Discovering Whiteness in America

Ifyou are one of the millions of Americans who has filled in a family tree you will be familiar with the problem genealogists call a “brick wall,” those exasperating dead ends where the document trail dries up and the link to previous generations is broken. In the early days of investigating my own ancestry, I hit a lot of brick walls. With persistence and a little luck, I broke through many of them. As a result, I was able to extend some lines of my American ancestry across four centuries and more than a dozen generations. However, there is one type of ancestry brick wall I never expected to be able to reach, much less breach — the brick wall separating me from ancestors who lived in a time before being a White person had any real meaning. For most of my life, I assumed the starting point of Whiteness in my ancestry had to be buried so deeply in European antiquity it could never be brought into the light. But I was wrong. White people are a product of modern history. <a href="https://momentum.medium.com/discovering-whiteness-in-america-cb9fe072d81a">Read More</a>