Ancestral Guilt: Inherited Idiocy

So friend works at the Freedom Center and last night called to talk about whatnot. During our conversation he told me that the Freedom Center has an authentic slave pen on exhibit. Apparently some people when confronted with the slave pen feel a deep sense of guilt which correlates to whether or not their ancestors owned slaves or participated in the slave trade. The thinking, using that term loosely, is that if great great great grandpa Jethromiah owned slaves then his presently living kin (who, mind you, are not slave owners) have reason to feel bad or guilty.

And I'm pretty sure that invoking that attachment to ancestry and so belaboring a fabricated notion of inherited guilt is fucking stupid.

I know that in the Western tradition we are inundated with the notion of original sin, the notion that we are all fundamentally flawed not due to what we do but what those who came before us did. But if you think about it? That idea has no basis in reality; we made it up.

Certainly one may employ a biological notion of heritage and so argue that as with genetic diseases ancestral sins are passed down from generation to generation. But to employ a biological basis for non-biological fabricated bullshit phenomena is, said plainly, moronic.

Moreover, a person's ancestral guilt is fundamentally based upon one's knowledge of their ancestry. If you do not know that great great grandpa Beasley was a slave owner, or a member of the KKK, or a Nazi, or Australian then you have no sense of guilt founded on your knowledge of great great grandpa Beasley given that you have no knowledge. This is not to say that by maintaining ignorance one may avoid the need for an embrace of ancestral guilt but rather indicates the nature of ancestral guilt: It does not exist until we create it. Upon one's discovery of an ancestor's transgressions one may invoke a sense of shame or guilt. But note how this process occurs! "Upon one's discovery".

It is not the case that one is born with the shame or guilt as, say, one can be born with an inherited genetic predisposition towards the acquisition of cancer. Rather, one adopts guilt, embraces guilt, fabricates guilt. There is no fundamental component of one's being from which ancestral guilt spawns: YOU MAKE YOURSELF FEEL GUILTY!

This is not to say that one ought to release one's feelings of guilt and rather embrace a feeling of pride over one's slave owning ancestors. Rather, my point is that one ought to shut the god damned fuck up about one's ancestors and relatives and focus, rather, on what you do; what you have done.

You are your own being. You are not a branch on a tree. You are not merely a link in an ancestral chain. You are not your parents, your grandparents, your great grand parents.

You are fundamentally your own individual being responsible for and beholden to your self.

Fucking act like it.