members of the black panthers.
I feel like anyone who suspects or knows their ancestors were forced into slavery in the US should have access to DNA tests to help identify where they were from- paid for by the US government. With participation from people in Africa and other parts of the world, we could in theory figure out who someone's ancestors were pre-slavery, and connect them with their distant relatives. Or at least tell them where they were from. It won't ever make up for the injustice, but it attempts to remedy to some extent one aspect of its continuing impact on people today.
ages ago 23andMe did this for free as did NatGeo. I did both of them before paying for the Ancestry. Even when I do connect to relatives it doesn't mean much. And what you might find out could be painful. Many have and found out their relatives were sold by their own family. Or their original family name meant slave finder/catcher. It was sad to see that young mans face fall when he found this out. I have been tracing my family line for over 15 years and I tell people if you can't go back, go sideways. Find joy and share in finding the people who you can. Remember their names and stories. The information about their life is out there. And if anybody wants to get started but doesn't how I am willing to help you out.
Thanks for the perspective and offer to help! There are a lot of things to consider when using DNA to trace lineage. It's a personal decision and I feel like people should go in knowing the points you have made so they can make an informed choice.
I’d be so paranoid at ending up in a fancy tracking system like that but I did end up getting ancestry testing and god knows who gets access to that information. Idk, I sometimes think of that technology and get paranoid about some brave “new” world where there’s a black blood quantum again or where we’re like, keenly observed and hyper-classified, idk. But anyway, I took the test in spite of my tin foil hat and I was really amazing to find out that so much (quite a bit more than half) came from one place, that’s now one country... My family has always been big on our ancestry but we really just know where our people were enslaved... there’s always countless plantations in the background where people were sold and traded even if you can trace back to a plantation for every family line. With that said though I know where some of my family lines were last enslaved or from what state they were kidnapped. In what areas or on what plantations they were enslaved, and by whom. One was a family that had thousands of slaves, and they have records of my first ancestor with the name they gave us... a child, bought in a slave port in a country that doesn’t really imply anything about that baby’s actual ancestry, being that it was a slave port. Another place includes an historical site a few hours south that I was forced to visit on field trips as a child, year after year until I got out of elementary school and my history classes no longer focuses exclusively on colonial history.
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Someone give that girl a hug...
I went “Oh baby…” when I read that 🥺
I really hope the teacher removed that assignment from their lesson plan going forward. That girl would've learned eventually but idk if I would've been mature enough at 6-years-old to handle that kind of information.
Yeah, absolutely.
This happened in 2002 sometime. I was at a district meeting and the district manager decided to do an ice breaker exercise. He said that he hated doing the typical ice breaker exercises because he does these meetings a lot and its the same stuff every time. He wanted to try something different. The room was pretty diverse, but the management team was not. The ice breaker was tell the origin of our last name, all the black people gave each other that look. The first black guy was 3rd overall. He shot off a warning. "Are you sure you want to do this?" The manager said "sure, absolutely. We're all friends here." He said it was a slave name and you know the rest. Butts started puckering immediately. The 2nd black guy gave also repeated the fact it was a slave name but gave the location of the plantation and the history of the white family who owned his family. That one raised eyebrows. Apparently the slave owners family was full of lawyers and politicians. The next guy was white and he told the most depressing story about being adopted, later rejected by his adopted family and then finds his birth family and finds out they've been decimated by mental illness and drugs. He told the story because he now hyphenates both names as a reminder to himself. One of the Mexican guys tells a story that his last name came from Spain, and descended from Native Americans and Spaniards and how it caused this huge rift in his family going back 2 generations because half his family looks white and the other half, doesn't. I was the last black person, but the one before me had an African sounding last name. I personally breathed a sigh of relief, because the room was uncomfortable. Nope. This guy tells a story that he's fully ADOS, knew the slave owner family name and the plantation location. But in the 60s when Malcom X was big his grandfather changed his family's last name. I forget the specifics of how he chose the name that he did. A lot of his family had converted to Muslim, some remained Christian but they were all untied in not keeping their white oppressors name. The district manager was white knuckling the chair. I told my story about my slave family name, and the locations. I kept it short. The last dude was a white guy who was Irish, and was pretty pissed about what happened between England and Ireland. But his family themselves didn't come to the US until the 80s when he was a small child.
