I made a poor excuse for a Presbyterian even as a kid. I resented religious indoctrination every precious school-free Sunday. Yet despite my apostatic nature, any number of biblical tenets with broad secular application have become touchstones. Of particular value during our post-Floydian festival of flagellation is Ezekiel 18: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” Ergo, while we can’t take credit for our forebears’ virtues and achievements, at least whatever horrors our ancestors got up to is not our fault.
The handing down of grudges generation after generation inculcates a dismaying moral helplessness in so-called culprits who were supposedly born into sin but never themselves did anything wrong, while stoking an unappeasable resentment in the descendants of long-dead ancestors whose injuries can never be healed. Sound like a world you recognize? The left increasingly embraces the highly un-Christian principle of heritable guilt.
Earlier this month, the NewsHour on PBS began its Tuesday evening program with the obligatory rundown of the day’s mass shootings coast to coast. There followed another obligatory report on the nation’s ignorant right-wing militias, whose members resist all social progress since 1960 and have never heard of slavery or Native American genocide — which, given today’s cultural climate, is quite an achievement; clearly the Proud Boys do their drills in caves.
The highlight of the show was an interview with one Tom Lasseter. The Reuters journalist had just released a report exposing five living presidents, two Supreme Court judges, eleven governors and more than 100 members of Congress as having one or more ancestors who owned slaves. What made the whole broadcast especially obnoxious? Of all days, this sweeping national diss aired on July 4.
The Reuters report itself begins with an array of photographs of all these morally contaminated national leaders that’s evocative of an FBI Most Wanted poster. Piquantly, the first photo is of Joe Biden, who’s cornily played up his dilute Irish origins rather than his equally British roots, while curiously underplaying his connection to a great-great-great grandfather who enslaved a fourteen-year-old boy in 1850. Among the outed senators is Elizabeth Warren, who has infamously touted her Native American ancestry, which, as a DNA test subsequently demonstrated, constitutes between 1/32nd and 1/1,024th of her genetic heritage; maybe the proportion of slaveholders in her background will prove more impressive. Another president with enslaving blood is none other than Barack Obama. Inconveniently, because his ancestors arrived in the US after the Civil War, the purest of living presidents is Donald Trump.
Maybe that tells us something about the questionable merits of this elaborate exercise. Note, digging up an orchard’s worth of American leaders’ family trees entailed shedloads of work. Reuters journalists examined thousands of pages of census records, tax documents, family Bibles, estate records, newspaper articles and birth and death certificates. But to what end?
This isn’t merely naming; it’s shaming. The journalists may claim their intention was simply to reveal “how intimately tied America remains to the institution of slavery” — meaning, OK, slavery happened, and the people who participated in the practice bore children, most of whose distant descendants still live in the US. And the report may dutifully include one quote from Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who states plainly: “We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions.” But the very conception of the study suggests otherwise. Implicit in going to all this bother to unearth buried badness is that the sins of the father are indeed visited upon the sons. When Reuters contacted the singled-out notables about their polluted genes, the journalists hardly expected these politicians to be disinterestedly curious, much less pleased; no, they expected news of a morally blighted heritage to make their targets feel abashed. Little wonder that only a quarter of this naughty list replied.
The news agency also commissioned a poll asking Americans whether learning that candidates had slaveholding ancestors would influence their vote. An appalling 23 percent — nearly a quarter — asserted they would indeed be less likely to vote for a candidate with such a stained genetic background, a figure that rose to an astonishing 31 percent among Democrats and 35 percent among black people. This is what I’m talking about. Heritable guilt is in fashion.
True, Tom Lasseter discovered at least five slaveholders in his own genealogy. But it’s a very different business to out yourself than to out the unsuspecting. Like the Guardian recently, which humble-bragged about its own tenuous historical ties to the slave trade, Lasseter has capitalized on a dark past by theatrically hair-shirting in the media.
Implicit in the very undertaking of this research is also the suggestion that slaveholding must have conferred economic and social advantages whose knock-on effects continue to this day. Although the study makes no such overt claim, its very focus on the country’s leadership hints that these big cheeses might enjoy outsize national influence because their ancestors owned slaves.
But correlation is not causation. Besides, for a fifth of Congress to have at least one distant slaveholding relative is statistically unsurprising. For white Americans with southern roots, that proportion would likely be even higher. (Reuters admits to having no idea the percentage of Americans whose ancestors include such modern pariahs.) After all, slavery was endemic in the region; that’s why they call it an “institution.” It wouldn’t be surprising, either, if these same politicians have adulterers, murderers, thieves, rapists, wife-beaters and fraudsters dangling from the dead branches of their family trees. So what?
Slavery is often dubbed America’s “original sin,” one of Christianity’s more dubious doctrines: we’re all sullied from birth. But it’s hard enough to accept responsibility for neglecting our elderly parents or cheating on our taxes. If Adam and Eve ate some lousy apple, that’s their problem.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
