In First Lady's Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

[Nylah]

Re: In First Lady's Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery


aie sah

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: BlackStar</div><div class="ubbcode-body">There's some kind of debate on NYTimes about the subject and here is the intro:<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">In an article published on Wednesday, The Times reported on Michelle Obama’s ancestry, tracing her maternal line back to her great-great-great-grandparents, a slave girl and a white man, and their son, Dolphus T. Shields, who was born in the 1850s.

While these findings tell of Michelle Obama’s roots, for many Americans her family’s story will also bring into focus a common narrative, which runs through the history of this nation. <span style="font-weight: bold">We asked some historians and writers, why has it taken so long for Americans to appreciate these deep multiethnic connections? </span></div></div>
The bolded sentence should read: <span style="font-weight: bold">&quot;We asked some historians and writers, why has it taken so long for <span style="text-decoration: underline"><span style="font-size: 11pt">white</span></span> Americans to appreciate these deep multiethnic connections?&quot;</span> </div></div>

[Blackstar*]

Re: In First Lady's Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

Here's another:
<span style="font-style: italic">Those of us who've found similar &quot;entangled roots&quot; on our ancestral tree are amazed at the complexity and in some cases, the depravity of these early behaviors. In some slaveowners' journals and family records, evidence (and now DNA) remain showing that three generations of white fathers: grandfather, father and son, had sex and children with three generations of black women they owned as slaves: grandmother, mother and daughter.

We are amazed to uncover ancestors who owned and traded their own children and cousins as slaves. In cases documented in slaveowners' journals, analyzed by modern writers such as Eric Williams, we read about the abusive patterns: &quot;the planter slept with his daughter and his granddaughter and so on, through all the grades of incest.&quot; He describes the legal categories of color labeling: sacatra, griffe, marabou, mulatto, quarteroon, metif, mameluke, ocotoroon, mixed-blood.

We come to terms with the fact that some of our ancestors were not bought and sold by strangers, but by their own relatives. We encounter ancestors who were abused sexually, not only by neighboring plantation owners, or traveling merchants, but by their own parents and relatives. And shockingly, this widespread behavior was endorsed by the laws, the families and founders. Psychologically, how did they tolerate this complexity?

When we are faced with these details in our modern news, as in the case in California, where a sexual predator kidnapped a young girl, housed her in a shed in the backyard, and bore children with her, we are outraged. And society reacts.

But how do we react when we read the names and families and ancestors we uncover where the slaveowner bred three generations of his own slaves himself. How do we react when we read the slaveowner's journal where he brags about breeding three generations himself. How do we react when we read that he beat an enslaved girl and her mother who tried to posin him to stop this behavior. Abuse is not easy to embrace as history unless we have the emotional fortitude to fact it, and the positive narrative to tell the stories.</span> Source