I spent the first eighteen years of my life in a perfectly acceptable but inadequately maintained 850-square-foot apartment with dubious plumbing, a leaky air conditioner, certainly no dishwasher or washing machine, and floor-boards near the sliding glass door in my bedroom that were perpetually rotting, allowing roly-polies or slugs to occasionally find their way inside. The walls stand out in my mind as well: thin enough to hear every fight my parents ever had and to cave in easily under the weight of my father’s fists, whenever the mood struck him to ventilate the plaster, as happened with some regularity. But even before the busted-up walls or leaky faucets at the Royal Arms Apartments, there had already been quite a bit of family water under the proverbial bridge. Examining the source of that stream provides substantial insight into the workings of privilege, and the ways in which even whites who lived in modest surroundings, as I did, had been born to belonging nonetheless.
Even if you don’t directly inherit material advantages from your family, there is something empowering about the ability to trace your lineage back hundreds of years, as so many whites but so few persons of color can. In 1977, my third grade teacher encouraged us to trace our family trees, inspired by the miniseries “Roots,” and apparently unaware of how injurious it might be for black students to make the effort, only to run head first into the crime of slavery and its role in their family background. The exercise provided, for the whites at least, a sense of pride, even rootedness; not so much for the African American students.
Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot. Genealogy offers a sense of belonging and connectedness to others with firm, identifiable pasts—pasts that directly trace the rise and fall of empires, and which correspond to the events we learned about in history classes, so focused were they on the narratives of European peoples. Even when we personally have no desire to affiliate with those in our past about whom we learn, simply knowing whence you came has the effect of linking you in some great chain of mutuality. It is enabling, if far from ennobling. It offers a sense of psychological comfort, a sense that you belong in this story known as the history of the world. It is to make real the famous words, “This land is my land.”
When I sat down a few years ago to examine my various family histories, I have to admit to a sense of excitement as I peeled back layer upon layer, generation after generation. It was like a game, the object of which was to see how far back you could go before hitting a dead end. Thanks to the hard work of the fine folks at Ancestry.com, on several branches of my family tree, I had no trouble going back hundreds, even thousands of years. In large measure this was because those branches extended through to royal lineage, where records were kept meticulously, so as to make sure everyone knew to whom the spoils of advantage were owed in each new generation.
Understand, my claim to royal lineage here means nothing. After all, since the number of one’s grandparents doubles in each generation, by the time you trace your lineage back even five hundred years (assuming generations of roughly twenty-five years each), you will have had as many as one million grandparents at some remove. Even with pedigree collapse—the term for the inevitable overlap that comes when cousins marry cousins, as happened with all families if you go back far enough—the number of persons to whom you’d be connected by the time you got back a thousand years would still be several million. That said, I can hardly deny that as I discovered those linkages, even though they were often quite remote—and despite the fact that the persons to whom I discovered a connection were often despicable characters who stole land, subjugated the masses, and slaughtered others in the name of nationalism or God—there was still something about the process that made me feel more real, more alive, and even more purposeful. To explore the passing of time as it relates to world history and the history of your own people, however removed from you they may be, is like putting together a puzzle, several pieces of which had previously been missing; it’s a gift that really can’t be overstated. And for those prepared to look at the less romantic side of it all, genealogy also makes it possible to uncover and then examine one’s inherited advantages.
Going back a few generations on my mother’s side, for instance, we have the Carter family, traceable to John Carter, born in 1450 in Kempston, Bedfordshire, England. It would be his great-great-greatgrandson, William, who would bring his family to the Virginia Colony in the early 1630s, just a few of twenty-thousand or so Puritans who came to America between 1629 and 1642, prior to the shutting down of emigration by King Charles I at the outset of the English Civil War.
The Carters would move inland after their arrival, able to take advantage in years to come of one of the New World’s first affirmative action programs, known as the “headright” system, under which male heads of household willing to cross the Atlantic and come to Virginia were given fifty acres of land that had previously belonged to one of at least fourteen indigenous nations whose members had lived there.
Although the racial fault lines between those of European and African descent hadn’t been that deep in the earliest years of the Virginia Colony—race-based slavery wasn’t in place yet, and among indentured servants there were typically more Europeans than Africans—all that would begin to change in the middle of the seventeenth century. Beginning in the 1640s, the colony began assigning blacks to permanent enslavement; then in the 1660s, they declared that all children born of enslaved mothers would be slaves, in perpetuity, themselves. That same decade, Virginia announced that no longer would Africans converted to Christianity be immune to enslavement or servitude. Then, in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, during which European and African laborers joined forces to overthrow the government of Governor Berkeley, elites began to pass a flurry of laws intended to limit black freedom, elevate whites, and divide and conquer any emerging cross-racial alliances between the two groups.
In 1682, the colony codified in law that all whites, no matter their condition of temporary servitude, were to be seen as separate and apart from African slaves, and that they would enjoy certain rights and privileges off-limits to the latter, including due process in disputes with their masters, and the right to redress if those masters abused them. Furthermore, once released from indenture, white servants would be able to claim up to fifty acres of land with which to begin their new lives. Ultimately, indentured servitude would be abolished in the early eighteenth century, replaced by a dramatic upsurge in chattel slavery. Blacks, along with “mulattoes, Indians, and criminals,” would be banned from holding public or ecclesiastical office after 1705, and the killing of a rebellious slave would no longer be deemed murder; rather, according to Virginia law, the event would be treated “as if such accident had never happened.”
The Carters, as with many of the Deanes (another branch of my mother’s family), lived in Virginia through all of this period when whiteness was being legally enshrined as a privileged space for the first time. And they were there in 1800, too—like my fourth great grandfather, William M. Carter—when a planned rebellion by Thomas Prosser’s slave, Gabriel, in Henrico County, was foiled thanks to other slaves exposing the plot. As a result, Gabriel was hanged, all free blacks in the state were forced to leave, or else face re-enslavement, and all education or training of slaves was made illegal. Paranoia over the Gabriel conspiracy, combined with the near-hysterical reaction to the Haitian revolution under way at that point, which would expel the French from the island just a few years later, led to new racist crackdowns and the extension of still more advantages and privileges to whites like those in my family.
Then there were the Neelys, the family of my maternal great-grandmother, who can be traced to Edward Neely, born in Scotland in 1745, who came to America shortly before the birth of his son, also named Edward, in 1770. The Neelys would move from New York’s Hudson Valley to Kentucky, where Jason Neely, my third great-grandfather, was born in 1805. The land on which they would settle, though it had been the site of