Thread: Ancestry Shows
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Old 04-20-2015, 02:43 AM
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wildernesse wildernesse is offline
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Default Re: Ancestry Shows

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea View Post
In a way, though, we kind of are our ancestors, in that your family's station in life is predictive of your own, and frequently, that station was achieved through exploitation of someone else's family.

There are also those people who don't think that history classes should cover bad things about America, for pretty much the same reason. People want their origin stories to be some kind of morality tale, and if you acknowledge that a lot of your family's (or country's) gains were ill-gotten, that taints your perception of the present.

(There was also one guy in my extended family who was really obsessed with genealogy for a pretty long while and then suddenly lost interest entirely, and would get agitated if anyone brought it up.)
I don't disagree with you, necessarily. I'm thinking more about personal traits. But I do think it is more complicated than we are/are not our ancestors, and at some point the status of our ancestry ebbs to nothing.

I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm not saying that I don't have benefits as a result of my ancestry that come at the expense of other people. I do. I think more of that has to do with outside forces than of who the individuals were--they/I just happened to be [viewed as] white, which had/s privileges. Society conferred those advantages, not the individuals themselves, even if they participated in society.

Many of my family received land as a result of ethnic cleansing, as they settled the frontier of Georgia after the Creeks were removed in the late 1820's. Some of those people owned slaves. The descendants of those settlers are both white and black. I have a hard time arguing that the black descendants of those settlers received benefits despite having the same ancestors.

I don't know if I have a point or am making a point or am being stupid. Screaming children.
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Thanks, from:
Janet (04-21-2015), lisarea (04-20-2015), livius drusus (04-20-2015), Watser? (04-20-2015)
 
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