I’m Turning Off My “Oppressor Gene”
I have at least one documented slave owner in my family tree.
Do I share this ancestor’s “oppressor gene”? And if I do, is it possible to turn this gene off? Is simple awareness enough to do so?
I believe so. We all have the ability to change our beliefs and behaviors. The caveat is that we need to know we have this power. I think the current discourse in the public space is that we are powerless against the forces around us—and that our socialization trumps our agency. I reject this premise. Of course, while there may be many things we cannot control in life, including the color of our skin, we can control our mindset and our reactions. And often, this makes all the difference in the world.
After having done a bit of historical research, I have so far been able to find one documented slave owner in my family, my 4x great-grandfather William Richmond. I know this as I discovered a deed in which he, as a landowner in North Carolina, bequeathed a number of slaves to his son Adam Richmond (so I guess that makes two slave owners, as I assume Adam came into possession of the slaves).
Prior to this discovery, I knew my family had had some association with slavery based on oral history. I have heard that the freed slaves of one of my ancestors, who I now believe was Macon Richmond, grandson of Adam, emigrated with them to Texas. I had always figured that, as my family had long been involved with ranching and farming, they likely had had slaves at some point. Now that I have actual documented proof, has it changed anything?
Before I answer this question, let me just say that while I don’t believe that I, as a descendant of a slave owner, have some unique gene that makes me more predisposed to being an “oppressor” than someone with no slave owners in their family history, I do believe that some cultural “genes” have been passed down in my family.
Let me explain.
I have worked most of my life in geopolitics. One of the premises of geopolitics, and one to which I ardently subscribe, is that our geographies shape our personalities. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, also notes this phenomenon. He emphasizes how certain terrain, for example, the hilly, forested areas of Kentucky, attracted settlers from regions with similar terrain, such as Northern England. This was an area that was not suitable for farming, but it was good for raising livestock. It makes sense that early settlers would have gravitated to areas in the New World where they could participate in the livelihood and professions they recognized.
The culture that was born from agricultural societies was different from the culture of herders. For example, as Gladwell notes, crop theft is not a major concern in agricultural societies, but for those dependent on livestock, the threat of “cattle-rustling” is very real, and harsh retribution was necessary to deter theft (the television series Yellowstone illustrates this nicely). Different regions breed different industries and pursuits, and these, in turn, shape not only our individual experiences but also our culture (and perhaps our genes?). Those growing up in this hillier terrain were typically much more territorial, and they developed a “code of honor” system that has permeated through the centuries. It is something still very evident today. J. D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy does an amazing job elaborating on the preservation of this “code of honor” culture, even for those “hillbillies” who are generations removed from the land.
Of course, the American South is not necessarily hilly, but perhaps to the extent that livestock often went side-by-side with agriculture here, the theory still holds, accounting for evidence of violence in the South. The book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese also mentions this Southern honor culture:
They were tough, proud, and arrogant; liberal-spirited in all that did not touch their honor; gracious and courteous; generous and kind; quick to anger and extraordinarily cruel; attentive to duty and careless of any time and effort that did not control their direct interests. They had been molded by their slaves as much as their slaves had been molded by them. They were not men to be taken lightly, not men frivolously to be made enemies of. And they wallowed in those deformities which their slaves had thrust upon them in the revenge of historical silence—deformities which would eventually lead them to destruction as a class.
Does this culture shape me? Yes.
The fierce independence of the “cowboy culture” has shaped my family, even though I did not grow up on our family’s ranch. The “rugged individualism” motto is very much imprinted on the psyches of those in these environs. Although ranching communities are often close-knit, the distance between ranches typically instills a necessary “personal responsibility” and “individual grit” ethos. If you’re caught in a storm in a distant field with a cow giving birth, typically you’re on your own. You’re responsible if the cow and her offspring live or die, which subsequently determines your own livelihood.
Now, let me get back to the question on slaveholding.
