Who Have We Become?

        I recently started researching my family tree so far, it’s been fascinating and frustrating.  Fascinating, getting glimpses of the past and what my ancestors endured as slaves, sharecroppers and farmers. Frustrating, seeing how they persevered through the injustices, abuse, mistreatment and prejudices to make a better life for their families at the time.  I really doubt that they saw the effects from their sufferings on future generations, for at the moment, it was more important to survive.  I found how so many large families coped with farming buy using family members as help to survive.  I also saw mixing with the owners resulting naming the offspring as mulattoes on the census.  Thus, some family members decided passing as white and others who are actually white.  There were many unkept records and misspelled names that I found as I dug deeper into my ancestral tree.  What should have I expected from people that were not educated and census takers that didn’t care?  In those days, people of color or mixed were not considered equal so why care when and where they were born.  Not many records birth or death records were kept of them.

 

            Research is like solving puzzles with pieces that look similar but doesn’t fit.  Many people, black and white, had the same names but were from so many different regions.  I got elated to find a piece but distracted when that puzzle piece took me to another source and that connection is a disappointment.  What I am finding is that we are all related in some kind of way by even just a little bit of blood.  We all are intertwined; we are all related and denounce our relationships because of race.  Yes, we were taught it and experienced it.  Even now, some of the very people that I descended from may very well be passing because it is a lot easier to bypass the abuse and discrimination set upon people of color.  Why should we all go through this?  Why should anyone go through this?  

 

            Look at our country now and the division it is experiencing.  We are more related than we think but it is hard to see.  What a shame.  We’re better off not knowing each other because it’s easier to fear, destroy and hate what we don’t know.  Recognizing the truth would be an embarrassment to our intelligence.  After all, it’s not where we come from, it’s who we become.