slavery, racism, and privilege today

I watched a show on PBS the other night, a documentary called 'Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North'. It was about a woman from Rhode Island, Katrina Browne, who found out that her family's ancestors were the largest slave traders in US history.
Wow. Can you even imagine what would it be like to find that out?
She said that when she was in college, she received a little book that her grandmother had written for all of the grandchildren, a sort of genealogy of the family, and this was the first time this history had been spoken of. She decided to contact as many of her relatives from this line, the De Wolfs, as she could, so they could explore this history and what it meant for their family and themselves.
A little DeWolf history: They have been a prominent family in the town of Bristol, Rhode Island, and even today the family is highly regarded by the residents. One of the ancestors was a Congressman, and the family became very rich from the slave trade. They used their fortune to start other businesses, such as factories. Three generations of DeWolfs were slave traders, from the mid 1700's to the mid 1800's - this means that for much of this time, slave trading was illegal as well as immoral.
The woman who did this documentary, Katrina, got 9 of her relatives together for a trip along the 'Triangle Trade' route, the slave trading route that went from Rhode Island, to Ghana, to Havana, Cuba, and back to New England. These people are from all over the country now, and most had never met before, but have this family connection. (Katrina is from Philadelphia. One guy, Thomas DeWolf, lives in Oregon...) They flew to all these places, and visited locations that were part of the ancestor's 'slave trading empire' so to speak. A 'castle' on the Ghanaian coast, which is really a prison where the 'captured' (purchased) Africans were kept until they had enough to fill the ship. A cane sugar plantation in Cuba, one of 3 that were owned by another ancestor, where sugar and molasses was made - by slaves- which was then shipped to New England to be sold to make rum, which was used to pay for the captured Africans, and around and around.
These people consider themselves 'good protestants', Episcopalians, actually, and were very moved and upset by this trip. They felt very bad about what their ancestors did, and did not understand how, for three generations, people could bring themselves to do such awful things. Seems like a perfectly normal reaction, one that most people would have. They spent a good deal of time talking about how they felt, and what they were seeing, and eventually they started talking about what they thought, if anything, they should do.
What really got me thinking was when she discussed how the town held this family in high esteem, even now. After the last DeWolf slave trader died, in the late 1800's, the town brought the guy's carriage out every year for the 4th of July parade, even into the 1930's. And yet, one of the historians the family talked to described how the whole town would have been involved in this 'business', from the ship builders, to the investors, to the rum makers, to the factory up the road, built from slave money. Everyone must have known about this, and they certainly profited from this horrible trade, and the town to this day is well off, as is much of the region.
After the trip, the family members spent an evening around a dinner table, talking about how the meal that they were eating, after the trip they had taken, made them feel privileged, especially because they did not consider themselves of a privileged status, gained through their family connection.
But then they started thinking about how they are privileged. One man said that he worked very hard all through school, to be able to go to Harvard, and that it was not privilege. Yet, when they went around the table, every person had gone to an Ivy League school - Harvard, Princeton, Brown. Many, third generation. They began to realize that this status is a direct result of the slave trade. Well, they didn't really say that, but they should have. Because most white people in this country, including myself, gain something from being white. Even though I am not rich, I certainly have had certain advantages in life that people of color do not have. I got a good education, I grew up in a good town, I have access to things like healthy food and lots of books that many do not have. And I have other relatives who have good jobs, connections, whatever. Now, whatever you think about status and class in this country, you have to admit that the surest way to get ahead is to get a good education, and to have the right opportunities available to you at the right time.
But what really got me thinking was the idea that in this country, we have created this situation that has placed a certain group - mainly comprised of white people of European descent- in a class that is above others because of everything they have, and have available to them, and that they got there through the mistreatment of others. They personally may not have done the mistreating, but historically, that mistreatment has placed the mis treaters and their descendants in a privileged position. The mistreated have been of many ethnicities, African among them, and it does on various levels continue to this day. If you think about all the things that we have to pay for to live a decent life in this country, you must start to realize that having a permanent lower class -which I consider mistreatment - perpetuates racism. Our society builds public housing complexes, which only the very poorest live in, and there is almost no way out of. We charge for schooling, we build cities that require cars, our public transit systems -when they exist at all - cost money to use, we don't have a safety net such as free housing and free health care, there is no state-mandated retirement system, we have no support system for members of society who cannot fend for themselves.
Most people probably would look at that list and think, "well, this is a Capitalist world, so of course all that stuff does cost money to have!" I totally disagree, and I am not alone. There are whole continents (see Europe) that do just fine providing for their citizens, regardless of their situation. They have found a way to equalize the field, and they have done it because it is the right thing to do. Discussing capitalism, however, is a topic for another post, so I will leave it there for now. (Besides, Jen could probably bemoan the evils of capitalism much better, or at least much more technically than I ever could!)
In the end, this program really made me think about racism in this country, and how truly built in it is. Eliminating it is more complex than simply convincing people not to be racist, or even waiting for the mindset to die out. We can't create laws that will eliminate racism - we can only hope they counteract the effects of racism. And we, as the descendants of privileged European-descended white folks who started this thing, need to realize that having the mindset of 'I earned what I have', which is followed with 'they also should earn what they get', is the root of the problem. Greed, I believe it is called.
Tch, tch.