Who Do You Think You Are?

[poliphilo]

Who do I think I am?

Well, I'm a sort of a Buddhist. I believe in reincarnation. I think this no longer very active body is the latest of many I've knocked about in-  which means my so-called ancestors are only related to me for the duration of this particular short life. When I shuck this body off I'll lose them as well.  My real lineage has nothing to do with my family tree but consists of all the random, genetically-unrelated people I've been.  So if I were to discover that my blood ancestors were slave owners and slave traders I wouldn't be greatly bothered. Those guys ain't me

Silly Ben Affleck.

(As it happens, the ancestors I know most about were Quakers, which means they'd have been abolitionists as a matter of course. Those are my mother's people. My father's lot were shopkeepers on one side and unknowable on the other. I think (can't prove but have reason to believe) that my grandfather was illegitimate. His mother had a lodging house in Erith and his father was what- some passing sailor? My grandfather was very swarthy- which makes me speculate (indeed hope) that his father may not have been English. All this is quite good fun- but I can't take it seriously.)

The soul's journey from incarnation to incarnation is a story of checks and balances. You go badly wrong in one life, you get back on track in the next.  I'm sure, on the law of averages, I must have been some pretty awful shits in my time.  Never mind. That was yesterday. We're here to explore the potential of life in human form on this planet- to have experiences- and we'd be doing a lousy job if we only kept to the straight forthright and never veered off into the bush.

Comments

Off on a tangent about Quakers and abolitionism

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Your ancestors wouldn't have been abolitionists as a matter of course, just because they were Quakers. At least, that's not how it worked here in the colonies. William Penn owned slaves; John Bartram owned enslaved people for his own farm and purchased additional enslaved people for his son's ill-fated rice plantation venture.

William Bartram, later in life, wrote an anti-slavery treatise. And Benjamin Franklin, former slave owner, became the first president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775. That organization (which is still around and giving small grants to worthy causes) was indeed composed primarily of Quakers, but I think that if you shook their family trees a slaveholder or two might have fallen out.

In current scholarship, there is a shift to substitute "enslaved person" for slave. It's a bit of an awkward construction, but it does help reinforce the notion that an enslaved man is a man.

(This pedantic lecture has been brought to you by a member in good standing of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, who held their annual meeting just two days ago, so all of this is really fresh in my mind at the moment.)

I am liking some of the thoughtful commentary coming out of the Affleck affair -- one African American commentator noted that blacks and whites in this country are still yoked together in the cycle of guilt, shame, and anger brought about by the country's slaveholding past, irrespective of whether their ancestors were enslaved or not, slaveholders or not. That's a useful point. We're all suffering as a result.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm a little shocked. I had no idea that some Friends were also slave owners.

I'm not keen on "enslaved person". I think these well-meaning reformulations drain the life out of the language.

If it's stirring up intelligent debate then Affleck didn't suffer in vain.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I'm of two minds about "enslaved person." It startles the eye and ear and makes one think. That's good. It's awkward as heck, but maybe that's good, too.

I do have a thing about euphemism creep. In this country, first they were Africans, then they were Negros, then they were colored people, then they were Negroes again, then they were blacks, then they were Afro-Americans, then they were African-Americans. And starting at about the time of the first usage of Negro there was "the N word," which has persisted for 150 years or so. Now they're African Americans, blacks, or people of color, but heaven help you if you slip and say colored people instead of people of color, as Benedict Cumberbatch recently did.

My mother fell of the nomenclature bus in about 1950 and proudly called them colored people (rather than the N-word that most of her family used out of ignorant innocence). Oh, well.

Similar euphemism creep for those with physical or mental or emotional disabilities is pretty mind-boggling, too.