A few years ago I got into genealogy.
I'm not urging you to do so. Genealogy is like a lot of hobbies. It's expensive and time-consuming, and you end up being a boring twit to anyone who doesn't share the hobby. But I went there, and this essay is about two things I learned.
My father's line was hard to track further back then the 20th century. Apart from a few census records and even fewer Civil War records, they didn't leave many traces.
My mother's line was different. These people began as Tennessee hillbillies back in the early 1800s and then moved west and became Arkansas hillbillies in the mid-1800s. They tended to stay in one place for several generations, and they left a lot more information.
They left a mystery too. It was an article of faith on that side of the family that we had an Indian ancestor, although nobody could ever tell me what tribe this ancestor came from. It wasn't just a story. Every generation in that side of the family had its share of dark-haired, dark-skinned children who didn't look like the typical northern European stock that made up the bulk of the family. There was some non-Caucasian blood in that line.
It was hard to find where that non-white component came in. Even though my mother's ancestors lived in an area where there are some records of the native peoples, I couldn't find the connection. All my maternal ancestors seemed to be white people who were descended from other white people. Not a hint of American Indian ancestry.
The mystery cleared up a little just as the records for this line petered out. The trail ended with a family whose origins I couldn't find, but whose children had names like Mahala*, Sintha, and Vena. That's when I knew the awful truth. I had Indian ancestors, but they weren't Indian ancestors, they were Indian ancestors. One of my great-great-something grandmothers in the early 1800s was a woman from India.
*The Indian name Mahala is not all that rare in records of the 1800s. It's not surprising when you remember that England was all over India at the time, and there were certainly some hook-ups. For an Englishman with an Indian wife, America was probably a good place to settle.
I wasn't descended from noble plains warriors after all. I was descended from customer service. I finally understood why I can't shoot a bow and arrow worth a damn but I'm real nice on the phone. It all fit!
I was crushed, but on the other hand I was also fascinated. Just as Germany and England were part of my heritage, so was India. I've read some Kipling. I read Mark Twain's description of India in "Following the Equator". What had always seemed like a far-off, magical land was actually a place where my ancestors had lived, until one of them ran off with an Englishman and settled in the still-new nation of America.
I have some non-white ancestors and maybe even some non-white relatives, albeit distant cousins, still living in India. That's one reason I can't be a white supremacist. It would mean looking down on my own heritage.
But what really drives me away from the white supremacy thing was something else I learned about my family history. As I began working my way back through the available information, I began closing in on pre-Civil War records.
Now, I'm not into white guilt about slavery. I didn't do it. But I'm a big believer in the American ideal of freedom, and slavery was, and always will be, a dark stain on our history. I don't condemn the people who founded our nation for that. They were acting according to the morals of their time, and we know that what passes for morality doesn't always hit the mark. America was founded on noble principles that it didn't really follow at first.
So I was a little uneasy as I got into the older records. I knew, since virtually all my ancestors lived in the South, that I would find some slave owners. I would find people who owned other people as property, something that today we see as a grave injustice.
But I as I dug into the records from the 1860s back, I found a pattern. None of these families owned slaves. With every new direct ancestor I found, and even with the non-direct ones, I found more and more people who owned no slaves. I began to feel a little proud of these folks.
Then I noticed another pattern, which was the typical net worth of these families. At a time when a slave might sell for $300 or $400, my people tended to have a net worth, including all the kids, all the livestock, all the land, and all the belongings, of about $20.
You know how a coupon says its cash value is 1/20th of a cent? That was my typical ancestral family, except their cash value was 1/20th of a Negro.
It wasn't that my ancestors were too moral to own slaves. They were just too poor.
That's partly why when the white supremacists ask me to join their club, I just laugh and tell them they're barking up the wrong tree. Don't get me wrong. I like white people. We've invented a lot of cool things and helped build the modern technological society we enjoy today. But the idea that we're inherently superior because of our melanin deficiency is ridiculous.
There's simply nothing inherently superior about a particular skin color. It's just a genetic variation that was selected for as humans migrated out of Africa long ago. We're a lot like dogs in that respect: lots of variations but still the same animal. Homo sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years, which is long enough to evolve such variations, although we vary a lot less than dogs, but not long enough to evolve into different species.
The earliest humans, who are ancestral to every single one of us, were probably a lot like the people we used to call the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the indigenous people of southern Africa. I can't look down on these people. They survived long enough to make me happen.
When someone says that white people, or any sub-group of humanity, is superior to the others, they're trampling on their own heritage, their own ancestors. They're cutting themselves off from the long and glorious story of human progress and gaining nothing in the process.
If there's any group that can claim some kind of superiority, it would be the British, who ruled a big chunk of the planet at the height of their empire. They were a military and cultural powerhouse, not because of the color of their skin, but because they valued knowledge. We Americans inherited some of that British attitude toward knowledge, and that made our nation strong too.
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