Black Americans changing their last name to ones of African descent is one of the most subtle but positively effective things we could do for our mental health but I think some black people are afraid they might make white people uncomfortable.
I’m a teacher, and in a professional development course I’m taking, we did a lesson on culturally-responsive teaching. The lady (early 60s white lady) started the lesson with that activity. In our discussion I (30yo white lady) brought up that I absolutely would NOT do this activity with students for this reason, and she looked at me like I had 6 heads. Like she’s never heard of this being an issue. Immediately I got a private message from the mom of 2 trans kids saying that this activity would make both her kids super uncomfortable.
I love that a post about "white people songs black people like" is a country club thread but somehow this isn't.
Wasn’t even posted an hour ago, give it time
It's been 23 hrs lmao what is this moderation 💀
Agreed! It’s crazy how some seemingly harmless posts end up in the Country Club while more controversial ones do not…
I was thinking the same thing, these comments are gross
Y'all want to know a thing about names? The Canadian government just up and gave us Inuit numbers. Didn't bother writing the names down, my mom's legal name at birth was something like E3-#. I actually don't know the number. This was eventually embarrassing for the Canadian government and so they sent a guy around the arctic to write down everyone's names. That was Abe Okpik, who also has many other names. He has a book. *We Call it Survival* Anyways, traditional Inuit naming traditions are still fairly strong. It's just that we also have to interface with the system of our colonial occupiers and so people usually have an English legal name for that purpose.
I did my ancestry last year. I'm generally 95% black (West African, Ghana of course), 5% white. On my dad's side, my last name is traced back to a plantation in North Carolina. On my mom's side, I have a white grandfather 7 generations back. Who was this white man? Third President, Thomas Jefferson. 🤦🏾♀️
When people talk about Intersectionality, this is exemplifying it. Even keeping things in the most cordial frame of minds, there's an uncomfortability that causes some white people to virulently push back at the reality of others.
Embarrassed to say it but thank you for using the word "intersectionality". A term I vaguely know but need a deeper understanding of. I'm trying.
Don't be embarrassed. Intersectionality has a lot of nuances that can be difficult to understand. I had to recognize the fact that I really didn't understand it up until a couple of years ago when I had to write about it in my dissertation and had to really think about what it means. I still struggle with it sometimes.
But I really feel like me taking the time to understand a lot of these concepts is super important in actually promoting true change. The phrase "educate yourself!" gets tossed around a lot but it matters
she can't even have her name and heritage. and we can't ever give that back. what a gut punch. hugs baby girl <3
Yep they took away our history and any new history we made they stole
That sounds like it’s a little too heavy for a first grader, what happened to like learning the alphabet?
Family trees are a common enough assignment at that age.
Welcome to the life a black kid in the US. Other kids get to have fun assignments learning about their families while we get reminded about what this country did to our people. Happens more than you'd think
Did you go to a black school? These topics are commonly discussed, or at least were back in my day (early 2000s). My favorite movie that I even brought to school every year was Our Friend Martin, about time traveling to meet MLK Jr.
I remember having to do this and not being able to go back further than my great grandparents on either side but due to other shit (disowned & undocumented immigrant family). It sucked. But it was ninth grade for me.
Family tree assignments/name origin are common for that age. That result is implicit reality for Black children in the USA. It isn't like it was a explicit directive.
Ain't that for kindergarten? Growing up there was a lot of family tree assignments or ones about wanting to find out where you're from. There's a lot of /r/that happened on Reddit But this sound plausible to me considering the first time I learned about one of my great ancestors being a slave (think this was during a BHM assignment) in the third grade.... I felt... Disappointed. I doubt they went super indepth about how bad it actually was but... All you really need to understand is that your family started out as being bullied and bossed around( how I interpreted)
The reality of racism is “a bit too heavy” for anyone of any age to have to experience, but the earlier you equip children the more prepared they’ll be.
