No, I disagree with this.
Some people are welcome to feel this way, but I don’t. Yes, some people are assholes. No, all people are not assholes. Just like the ex is an asshole and I am not. It does not make someone an asshole because they lived when and where they lived. What you do is what makes you an asshole. Everyone else is not “guilty by association.” We all came from the past, we all hold a debt payable by the future.
I’m descended from the Founders. Despite that sounding a bit DS9ish, I’m not under any illusions that some of them were anything but, as I’ve often put it, “durned cussed.” My 10th great grandfather arrived in Newport, RI in 1637, when the population was 200 white people and no slaves. His mother was already there. He married a widow and a couple years later as the first Englishman to carve a farm out of the wilds of what is now Andover, MA. As far as I can tell, he never held slaves, nor did his family or descendants. He refused to pay church taxes or attend Meeting, and was punished, and forced to support religion he did not believe. He and his son saw 17 of our relatives indicted, tried, and acquitted at the Andover Witch Trials. He lost everything, including a large part of his family who were slaughtered wholesale when Native Americans wiped out their whole village. It was a war, both sides of the war did terrible things, like slaughtering women and children. He built a homestead that still stands today. It took someone who was that stubborn, that durned cussed, to survive. I have a little bit of that durned cussedness today. I don’t see anything to be ashamed of, or to fail to be proud of.
His great-grandson married the grand-daughter of an illustrious family. Her grand-mother was the First American Poet—yes, America’s first published poet was a woman. Her father was one of two founders of the Massachusetts Bay Company. As colonial governor, he signed Harvard University’s Charter creating the first university in North America. He prohibited slavery in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There’s no evidence that he ever personally held slaves. Yet his name has been removed from historic landmarks as if he was somehow guilty just by living in a time when bad things like slavery were widely accepted by other people. What exactly, among their legacy should I not be proud to claim?
In another line, my great-great-great-grandfather refused a commission in the Union Army which his social standing would have gotten him. He rose from Private to Captain, with honor, bravery, and hard work. He was nominated for the Medal of Honor (or whatever it was called then), but did not receive it because he merely risked his life to save others. He didn’t die doing it. He fought to preserve the Union and free enslaved people. I’m damned proud of that.
I’m also the 8th-great niece of Aaron Burr. He was an asshole and a traitor. I’m also a cousin to Helen Keller, Robert E. Lee, and 41 presidents—some assholes, some heroes. A substantial portion of my cousins are black, having taken our surname from the Southern plantation where they undoubtedly had their heritage forcibly mixed with distant cousins of mine. When I meet them, they are always somewhat shocked that I embrace them as family, however distant, because people who are assholes made them and people who are assholes refuse to count them as family.
None of what we have would be in the US today would be here without my ancestors. OP would not be here without theirs. None of us would even be here period! And somehow I should not be proud of—or should be ashamed of—what my people achieved because some people who also lived then were assholes? Because they were less morally evolved than us and tolerated or benefitted second or third hand? We would not be morally evolved except for the moral evolution that occurred while they lived.
The poster talks about having a sense of history. This isn’t history to me, it’s personal. No, we are not our our ancestors. Their crimes, shortfalls, and guilt is not ours, but that doesn’t mean that OP gets to tell me what my identity is or should be. I am the descendent of heroes and blackguards. It’s part of me and I’m proud to own my people… even the assholes.