White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son Read Online Free PDF

Scott decision announced that blacks could never be citizens, even if free, and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” Jason had accumulated eleven slaves, ranging in age from forty down to two—a number that was quite significant by local and even regional standards for the “Upper South.”
    And then we have the two primary, parental branches of my family: the McLeans and the Wises.
    The McLeans trace their lineage to around 1250, and at one point were among the most prosperous Highland clans in Scotland, but having allied themselves with Charles Edward Stuart (claimant to the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland), they lost everything when Stuart (known as Bonnie Prince Charlie) was defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The McLeans, as with many of the Highlanders, supported the attempt to restore the Stuart family to the thrones from which it had been deposed in 1688. Once the royalists were defeated and the Bonnie Prince was forced to sneak out of Scotland dressed as an Irish maid, the writing began to appear on the wall for the McLeans and many of the Highland Scots who had supported him.
    With that, family patriarch Ephraim McLean (my fifth great-grandfather) set out for America, settling in Philadelphia before moving South in 1759. Once there, Ephraim would be granted over twelve thousand acres of land in North Carolina and Tennessee that had previously belonged to Catawba and Cherokee Indians, and which had been worked by persons of African descent for over a century, without the right of the latter to own so much as their names. Although the family version of the story is that Ephraim received these grants deservedly, as payment for his service in the Revolutionary War, there is something more than a bit unsatisfying about this narrative. While Ephraim served with distinction—he was wounded during the Battle of King’s Mountain, recognized as among the war’s most pivotal campaigns—it is also true that at least 5,000 blacks served the American Revolution, and virtually none of them, no matter the distinction with which they served, received land grants. Indeed, four out of five blacks who served failed to receive even their freedom from enslavement as a reward.
    Ephraim’s ability to fight for the revolution was itself, in large part, because of white privilege. Although the Continental Congress authorized the use of blacks in the army beginning in 1777, no southern militia with the exception of that in Maryland allowed them to serve. Congress, cowed by the political strength of slave owners, as well as threats by leaders in South Carolina to leave the war if slaves were armed and allowed to fight, refused to press the issue. As such, most blacks would be kept from service, and denied the post-war land grants for which they would otherwise have been eligible.
    In the early 1780s, Ephraim became one of the founding residents of Nashville, and served as a trustee and treasurer for the first college west of the Cumberland Mountains, Davidson Academy. On the board with him were several prominent residents of the area including a young Andrew Jackson, in whose ranks Ephraim’s grandson would later serve during the 1814 Battle of New Orleans, and alongside whom his greatnephew, John, would serve during the massacre of Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend.
    Ephraim’s son, Samuel (my fourth great-grandfather), was a substantial landowner, having inherited property from his dad. Although the records are unclear as to whether or not Ephraim had owned slaves, Samuel most certainly did, owning at least a half-dozen by the time of his death in 1850.
    It has always fascinated me how families like mine have sought to address the owning of other human beings. Because it is impossible to ignore the subject altogether, those descended from slave owners opt instead to rationalize or smooth over the unpleasantness, so as to maintain the convenient fictions about our families to which we have so