Liberation Genealogy

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Taking full responsibility for this legacy of relationships is empowering and radical. Guilt and denial and the defensive pull to avoid blame require immense amounts of energy and are profoundly immobilizing. Giving them up can be a great relief. Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act. Acknowledging our ancestors' participation in the oppression of others (and this is ultimately true of everyone if you really dig) and deciding to balance the accounts on their behalf leads to greater integrity and less shame; less self-righteousness and more righteousness, humility, and compassion; and a sense of proportion.

At the same time, uncovering the credit side of the accounts, not the suffering but the solidarity, persistence, love, hard work, creativity, and soul of our forebears, is also an obligation. We are responsible for carrying that forward into our own time and for calling on our kin to do likewise. For people committed to liberation to claim descent from the perpetrators is a renewal of faith in human beings. If slavers, invaders, committers of genocide, inquisitors can beget abolitionists, resistance fighters, healers, community builders, then anyone can transform an inheritance of privilege or of victimization into something more fertile than either.

One of the rewards of discovering exactly who our people have been--and how and with whom they have lived--is the possibility of unimagined kinship. My Jewish ancestors were settled in the Ukraine as a buffer against Turkish invasion, alongside German Mennonites brought in to teach formerly landless Jews about farming. At a talk in Wichita, Kansas, I was able to thank their descendants and claim a relationship between us, as Eastern European Jew and German Christian, other than that of genocidal anti-Semitism.

Mapping the specificity of our ethnicity also reveals hidden relationships. European Americans in this country need to find out in relationship to whom they became white. The answers will be very different for the descendants of a Scot from Iowa, an Irishwoman from Alabama, a New York Pole, a Louisiana French-Spanish Creole, a Texan with roots in 17th-century England and 19th-century Austria, and a Romanian Jew who settled in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. Questions about our place within the megastructures of racism become intimate and carry personality. It becomes possible to see the choices we make right now as extensions of those inherited ones, and to choose more courageously as a result.

From Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity(South End Press, 1998).

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