I’ve written before about the PBS show Finding Your Roots, hosted by Prof. Louis Gates.  As an avid viewer for nine seasons the complex detective work by genealogists to uncover the roots of celebrity guests has intrigued me. But the show rarely wavers from its unspoken mission: social justice.

The family history of nearly every celebrity guest is traced back to the Holocaust, slavery, the Irish famine, or whatever historical injustice the producers can link to.  Fascinating? Yes, but sadly predictable – Jewish, Irish, and Black guests should be warned not to appear without a box of tissues. Last week’s guests – a Black actress and White actor – had ancestors on both sides of slavery.  That not-so-uncommon revelation automatically prompts Prof. Gates to ask each guest “How does that make you feel?” or “What’s going through your mind learning that your ancestor was a (pick one) slave or slave owner?”  Of course the White guests are appalled and the Black ones get emotional.  To cheer them up, Gates usually digs deeper to find an inspirational ancestor.  Last week, the “slaver” White guy learned of an ancestor who served under George Washington; and in the case of the “enslaved” Black lady Gates found a Pilgrim ancestor from the Mayflower.

As it turned out the Black actress was bi-racial, hence a lineage back to Plymouth Rock.  In truth, few of the Black guests over the years have been devoid of White DNA.  Prof. Gates often affirms that American Blacks average 25% White DNA.  And not just White but mainly Anglo-Saxon genes, which means most Blacks are closer to Plymouth Rock than Italic people are.  And here is where Prof. Gates works his magic.  He fails to disclose that his biracial guest had 131,000 ancestors to pass through on the way to finding a Pilgrim.  In short, with these numbers just about anyone with a touch of WASP blood can trace to the Pilgrims or any Founding Father.  Gates had one guest whom he traced back to William the Conqueror (A.D. 1066) – that’s something like 2 million ancestors to sort through!

It is nothing short of ingenious how the Woke generation has crucified Christopher Columbus for debunked charges of slavery and genocide while only conducting a pillow fight with real Anglo-Saxon crimes.  In the case of the biracial actress, when Gates linked her to the Pilgrims the heavens opened up for her.  No talk of how Pilgrims and Puritans had slaves and had bilked the New England natives out of their land and decimated their populations.  Or, how they were later part of the “Triangular Trade*” that kept slavery profitable.  Shouldn’t she be ashamed of her new-found ancestors? (*New England rum to buy African slaves who produced the Caribbean molasses that made New England rum.)

In general, Anglo-Saxons have managed to suppress two aspects of slavery that went well beyond the pale:  the wholesale rape of slaves and enslaving their own children, the offspring of those rapes.  Can you imagine raping and impregnating a slave and then adding that child to your slave assets?  Only God knows the number of such abominations by masters, their sons, and overseers.  Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was half-White and enslaved.  His White father apparently sold him to another White slaver just to avoid paternal attachment.  These well-known outrages inflamed Northerners on the eve of the Civil War.  Such are the people who now gladly make Columbus the national piñata.

To be fair, Anglos weren’t the only perpetrators of these evils. First and foremost are the African chiefs who sold their own kind for trade goods; then the French creoles of Louisiana, the Scots-Irish, and even many Indian tribes that perpetuated Black slavery.  Worldwide, Arab Muslims were the first and most prolific exploiters of Black slavery.  The Muslim Turks and North African (“Barbary”) Pirates routinely enslaved White Europeans for centuries.  Isn’t it odd how this part of the slave narrative has been “lost”?

Lately, we’ve been hearing about cash reparations for Black slavery in amounts too absurd to take seriously.  Our own former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave life to H.R. 40 to study reparations.  But even Prof. Gates believes the question is too complex to ever resolve: Gates being half-White might mean paying himself reparations. You see? -JLM