david starling
Well-known member
To me, it's a mixed bag. I have links in my family tree to several of the founding fathers and other known figures of colonial and post revolutionary American history. I suppose you could say that's a legacy of pride. I'm also aware of some particularly good things some of my closer ancestors have done. Definitely a legacy of pride.
I also have to acknowledge the fact that one whole side of my family participated in slavery and profited from it. And that some of the financial advantage gained from that passed down to my generation, while the descendants of those who actually did the work did not inherit the profits. Those people may even be my (distant) cousins, considering the well known propensity among slave owners for knocking up their female slaves. I have no actual knowledge of the men in my family having done that, but it wouldn't surprise me if at least a few of them did. And then there were a few Indian killers in other parts of the family tree, which is a whole other issue....
But it's not disloyal to my family to say those things. It's not lack of pride in who I am. It's ancestor work.
The only ethnic group that's in America now that has a legacy of having been enslaved in America, and having been considered as "3/5ths" of a person by many of the Founding Fathers, is the one now labeled as "African American", or by the color-code "Black".
I can see where that would bother some members of this ethnic group, to the point of hypersensitivity and even anger.