Paradoxically enough, a common facet of U.S. white culture is a romanticized connection to some European place that actually has next to nothing to do with who and what they are as white US citizens.
So when this leader from The Irish Times popped-up in my social media feed this morning, I was surprised.
Surprised and disheartened, because I didn’t expect someone like Ms. Kingsolver to be repeating the same old “white essentialist” take on Southern Appalachian culture, i.e., “We are Scots-Irish”.
But this is how real history is erased - a thing is repeated like a mantra so often and for so long that it becomes “received wisdom”.
Some might well ask “What does it really matter if our ancestors were from this group or that group?”.
It matters because untruths and foundational myths are used by people all over the world, yesterday and today, to justify the pre-eminence of some groups, and to downplay (and even disappear) the stories of other groups.
Some of us do not want our stories to disappear.
Of sixteen second-great grandparents, Ms. Kingsolver has only one single ancestor who on balance might be said to descend from Ulster folk (highlighted in green in pedigree).
The rest of her ancestry consists of the descendants of people from the British Isles (including England, Scotland, and probably Wales), people from either Flanders or The Netherlands, and people from France and Germany.
At least half of her ancestral lines were slaveholding families, so where no explicit wills, land documents, or Bible entries provide documentary cross-referencing, we must entertain the possibility that some descendants may in fact be what I call “sparks” - the offspring of slaveholders and enslaved people.
Ms. Kingsolver’s very surname is an enigma. Appearing out of the blue in colonial South Carolina first as “Consolver”, many believe this surname might be a corruption of the Portuguese/Portuguese Jewish surname “Gonçalves”. Interestingly, her direct Kingsolver ancestry includes households which included free people of color.
It is all too easy, when we feel an affinity for a place, to imagine some sort of “genetic memory” connecting our feelings to something more tangible or historical.
More often than not, we are simply projecting our own romantic desires onto the world around us - our imagined history having no basis in reality.
Just think where this might lead when people less well-intentioned than Barbara Kingsolver start to “project”.
Dipshits all around. Just throwing out as much hate as they possibly can.
