"BLOOD TIES"

"self-mythologizing takes place when we assimilate the stories of our ancestors into our own—it’s automatic. We tell ourselves that their triumphs have somehow entered our bloodstream. We’re not descendants, we think; we’re heirs—heirs to intangible qualities (ambition, brilliance, endurance) through the fact of a thoroughly diluted blood tie. We allow ourselves to revise and cull from a shared history we lay claim to, every dead relation a past life lived vicariously...

On one of these ships arriving at Española, I have a blood relation. That is, he’s someone the Cuban side of my family counts among its own, tracing our roots back a half-millennium to take credit for the doings of at least one star conquistador. He will become one of the first governors of the New World. He will discover new territory himself and call it Florida. He will go hunting for—and find, and lose—a natural water source with near-magical powers of rejuvenation, in modern-day St. Augustine or St. Petersburg or maybe Punta Gorda. Each of these events is made more vivid for me by our shared bloodline. Each of these events is built on a lie."
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/789-blood-ties?utm_source=digest-nightly&utm_campaign=digest-nightly-20160308&utm_medium=email

It's weird, reading this, because this is not at all how I engage with my ancestry, as a descendant of slaves. Anything I ever learned or read about the kinds of people who were my ancestors was about their subjugation and terror and helplessness and less and death. Occasionally, there is one specific shining-star who is held up as a symbol of the potential contributions of all people who were enslaved or faced anti-black societies and laws. But I would know if I am descended from these tokens, and I am not. And before we were brought here...? Most of that ancestry from more than a few centuries ago is gone from our knowledge (the only way for me to know which countries my ancestors were from is to use 23andMe and hope it gets more specific about not-Europe soon, telling me that I'm Irish and Southern Italian but just generally West African, South Asian).

And then, the other weird thing: There are a lot of people in my ancestry who have names and can be tracked back to an old world continent, because they are white - but, there is a way in which I don't feel like I belong to their descendants or inherit anything from them, I imagine meeting them and their confusion and disgust at my skin color.

So, the few times that I have been able to access that feeling of being an heir to something desirable have been lessons on pre-colonial African history; I was lucky to attend a middle school that dedicated part of our 7th grade history curriculum to really talking about it, and then I took a class in college. But both times, the audience in those course was mostly not black and so, unlike the lessons about the renaissance or the American revolution, we did not learn these histories as part of our own history and inheritance and pride. And, if you are black in America, it is hard to feel pride and power in the histories if your ancestors without scaring the white people around you.

FB: "Most historians seem to agree that Juan Ponce de León is one of the more humane of these European settlers, treating the locals he absorbs into his enterprise more like indentured servants than slaves. But what does that mean? How thinly do we have to slice these moral distinctions to see the difference? He does not foment a native uprising—he helps to crush several of them. By the end of his first term in San Juan Bautista, the Taíno population has been drastically reduced through the deadly trifecta of fighting, forced labor, and disease brought by the Spanish.

This is not an aspect of my inheritance I want to engage with. Do I have to? Can I skip this part? Do we inherit awesome accomplishments and awesome guilt in equal measure? What part of this is family? Can we pick and choose what’s ours in the present tense?

Do we inherit darkness, even at a few centuries’ remove?"