11d • General discussion
What kind of ancestor will you be?
All this. Having Thomas Jefferson be an atrocious yet revered (not by me) colonizing ancestor of mine, I strive to be the kind of person that would make him turn in his own grave.
Original post from Chamieka House-Osuya 👇🔽
"I don’t usually write on Sundays, but I’ve been sitting with something I can’t put down. It came out of a wonderful conversation I had recently, and I keep turning it over: what would it actually mean for white people to be good ancestors?
When I first heard the phrase “good ancestor,” it didn’t feel simple or inspiring. It felt heavy. Not because it’s some new concept, but because it put words to something a lot of us have been going around for years without ever saying out loud. We keep having the same conversations about race and history. They keep falling apart in the same spots every single time. That exhaustion is real and it adds up. It does not level off the more you go through it. It gets heavier, especially when you are being honest and what you get back is defensiveness instead of any real reflection.
A lot of white folks hear these conversations and immediately turn inward in entirely the wrong way. They are not reflective or curious, but merely protective, making it about defending themselves instead of facing what is being said. And then we end up completely stuck, because the focus shifts to their fragile feelings, and the actual harm never gets dealt with. It just sits there, unchallenged and unchanged, while everyone argues around it in circles. That is the pull in two directions at once: wanting to be honest about what is real, while knowing how quickly honesty gets shut down when it feels too close.
Still, if anything is going to move, there has to be a way forward for the people who are actually willing to do something different. It cannot be a way that makes it easier, but just a way that keeps the responsibility exactly where it belongs. The idea of being a good ancestor does that in a way that feels incredibly grounded and real. Being a good ancestor means not looking away, but sitting with what came before you and being honest about what you’ve gained from it. It is a defining decision point where you either continue what was handed down, or you actively interrupt it.
Interruption takes sustained effort, not just words, and as a white person, there is real, undeniable responsibility here. It requires the kind of work that looks at the patterns passed down through your lineage — shame, guilt, tribalism, narcissism — and calls them what they are. Did your ancestors enslave Africans or violently displace Native Americans from their homes? Probably, and that isn’t said to shock, but rather to state the baseline reality of the history you come from. There is an unspoken truth at the core of white American identity, which is a profound and unacknowledged rootlessness.
White people do not naturally belong to this soil. Their presence here was built on violent invasion and extraction, not on any real relationship to this land. That rupture creates something- a grief that most white Americans have never been asked to look at directly, because the construct of whiteness has always worked to bury it before it could surface. It is the sorrow of having cut yourself off from your own true belonging in the pursuit of dominance. And it is compounded by the ongoing reality of having actively destroyed, or tried to destroy, the belonging of everyone else in the process. Those patterns do not stay tucked away in the past because you refuse to look at them. They settle into your body. They show up in your reactions, your defensiveness, your desperate need to make yourself the center of someone else’s pain.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how the phrase “Black community” naturally evokes warmth, solidarity, and a deep sense of togetherness, whereas “white community” simply does not. I realize now that this exact same stark contrast applies perfectly to how we view those who came before us. When Black folks think of our ancestors, we think of profound resilience, spiritual grounding, and a fierce survival that paved the way for our existence. White folks, instead, attempt to sanitize their history and remove themselves from harm by rebranding their ancestors as “forefathers.”
Whether they realize it or not, this linguistic shift is a deliberate distancing tactic used to create space for whatever justifications they need to make in their heads. Turning flesh-and-blood perpetrators into marble statues makes it much easier to separate yourself from the atrocities of the past. But you cannot build anything different without dealing with what is underneath it, because that history does not go away just because it is uncomfortable. What is actually required are people who are fully prepared to become their white, racist ancestors’ absolute worst nightmare.
We need people who are willing to be the first in their entire family line to look at all of it honestly and say, “Fuck this.” No more passing it down. No more looking away. So what kind of ancestor will you be? When people look back on your life, on the choices you made during this particular moment in history, what will they feel? I am not asking whether you were a good person. Good people let this stuff continue all the time. I am asking whether you were willing to be the one who actually stopped it. And if not you, then who?"
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What kind of ancestor will you be?
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