The American experiment is dedicated to judging individuals on their own merits — not damning them for the evil lurking in their family trees.
The American experiment is dedicated to judging individuals on their own merits — not damning them for the evil lurking in their family trees.
A s scholarship, an extensively researched Reuters report detailing the current political class’s family ties to slavery — a report to which a small army of historians and genealogists contributed — is impressive. But this isn’t merely a contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Though Reuters’ report takes pains to insist that it is not engaged in an act of political activism, that assertion is betrayed by the degree to which it lobbies for political activism. It should therefore be regarded as what it is: Not an effort to advance racial rapprochement but a familiar exacerbation of racial tensions in pursuit of an explicitly political agenda.
Reuters begins with the facts, insofar as they can be determined from our historical remove. Among the 536 members of the 117th Congress, at least 100 of them — 8 percent of all Democratic members and 28 percent of all Republican members — are the descendants of slaveholders. In addition, eleven governors in 2022, including 2024 GOP presidential aspirants Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum, counted slaveholders among their relatives. Two U.S. Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — have genetic records that include slaveholders. And all of the living U.S. presidents past and present save Donald Trump (yes, even Barack Obama) can say the same.
As this amalgamation suggests, the American political class is representative of a country that tolerated slavery for the first 87 years of its existence. Reuters notes that there is no scholarly consensus on how this breakdown in the political elite corresponds to the general public’s ancestral ties to slaveholders, but that is not the point of this exercise. Its “examination is different” because it focuses on elected and appointed political officials, their ties to slavery, and their views on reparative racial politics.
This is “not another chapter in the blame game,” insisted Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a quote he provided to Reuters reporters. “We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions.” Well, we shouldn’t. But Gates’s aspiration is not reflected in the substance of the piece to which his quotes contribute. This research was conducted and published in the service of an undisguised political objective.
Reuters’ reporters marvel at the extent to which the politicians singled out for their ancient ties to the odious institutions of the antebellum South declined to take Reuters up on the opportunity to besmirch their relations for the record. Even many who have spoken “publicly, sometimes eloquently about slavery and the need for racial healing” declined to indict their distant relatives. That reluctance is revealed as prudence the farther the reader spelunks into this piece.
“The new insights into the political elite’s ancestral links to slavery come at a time of renewed and intense debate about the meaning of the institution’s legacy and what, if anything, lawmakers should do about it,” the piece confesses. The modern controversies that serve to keep America’s racist past at the top of the headlines — a perch it has never truly abdicated — are myriad.
The tumult that followed George Floyd’s murder and the push to purge vestigial racism from American institutions; the controversial premises that make up the assumptions in critical race theory and the rejection of those premises by conservatives; the perennial push by far-left legislators for paying monetary reparations to the descendants of slavery; and, most saliently, “the future of affirmative action college admissions,” which the Supreme Court is expected to rule on before the end of June. Indeed, Reuters promoted this piece by touting the tenuous relationship between lawmakers with slaveholders in their family histories and the “fierce debate over how to teach U.S. history.”
Reuters commissioned Ipsos pollsters to conduct surveys based on the findings of its own reporting. Unsurprisingly, the outlet found that its discoveries might provide those inclined toward activism with some blunt but nonetheless useful political instruments.
Reuters found that the discovery of ugliness in their genealogies can “shape” individual views on “controversial policy questions.” Reuters/Ipsos learned that “white respondents who said they’re aware of having a slaveholding ancestor were more likely than other white people to support paying reparations.” That effect is observable, too, when respondents with slaveholders in their family tree are confronted with “the idea of having Congress create a commission to formally apologize for slavery.”
Most portentously, “almost a quarter of respondents – 23% – said knowing that a candidate’s ancestors enslaved people would make them less likely to vote for that candidate.” Nearly one-third of Democrats and 35 percent of African Americans shared the view that an individual candidate can be judged by the sins of their “great-great-great-great-great grandfather” (which is poor Democratic senator Tammy Duckworth’s heritable offense, for which she can’t truckle enough).
The first section of this sprawling Reuters investigation concludes by noting that much of the wealth accumulated by Southerners (slaveholding or otherwise) in the antebellum period was wiped out after 1865, but through “elite kinship networks and social class connections” their “grandsons had almost completely recovered their economic status by 1940.” The piece proceeds to later discuss the proposed remedies for this state of affairs.
One of those remedies is reparations, support for which Reuters’ interviewees insist most certainly should be influenced by individual family histories. “Though your discovery is troubling,” Democratic representative Lloyd Doggett said, “it only invigorates my support for the cause of truth, justice, and equity today.” Another addendum on “making amends” itemizes America’s incomplete efforts to repair race relations, concluding with the unfulfilled promise in a congressional resolution sponsored by Squad member Cori Bush (D., Mo.), who proposes that the U.S. has “a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people.”
Just because Reuters insists it is not lobbying for political outcomes does not oblige readers to overlook all this lobbying for political outcomes. Nor is the implication embedded in the piece — the anti-egalitarian supposition that America’s “original sin” is congenital — all that subtle. Those who transgressed against the sovereignty of black Americans via their genetic histories, the piece seems to say, are not eligible for absolution unless they have purchased the requisite indulgences. It is a veiled argument for the most atavistic tribalism — one the American experiment is dedicated to breaking through the unnatural and entirely intellectual exercise of judging individuals on their own merits.
Reuters’ readers are not treated to a limiting principle that might sharpen its advocacy. Are we to judge the relative righteousness of a politician’s views on policy matters based on how their ancestors responded to the Panic of 1873 or how they behaved during the Spanish-American War? Or based on whether they were enthusiastic supporters of the Red Scare or opponents of the Palmer Raids? Are their contributions to the effort to defeat Nazism tarnished by their service in a segregated military? Have their families benefited financially by the mere act of participating in an economy that sanctioned Jim Crow laws, from which at least some capital can surely be traced? If we truly committed to this backward, retributionist philosophy, the sources of domestic political conflict and disunion would proliferate exponentially.
Maybe that’s the point of this exercise. It seems, all else considered, a strained and tenuous attempt to establish guilt by distant association, thereby allowing the activist class to summarily dismiss legitimate and grounded objections to policies like affirmative action and reparations.
Reuters’ report lays the cognitive foundations for an elaborate intellectual edifice around the basest sectarianism. Those who object to reparative racial policies are just issuing the plaintive wail of heritable privilege, which only the most enlightened among us acknowledge and strive to atone for. Reuters insists it set out to contribute to a fuller understanding of what it means to be an American. To the extent its research contributes to an aristocratic conception of politicians as mere genetic packages of transitive evil, I can’t think of anything more un-American.