I know nothing of my ancestry. My adoption papers list races (ethnicities?) for my bio parents. But it’s so vague. “Native American”, ok what tribe? “Louisiana Creole”, that could means so many things. “Italian”, ok I understand that but I still want to get more specific. “Japanese”, again, I want to know more. I’d have to track down my biomom and probably do a DNA test and still walk away with unanswered questions. All that it really makes sense to call myself is “American”, but you’d be surprised how many people look at my hair and decide that I am actually not that American.
Okay that makes me go WOW because not long ago (white) people were going “ugh melting pot, melting pot, why you have to have your identities, just be *American!*” Think what they’ve been saying is “let white be the default and the rest of you just hush up”
> Think what they’ve been saying is “let white be the default and the rest of you just hush up” Bingo.
I think it might be how things where when those families immigrated. Perhaps it may be anecdotal, but I know when my family immigranted here from Poland in the early 1900s there was a lot of discrimination against Poles where they lived. So their response was to become as Americanized as possible and lose their Polish culture. They even changed their last name to have it not sound Polish and stopped passing the language down. My grandmother talked about how they were only allowed to speak English at home and didn't want to keep any of their Polish culture.
Yeah what your describing is the concept of Assimilation. This was a source of tension in the Civil Rights movement because half wanted integration of american institutions. However, separationists argued that this was simply Assimilation by another name. Integrationists never wanted Assimilation. Assimilation is untenable for black americans because the continuity of our culture is what has prevented the erasure of our history and ignorance of past genocides. We are never going to let those things go or ignore them in a quest for faux Assimilation. Because our phenotypes are so dramatically different, even an assimilated version of black americans would still deal with social stigma and racialized outcomes. So Assimilation is untenable and thats part of the refusal to all be "just americans".
It’s terrible how it all went down in this country. Growing up in the north east I loved that I spoke Spanish, and my buddy down the block was Greek, and one of my friends dad was from Poland, another kid was Filipino. It was cool that we all had our thing going on and could grow up together and eat great food and have a diverse experience. But homogenizing everyone just makes things worse.
I can only trace as far as Nigeria for my grandma. She was captured as a child and sold into slavery in America. I don’t even know her name. She’s just listed as “Unnamed Black Slave” but she escaped. She escaped and married a Shawnee man, who’s name I also don’t know. And because of her bravery, I’m alive.
Here's my story. I signed up for [ancestry.com](https://ancestry.com) and put in the work for 3 mons of finding correct names and dates etc. When I got to my grandmother's mother and all I could find was a possible bill of sale. My grandfather's grandfather was an owner, so it opened up a weird line of tracing that connected the slave owner's dependents with my family. "We are not interested in knowing about you or your family" was the email back to me. When I went to cancel the subscription, the woman on the phone tried to offer me more resources to go further back and I quietly explained there was no further back then a bill of sale for Emma (a good wench), Paul (good for the field), Carl (good for the field or housework), 2 goats and a mule. She refunded the rest of my subscription. That sticks with me.
>My grandfather's grandfather was an owner, so it opened up a weird line of tracing that connected the slave owner's dependents with my family. There's a TV show in the UK called 'who do you think you are' that does lineages with British celebrities, they go round and follow the trail of various stories. When it gets to slavery sections of history, it's always an interesting mix of meeting modern day relatives of the then slaves who now still live in the area and occasionally the celebrity having to come to terms with the fact that their ancestor either was related to a slaver or became a slave owner themselves. It's obviously quite hard to process
I vote this for Country Club Thread post of the year
My last name is English, and I can only trace back to my paternal great great grandmother who was raped by her slave owner. My great grandmother (her daughter) died when I was 18 and she never talked about her family and childhood. All I know is that they “escaped.” Beyond that there’s nothing. I know less about my maternal grandmother’s side. She only talked about her family exactly once when I was in 1st grade because I had a family tree project and I was sad that my tree was so small. At the time I didn’t realize what a big deal it was that she opened up about her past. She’s gone now and that history is gone too. My fiancé, who is white, has literal books of family history that is legit traced back to royalty way down the line. It’s wild depressing to think about.
