It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the challenges faced by black Americans in tracing their ancestry due to historical exclusion in official records.
Jesmyn Ward's quote underscores the significant barriers that many black Americans encounter when trying to construct their family histories. It points out that official census records, which are commonly utilized by genealogy enthusiasts, often fail to acknowledge or include the non-European ancestors of black individuals, thereby complicating their quest to uncover their full heritage and family trees.
In practice
During a talk on family history, one might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of inclusive historical records.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather.
You are as much serving God in looking after your own children, & training them up in God’s fear, & minding the house, & making your household a church for God, as you would be if you had been called to lead an army to battle for the Lord of hosts.
Everybody's social life in Jordan revolves around family.
Our child benefit goes directly to the families who need it the most.
He touched the screen as if trying to reach through with his hand. "You're a wonderful young lady. I don't tell you that often enough. You remind me so much of your mother. She'd be proud. And Grandpa Tom" --he chuckled-- "he always said you'd be the most powerful voice in our family. You're going to outshine me some day, you know. They're going to remember me as Piper McLean's father, and that's the best legacy I can imagine.
I have cared for loved ones nearly all my life, so when I look in the mirror, I see a caregiver looking back at me. It began when I was 12 years old and my father became ill. Taking care of him took a toll on our entire family, my mother most of all.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.