Descended from Enslavers: Grappling With the Legacy

By Cathy Roberts

Falling asleep, waking up, and showering are numinous times for me. Thoughts flow, creativity blossoms, and sometimes out of those relaxed states of consciousness I find a solution, gain an insight, or ask a question.

The latter happened one morning in late autumn of 2014. Michael Brown had been murdered by a police officer in Ferguson, sparking months of protests, and Black Lives Matter surged into the national spotlight. In my own life, I was healing personal trauma stemming from childhood abuse and neglect.

In those waking seconds that morning, my personal history and our national history intersected. I woke with a question burning through the bleariness of my morning mind. Is it possible that the neglect and abuse of my childhood is due to my ancestors enslaving black people? Is it possible that in owning human beings, my ancestors harmed themselves and passed that damage down to their children and grandchildren, and eventually to me?

Now I answer both those questions with an emphatic “Yes!” Back then, I was naive about race in America. I knew there was inequity and always had been. I saw institutional systems of discrimination as well as individual acts of racism. I cared deeply that all people might have a chance for health, jobs, housing, education, and wealth. That was what I knew.

I didn’t yet have awareness of the ways I, as a European-American woman, great-great-great-great granddaughter of enslavers on both my mother’s and father’s sides of the family, had a degree of privilege and a sense of white superiority embedded deeply in my bones. Four years ago, I could not have even told you what those words — privilege and white superiority — might mean.

Waking up to those two questions sent me on a quest I would not have envisioned a few years earlier. I voraciously sought confirmation or disconfirmation of my theory that my ancestor’s slaveholding was directly connected to my childhood neglect and abuse. (NOTE: In no way do I believe my trauma equals that of the enslaved or descendants of the enslaved, nor do I think that families who are not descended from enslavers are immune from neglectful and violent parents.)

Reading Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Josiah Henson, all enslaved people who escaped to freedom and wrote autobiographies, I found what I was searching for. Each of them narrated the loss of humanity they witnessed in the people who owned them. Douglass perhaps is most poignant in relating how kind the wife of his slaveholder was as she taught him to read and write. Until her husband intervened and told her to stop. Douglass watched the woman become cold and saw her kindness and humanity slip away.

I next questioned whether any Europea- Americans recognized this loss of human kindness. Thomas Jefferson wrote about the despotism and degradation that occur in enslavement and the ill effects the dynamic had on him and his children. Tied to economic survival and dying in debt, he never freed his enslaved peoples even though he recognized the mental and spiritual harm the institution of slavery caused.

As I further studied U.S., European, and Western Civilization from the perspective of oppression and freedom, my world expanded. Not only do the descendants of enslavers experience a loss of humanity, but most of us, living within the system that tells white people “you are superior” and black and other people of color “you are inferior” have a diminished capacity for empathy and compassion.

When I ask European-Americans attending the workshops I lead if they can imagine their son’s body, lying dead and unattended in the street for hours as happened to Michael Brown, they cannot imagine it. Likewise when we talk about the numbers of black and brown men in prison, relative to the percentage of black and brown men in the population, I sense that the reality of our criminal justice system with its disparate treatment of people based on skin tone is distant and unreal. The number of black people incarcerated in prisons in my state (Maryland, 2010) is four times the number of white prisoners even though blacks make up less than one third of the state population. Why aren’t more white people outraged about this?

I think the outrage is absent because being white in America is somewhat like being a favorite child in a family. A favorite child gets attention and feels cared for in ways that allow the development of confidence and trust that one can be successful. At its best, this sense of entitlement is healthy. Unchecked, there is a dark side to being a favorite, as Ellen Libby notes in her book, The Favorite Child. Along with confidence can grow a false sense of entitlement, unawareness of the consequences of our actions, and little accountability for those actions.

Those last descriptors help me understand why more white people lack outrage at the treatment of black citizens. Apparently unaffected by racism, we look the other way. If instead we were to look closely at the dynamic, white folks would see that we might have to give up some of the goodies of our entitlement and share our wealth, health, and education with our less-favored sibs. It’s likely we won’t want to do that. Unless we look very closely at the ways that favoritism and entitlement are hurtful to us.

My take on the ways favoritism, in a family and in a nation, hurts the favored child or favored race centers on the ways we dehumanize and separate ourselves from the “other.” When we are unable to imagine our white child shot and killed by police, we must question what has happened to our empathy and sense of human community. When we think nothing of our white sons going to 7-ll in hoodies while our black brothers and sisters fear for their sons’ lives every day, what has happened to our empathy and sense that what affects one of us affects all of us? Moreover, we lack the motivation and skills to talk about race and disparities.

This silence needs to change! White moderates, liberals, and progressives in America can demand radical change in institutions and systems that created and maintain racial inequity. To do that, we must begin by searching our own minds and hearts, owning our own biases, and learning the truth about race in America. For this to succeed, we will have to dig down deep, give up our false sense of white superiority, and learn with our fellow men and women of all races how to be fully human.
 

Cathy Roberts is a licensed professional counselor and racial equity educator based in Maryland. A pastoral counselor for 20 years, she sees individuals and couples in her private practice in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC.

As co-founder of the Institute for Racial Awareness and Equity, Cathy designs and presents workshops on topics including the racial history of the U.S., hard conversations, and intergenerational racial trauma. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work in Baltimore where she co-teaches a course called “Perspectives on Race and Racial Equity in Social Work Practice” to graduate students.

Cathy’s life work is serving individuals and systems that want to free themselves from oppression. For fun, she spends as much time as possible with her adult children and grandchildren, Link, Kyra, and Pax , all amazing beings with whom she shares huge quantities of love, laughter, and playfulness.

For more information about Cathy, click here.