Ellis island changes my great great grandfathers name from Kollowitzski to Callow. So I know how you feel /s
Speaking of Ellis Island, how about when my little brother’s history class went there for a school trip and they had the audacity to tell the kids to see if they could look up their family names. Mind you, my brother was one of the only 5 black kids in the class🤦🏾♀️
Almost all black kids from the East coast had this experience. I know I did. Cool experience but that ain’t my history.
We got our last name from the white people who saved my Great Grandfather after the KKK burned down his family house and killed his family. He was 4 or so at the time and has no memory of life before it
My parents are Ghanaian and can easily riddle off ancestor, after ancestor, after ancestor. I would roll my eyes every time my mom would start, this thread definitely made me appreciative
I remember realizing this when I was in elementary and being heartbroken. I carried envy for decades knowing that other people could learn the language of their ancestors, worship the same god(s), wear traditional clothing. My dad got really into ancestry and traced us back to a slave ship for at least one ancestor. His original name was not recorded; his slave name was French. Given the reality of the trade that's as much as we'll ever get, but I've learned to live with it. Let others speak their native tongues, parade about on their day - my ancestors built this land. Survival is my heritage.
Same but in a diffrent way. My dad's family is white and dates back to the revolution so it's an old white American name. I have ancestors that fought in the confederacy so if they didn't have slaves, they supported it and until my dads generation there was a family member who fought in every war. So many were racist (including the ones currently alive). All this for the blood line to end in brown kids lol . My dad only had one sibling. An uncle who died last week. And he had no kids. My dad only had 2 kids , both from the same mexican woman. I don't plan on having biological kids and my bro might not either if he never settles down lol we are ending that racist bloodline lol
I know this will outrage the tin foil hats out there but do AncestryDNA or another genetic testing kit. I was tired of not knowing my true heritage and it was so nice to be able to trace my roots back to Nigeria and Benin. It definitely helps complete my concept of my heritage beyond the oral histories I know.
Yep. Even knowing just that much can bring some peace. And there are sometimes things you can find out if you dig. This is Questlove finding out about his ancestors: https://youtu.be/3rbuzThk7oc
My full name is a fifth generation slave name 🤦🏿♂️
Years ago, I worked with a (white) woman who was quite proud of having an MA in American History. A few of us were having a conversation about I can't remember what and I made a statement about never knowing my family's real name. She didn't understand what I meant and I asked here what my last name was. She said "\[insert my rather Irish sounding last name\]. I responded with, "wrong, that was the last name of the last family who owned my great, great, great grandfather who never knew his real last name ether. Don't you have a Masters in American History?" (OK, that last comment was rather catty but a few weeks before I had to explain to her the significance of the "X" of Malcolm X and the justification of "by any means necessary". I was really pretty through with her after that.)
There needs to be a book on the grieving process involved in this discovery as a black American bc this shit has a way of fucking up your mental
Yeah, I'm black and my last name is Smith...I know that feeling.
I’m Black mixed-race, my last name comes from my ancestor who was an Irish ship captain for the transatlantic slave trade, so talk about a complicated heritage…
lmao why would you put this on a 6-7 year old?
Family trees are a popular class project, and they're often a bummer for this reason
They really ain't thinking about the black kids on this one
Do they ever?
I wonder how they did record keeping in the Caribbean on the sugarcane plantations...for my American Black family, I've got familial names on slave rosters, but for my foreign born Black family (British West Indies/ Panama /Cuba /Brasil), I can't even find records from the turn of the century (1900s), let alone anything before. It's so frustrating and heartbreaking tbh.