While I do believe that my environment has shaped me, my awareness of the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery has also shaped me. I do not like that I can trace my ancestry to slaveholders. A slave owner’s blindness to humanity literally hurts my soul. And yet, I believe all of us, in some way or another, have had ancestors that make us cringe. I honestly cannot say that knowledge of my ancestry gives me any greater sense of rootedness, but the fact of the matter is that I can trace it. My ancestors weren’t erased on their passage to America, and we get to visit the Old World haunts of our forefathers and collect various “coats of arms” and other trinkets that point to our history. Add to this the knowledge that my ancestors came over willingly, which perhaps in some sense provides a feeling of “belonging,” if you will.
I think the fact that most black Americans cannot trace their roots past American soil is one of the worst lingering effects of slavery and something that most white Americans do not face. I have things to do in this life, and compensating for ancestors I don’t even know matters not to me. Family is so important to me, and yet going back and lamenting my ancestors is of no interest.
I would argue that I am not blind to the past. I can acknowledge the past without bringing it into my daily life or letting it define me as I try to forge a new future. This is not to say that one shouldn’t be saddened by the sins of an ancestral past—we all want to unearth our saints and bury the sinners.
But many white Americans needn’t look back to the days of slavery to find sinners in their family. Indeed, the Jim Crow era, in my mind, is almost a worse sin than American slavery. As horrible as it was, slavery was a global phenomenon and not confined to any continent or country. While that fact, of course, does not excuse its presence or existence in America, I’m less moved by rhetoric that paints slavery as the United States’ original sin than by the institutionalization of Jim Crow policies after the promise of Reconstruction. Such an explicit repudiation of hard-won and long-overdue progress evokes stronger emotions in me.
Retreating from shame is a normal human reaction. When faced with shame, if we can’t hide, we often crumble and beg for repentance. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the past five years or so that I considered whether this emotion was one of guilt. It was always one of sadness. It was also one of pride. No, not white pride. Rather, black pride. Or American pride. The pride doesn’t emanate from Jim Crow but from the spirit of overcoming.
Born after the Civil Rights Movement, I was blissfully ignorant of Jim Crow in my early years. Have I lived a sheltered life? Like many middle-class white Americans who never experienced racial bigotry, I have. My increasing awareness of the experiences of many black Americans only deepened my sadness.
While I don’t buy into the idea of guilt, one thing I will say, as I’ve said before, is that this hyper-focus on race has forced an important conversation in a country where many people were, like me, blissfully and, in some cases, willfully ignorant. For me personally, it has expanded my empathy and my desire to connect. To learn and listen to stories different from my own. To understand.
Simultaneously, my pride in being witness to a country so determined to live into the ideals of freedom, liberty, and equality has expanded. To be a fellow American alongside the likes of black heroes who refused to sit idle in the face of discrimination, risking their lives to fight daily for these values, gives hope in the strength of our plurality. In many ways, it is the black and non-white experience that fuels my patriotism.
Of course, being white, I can only claim agency in such a movement from the sidelines. I can support and applaud but cannot lay claim to these successes. Yet, while middle-class white Americans were surely in a position to escape racial bigotry, the obsessive application of guilt and privilege has stalled what I considered was the coming of a new era of reconstruction—this time of a new American identity. I don’t consider the penance of white allies groveling and tripping over themselves to bear the scarlet letter of racial prejudice as they relive their ancestral crimes a durable foundation for building a new community. The scaffolding of division layered upon division is sure to buckle under the weight.
As communication and connection transform into angry vitriol in short clips and 280 characters, our world is now both more connected and more tribal. A white professor tweets that all cops should be killed. A California teacher proudly announces on TikTok that she has taken down the American flag in her classroom and that she has told her students that there’s another flag in the classroom; they can pledge their allegiance to a Gay Pride flag. How we land in the ensuing debates over these issues has torn friends and families apart and entrenched tribes. Even in my own family, talking politics has become taboo when we come to rely on sound bites to formulate arguments instead of good-faith dialogue.
