The first person with my father’s family name arrived on this continent at Jamestown in 1609, but I don’t know what, if any, genetic connections link that man to my brother and me.
What I do know is that my father’s father was a farmer in western Illinois who moved in off the farm to become a railway motorman and that my father worked as a telephone lineman before he died at 40 when I was a year and a half old and my brother was still in my mother’s womb.
My mother’s father was born in England in the late nineteeth century but became American. As the descendant of Englishmen on both sides of my family, I can proudly lay claim to belong to the first people in history who outlawed slavery and, on the British side, used their naval strength to destroy the North Atlantic slave trade.
But mostly I resent Father Pleger’s imputation of white guilt to all whites–or any current whites, because it’s a vile, castrating trick,used to psychologically bully people into his PC army or to shame others into letting him and his have their own slanderous way.