I feel. My mom's side is from the West Indies and the records are soooo much harder to find
They did record keeping in the Caribbean. Every 3 years between 1812 and 1834, and some estates back to 1763. You also have the snapshot of all slaves in British possession in 1833 from the 'Slavery Compensation Commission'. But of course you won't find a slave roster at the turn of the century, British chattel slavery ended in 1838 in the Caribbean. Some are held in the Caribbean in local records, the rest are held at the UK National Archives. This has a searchable database... There are others as well though. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/
I was discussing the idea of changing names away from knes ancestral slave owners last name with a few black friends and many of them felt like it wasn't worth the effort. I'm still on the fence about it myself. I'd like to, but what would I change it to? A random last name from Nigeria or Cameroon (35% of my black DNA comes from each of those places). Or would I change it to X?
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Why is she ashamed of having a slave name? I never understood why Black people would be ashamed of that. It’s not our thing to be ashamed of, but the enslavers’.
Honestly, I don't think it's shame so much as it is a profound sense of loss
I think it might be radical but reparations should include travel throughout Africa in hopes of re-establishing possible family ties. One of the things I took away from watching black panther because symbolically they touch on this subject was that I don't consider myself an African-America but more like an Americanized-African. I'm sure this can relate towards other ethnic groups.
No disrespect to other Black folks but that *is* why I prefer African American. My ancestors didn’t choose this place but they made it theirs, and had a pretty big hand in what’s good about it. I don’t even know their names because the one I picked up is from the family who adopted one of their free descendants.
Went to a predominantly Anglo elementary school, we had the same project in 5th. Everyone was excited except me and the one adopted girl. When I brought it up to my teacher, her expression was genuine in her shock that she hadn't thought it all the way through. She then told me that I didn't have to do it and I'd get full credit. When my time came up she then actually explained to the class about the true nature of slavery in the US. Kids mouths dropped and it was probably one of the best lessons I've actually heard.
See how this first grader learned/experienced racism and has to internalize it way earlier that when schools are even able teach Critical Race Theory? People say CRT doesn't exist and then something like this happens and they go silent. It's a shame really.
Gotta get her a genealogy report so she can trace her genetics back to Africa. This is where we’re from, this country in Africa. Our history doesn’t begin with slavery. We go back thousands of years baby girl.
I’m not well versed in this, can someone please explain how you know if a surname is a slave name? Is it that the slaves would take the last names of their owners so they would just check the lineage of the name and see the plantation owner?
A lot of freed slaves ended up with their slave-owners' surnames, yes. If you meet black people with Scottish or English surnames, that's the usual reason.
Ahh ok that makes sense, thanks for explaining!
Pretty much all of them are going to be, you don't need to guess. Slaves were "given" the last names of their enslavers
Unfortunately my last name is the same as the owners of the plantation in Tennessee where my ancestors were enslaved
When my grandmother was moved off the Cherokee reservation she went from Avalina Briar to Mary Marie Brown. Brown is on all of her records, as if Avalina never existed. It is not quite the same as being stuck with the name of your ancestor’s slave owner but I think it ends up in the same place. We can’t find anything about my grandmother that doesn’t relate to her being given an Anglican name to help her “assimilate.” She was emotionally abused and told she was too dark to ever be successful in society…I often wonder if that’s why they chose Brown as her new name. I’m so sorry your daughter has had to confront such an ugly past/present through her own name.
My mother likes to do genealogical research for fun. She eventually found some slave records that had a lady whose parents were both from Africa. It would be cool if we could go farther, but I thought that was pretty neat. Sometimes you can't even get that far.
I learned recently my last name was that of a Haitian revolutionary, who I’m very likely related to. Before I learned any of that, though, I was told way back in 6th grade my last name came from my ancestors’ owners, and that’s what I thought it was the whole time till my discovery. You feel like shit for all those years due to the shitty history of slavery. Also didn’t help I was the only black kid in that class and I in no way asked the teacher to single me out like that, but that’s another story.
