When your ancestors are racist

Last updated on: November 21, 2016 at 11:23 am by Brandy Williams

When your ancestors are racist 2016-11-21T11:23:21-07:00 Brandy Williams

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As I was absorbing the body blow of the presidential election where a racist demagogue took the most powerful office in the world I reached out for spiritual support. Ancestors, guide me, I said. Immediately I realized they weren’t going to be helpful. My ancestors are Trump people.

I was raised in a Southern white racist family. My uncle taught me that the Civil War was triggered by Northern resentment of the economic success of the South. My mother gave our black housecleaner our used clothes and imagined that made them friends. She whispered vicious things about people of color and taught me to be afraid that black men would sexually attack me.

She’s with the ancestors now and they’re having a celebration party. Family line ancestors look out for the interests of their living family. From that point of view, what’s the problem? You’re good, they tell me. You’re taken care of. You’re welcome.

My father’s family came to America in the late eighteenth century. They participated in the wave of white settlers who killed nine out of ten of the inhabitants of the continent, wiped out the buffalo and settled on the plains to farm. My mother’s family came in the early twentieth century and settled in Texas in time to benefit from all that free labor provided by the black people ripped from their ancestral homes.

The white men who formed the government here built a constitutional democracy where citizens govern. The first definition of voter was “white male landholder”. Through the centuries black men, then white women, then black women claimed the right to vote. As the franchise expanded to include more and more citizens, white people started to feel more and more crowded. No longer special. No longer in charge.

The Democratic National Convention this year played the tune of American exceptionalism, the greatest democracy in the world, with freedom and debt relief and jobs for everyone. I wanted this future desperately while remaining painfully aware that the vision of an exceptional America fails to acknowledge the genocide and slavery on which our prosperity is built. We hold ourselves out as the greatest country in the world, but our “Manifest Destiny” to demonstrate to the world how to be a free nation actually drove the appropriation of Native American lands.

Freedom and equality are not a party characteristic. The Republican party, party of Lincoln, championed civil rights while the Democrats went by “white man’s party”. Republican Theodore Roosevelt asked the first black man to dinner at the White House (Booker T. Washington) while Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the Japanese-American internment camps.

Both the red team and the blue team vote white. That’s what happened in this election. We re-asserted the fundamental value that white men are the voters who matter. The initiative to deport people is about keeping white men in charge. The initiative to restrict immigration is about keeping white men in charge. The new Jim Crow voter suppression laws are about keeping white men in charge.

Facing down totalitarianism takes more than making sure the blue team wins next time. Facing what has happened in this election means acknowledging that our vision of democracy is an ideal that we have yet to live up to. We argue that these events are in the past, but in fact the settler population is an occupying force which continues to rip resources from the native populations. The government imprisons and kills black people with the approval of the white population.

I fervently believe that every person, no matter what race or gender or sexual orientation or ability, deserves life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Here is what we need to do, white people: stand down. Cede power. Commit to holding our government to our treaty obligations with the sovereign nations in our borders. Hold local courts and police to the standard of treating every black person as a person. Fight for universal suffrage – registering every citizen to vote and putting a stop to voter suppression. Most importantly, stop talking and listen. Stop trying to lead and follow, like Showing Up for Racial Justice which organizes white people to take action which is directed by people of color.

One thing I can do as a white woman is put my body out on the street with people of color when people of color ask me to do it. I’ve been standing in the rain a lot lately: in front of the local police station holding a Black Lives Matter banner, on a sandy beach with Idle No More as tribes gather to bless the Salish Sea, in front of a mosque threatened by men who said they’d show up with guns.

My ancestors still provide a moral compass in negative form: if it pisses them off it’s probably the right thing to do. My mother would no doubt be appalled at the company I keep these days. I want to be the last racist of my family line. So that when I join the ancestors there will be at least one of us who can answer the call to recognize freedom for everyone.

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