The other day my family got into a heated debate about our own ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. (We can trace ancestors back to both sides of the Civil War.) My son was disgusted. They were bad people, he said with a grimace. My dad came unglued. Wrong and evil are not synonymous. In the instance of our family member in the Confederacy, he actually started out in the Union Army, but when the lines were drawn and his hometown fell on the “wrong” side, this ancestor, who never owned a slave, switched sides in what we assume was a sense of duty to protect his home.
A while back, I found myself in the car more than usual as my dad and I sought a miracle for his cancer “up the road” at MD Anderson in Houston (“up the road” is Texan for “not too close,” while “yonder pasture” indicates proximity). On our drive, we spent a lot of the time listening to the news. Remembrance of 9/11 dominated the airwaves. In one segment, they were interviewing the family of someone who died that day, and it was mentioned that this woman’s family had proudly served in the U.S. military all the way back to the Civil War. The commentator responded, “I hope for the right side.”
It goes without saying that the “right side” won, thankfully. But I couldn’t help but wonder if we will now be castigated and shamed in the public square if we are found to have a drop of Confederate blood in our veins. Is this a new rendition of the “one-drop” rule? Does it help move us toward equality? Perhaps a true reconciliation comes when we recognize the sinners and saints in all our family trees and absolve each other of the “sins of our fathers.”
Just recently, I read a piece on Beyoncé’s ancestral search. The tagline for the piece reads, “Beyoncé’s reconciliation of her ancestry reminds us that we live in danger of allowing narratives we didn’t generate to tell our stories for us.” In doing her ancestral search, she found that she comes from a slave owner who fell in love with and married a slave. This means that she could just as easily be descended from people like Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and even the infamous, murdering King Henry VIII as any white American on the street. Indeed, on average, black Americans are genetically a quarter European. How much of this is a result of rape, and how much of love? Even if this one instance is classified as love, I would wager that most of us could find instances of rape in our family tree, regardless of our color. For example, did you know that Jesse Jackson was born out of rape? As was news anchor Faith Daniels. The list, sadly, is long. Acknowledging the full range of stories—from stories of slavery to stories of uplift or stories of rape to stories of love—seems necessary in any review of history, including of our own family’s history.
In order to fully embrace and account for our past, and to do so with an eye toward strengthening our plurality and multiracial future, we need to be wary of blanket narratives wrapping us up in an elusive hug of warm tribalism.
I think it is important to continue to push forward an agenda that recognizes the history of black Americans and seeks to reconcile a dark past with a bright future. I’m just not sure that the way we are going about it supports a Coming to the Table moment. Eric Kaufmann, in his book Whiteshift, suggests that we support ethno-traditionalist nationalism. That is to say, a viewpoint that recognizes minorities and minority struggles, with the idea that we are all Americans and responsible for creating our future . . . together. To value our history and founding and to take responsibility for maintaining a larger national identity while embracing our differences and struggles. We shouldn’t “sidestep” any history.
I believe that thinkers such as W. E. B. Dubois and Martin Luther King, Jr., would subscribe to such a view. Both fought for the values of this country to be applied to all. The oppression mantra today seems to suggest that we “throw the baby out with the bath water.” Instead of taking everything down to the foundation to rebuild, this thinking seems to revolve around total destruction. Within this storyline, we’ve built walls between us that seem insurmountable.
Recently I attended a show that had a jazz band composed of two white men (piano and sax), a black man (upright bass), and an Asian woman (drums). As I sat in the audience, I couldn’t help but smile. This is my America, I mused, playing together in perfect harmony. Am I too naive to think that we can replicate this nationally?
Am I genetically predisposed to look to the future instead of the past? Maybe so. But that’s not something I’d want to change, even if I could. I accept my ancestry, warts and all, and doing so doesn’t constrict my future. To the extent that I have power over my genes, if we do have such power, the one gene I’m turning off is the “oppression gene.”
This essay is adapted from letters the author wrote to Winkfield Twyman, Jr., first published in the book Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Jennifer Richmond is the founder of Truth in Between and executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Liberal Values. She also works with EmpowerED Pathways, a non-profit affiliated with Free Black Thought. She lives in Austin, Texas.
August 2024