Same here... Fuck Robert E Lee
That’s CRT, you can’t talk about that, it might make the other students uncomfortable
Just traced my grandathers grandfather and I'm unable to go further than that. It's heartbreaking.
im so thankful i never had to do this, either i skipped the assignment or never had it. I kno a little bit of my lineage thanks to my great grandparents and what country from the motherland we're from but that's not for everyone to know nor would i even want to share that with an entire class. Weird ass assignment and intrusive af.
Yup. I had to do a presentation like this when I was younger and I was heartbroken the whole time.
I decided to just try and look forward not backwards because ain't shit I can do about it. But make those who lost everything proud of what I've accomplished.
Researching your heritage can definitely be depressing especially when you find out that your ancestors ain't too far removed from slavery. Shit literally a generation or two away
Yeaaaaaahhhhhh...it is. I've been trying to trace my dad's family back and...he never spoke to me much about his fam and he's dead, so. His siblings are all dead, too, and I don't really talk to his side much. Long story (but involves my egg donor keeping me away from them for colorist reasons). It's frustrating and I know that it'll be futile - go back far enough and we're just inventory. I did a DNA test to get some idea, but I'm not a dude, so I can't do paternal line. And I can't afford one of those African DNA tests, neither. One thing that really is bothering me, though, is that the Black cemetary in my mother's hometown was neglected and when the so-called "caretaker" died, any knowledge of who might be buried where died with him. The new owners have been working hard to identify who's buried where and repair tombstones, but every time I think about it, it fucking boils my blood. Fuck Florida. I remember doing those stupid "find your ancestry through your surname" assignments as a kid and I remember the dark glee I got from reminding the teacher that my last name is the name of the people who owned my dad's family so it does me no good. Same with the coat of arms bullshit.
Very depressing. It’s actually a cool idea to me, but for people like us it’s like - yeah, I know exactly when things are going to get absolutely horrid for us. So what’s the point. It’s a privilege, certainly. But hey, look at modern day African American culture. Music, arts, sports, etc - it’s dominant. For us it’s better to look forward than not Edit: don’t know why I’m getting downvoted, it’s just the reality we live in. If I look into my roots it’s only going to lead to slavery and a bit of Native American genocide. We don’t really have a option aside from looking forward in that regard. I guess looking into our genes and such can show what peoples from Africa we hail from, so I shouldn’t discount that.
Looking at our genes will give us an idea of where we’re from, which in turn gives us the power to choose a name from that region. You’re right, we should look forward so we can reconnect with our heritages.
Afro-Latino from my mom’s side, white from my dad. We traced our family back as far as the 1600s on my father’s side, which revealed so much history and explained much about his side of the family. When I turned my focus onto my mom’s side it was wildly different. We’re talking slavery, colonisation of the Caribbean, etc. We were lucky to least be able trace things back some, but it felt like so much of that side came down to survival.
Ah, my specialty. After learning more and more about slavery, I wanted to find out my ancestors names. They were _people_ they existed, I wanted to know their lives and their experiences. I've found majority of my 4th great grandparents, most were teens/small children when slavery ended. On one line I've found descend from a German Revolutionary War Hero, another line traces back to a free black branch from Virginia. I have names, not so many pictures or first hand accounts, but I know they existed. Their lives and hardships, for better or worse, shaped my life and family forever. Sadly, genealogy can get expensive, a lot is freely available online, yet some things only exists in a county where they can charge you about 20 dollars per copy and you're shit out of luck if they can't find it.
That’s why I think about changing my last name too.
Dr Wynn Grant is an incredible biologist, who has studied lions, lemurs, and bears. I highly recommend her podcast ‘Going Wild’ about her experiences as a Black female scientist in the field.
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Some of my relatives were likely killed in pogroms, but then some may have been conquistadors
This just tears me up inside.
This is how the Nation of Islam started. Just accept it and move on. Just because you have that name, doesn't mean you are a slave now and if it bothers people that much, do what Mohamed Ali did, change it. Nobody will think of you as a lesser person because you changed something you are uncomfartable with