As 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.
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