by Nathaniel X. Turner
Barack Obama has availed himself of every opportunity to signal African Americans that he feels no special bond with them – a rejection that should be reciprocated. “Obama is analogous to the white slave master that could sell his own black children because he had nothing invested in their lot in life.” African Americans need not rely on a hostile stranger in the White House to affirm their collective worth. “There is a unique African American identity that is pan-African, anti-imperialistic, anti-capitalistic, and is anti-hegemonic” – the antithesis of Obama.
Barak H. Obama, My Kenyan-American Cousin: An African-American Reflection On Genealogical Heritage
by Nathaniel X. Turner
“In spite of Obama’s constant political cues to African Americans that he is not one of us and never wishes to be, we claim him as family.”
A few weeks ago, this writer was engaged in doing genealogical research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. looking for information on missing ancestors. In my childhood, I was fortunate to have as a teacher Mrs. Thelma Short Doswell. Ironically, my ghetto school that lacked almost everything employed America’s first certified African American genealogist, and I found myself mentored by the same woman who made Alex Haley. Moreover, Doswell’s influence on my life has been potent, and most importantly she unearthed for me my African, Native American, and European origins. As a result, I came-of-age with an African-American identity rooted in the struggle of black people who had been in colonial Virginia since the early 1600s—not counting the Powhattan Indians.
Doswell’s research only pertained to my paternal family history, and, it just happens, that my maternal family had a skilled genealogist: Jesse Davis. He had traced our family’s lineage to the early 1800s. Paradoxically, Jesse, who resembles a tanned Luciano Pavarotti, was totally disinterested in knowing about the white side of the family. Any suggestion for him to plumb deeper elicits violent vitriolic tirades against all white people.
“I came-of-age with an African-American identity rooted in the struggle of black people.”
Jesse is the embodiment of what could be called the self-affirmation of blackness. Jesse, like many other African Americans over the centuries, irrespective of how much they looked otherwise, sided with the struggles of the descendants of people forcibly brought to Americas shores.
For clarity sake, the name of my maternal family needs to be stated: Lancaster. Giving the ahistorical bent of most Americans, the writer feels compelled to furnish a short history lesson. In 1066, the Count of Normandy William the Bastard (also known as William the Conqueror) seized control of Saxon England after defeating King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Once in power, King William made his Norman brethren the ruling class of Britain. William’s reign started the dynastic rule of the House of Normandy that lasted from 1066 to 1153. This short-lived dynasty is infamous for its brutally regressive taxation policies that reduced the masses of Anglo-Saxon Britons to serfdom.
The House of Plantagenet succeeded the House of Normandy in 1154. A total of fifteen Plantagenet kings ruled Britain between 1154 and 1485. King Henry II of England was the first major Plantagenet dynastic ruler. From 1399 to 1471, the House of Lancaster furnished three monarchs to the British throne: Henry the IV, Henry V, and Henry VI. All of the Lancastrian kings were great grandsons of King Henry II. Several genealogies of President Barack H. Obama list him as a descendant of King Henry II.
“Jesse, like many other African Americans over the centuries, sided with the struggles of the descendants of people forcibly brought to Americas shores.”
In the 1630s, a few affluent Lancasters came to the Americas. They sold slaves, grew tobacco, and were staunch defenders of the Roman Catholic Church. Vast land acreage is still held by the family. In 1731, John Lancaster‘s wife’s dowry compromised 490 acres of land, and the inventory of his will included 46 enslaved Africans. In spite of the clear record of my white ancestors selling and owning slaves, there is little evidence that my mother’s people suffered long under the lash. In fact, large-scale land ownership and advanced education, and entrepreneurial pursuits were the norms of the family for scores of years.
Historically, there have been a few African American families in Southern Maryland that have always owned land and were known to be the blood relatives of the elite local white families. Those familiar with the Washington, D.C. area’s “blue vein folks” have heard of the Swans and Proctors. These are fair-skinned black folks who only marry equally light colored people, and they are even known for preferring to marry close kin than risk sullying their blood with that of darker-skinned blacks. My family following the Civil War rebelled against the Mulatto caste system in the region. Whereas many people in the 1900s decided to pass for white, my ancestors tired of being hated by whites for owning land, and hated by blacks who could not tell whether they were black or white, determined to marry only blacks darker than themselves.
Most recently, when reading the 1920 Census on my great grandfather, I noticed that there was a line drawn through the racial classification of the family. My great grandfather who resembled the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria had claimed to be a Mulatto and the same for his family. The census takers supervisor had rejected the classification mulatto and replaced it with Latino/Spanish. The local black and white neighbors frequently torched the family residence. Whites wanted to burn down the house of the wicked white man cohabitating with his black wench, and the blacks burned their house because they did not trust people who got to have things both ways racially.
“My family following the Civil War rebelled against the Mulatto caste system in the region.”
My great-grandfather and my grandfather rebelled against the color caste system of their day by marrying the darkest women that they could find. My mother’s generation more or less married persons darker than themselves. Out of seven children only one married someone lighter than themselves. My grandfather recounted numerous times he had to fight because he was called Chinaman and white boy. His audacity of hope was that the ordinary black people could accept him as one of them. Like many other fair-skinned families they share my cousin Jesse’s steely determination to be African American first. These folks have sided with the history of struggle for justice of those pressed down by the system. It makes no difference to them if they are descended from European Aristocracy; they have aligned themselves with African American people.
When I think about Obama having the same Norman ancestry as myself, I feel that I totally understand his absolute failure to do anything for the African American people, because in reality his closest relationship to us is his white ancestors. His grounding in America is that of those who have oppressed us. Obama is analogous to the white slave master that could sell his own black children because he had nothing invested in their lot in life.
My cousin Jesse, who is a skilled genealogist, refuses to embrace his Plantagenet past because he hates racism and injustice. Obama can embrace his relationship with his cousin Dick Cheney because they both are ideologically wed to the finance capital class that is buttressed by militarism, slavery, genocide, imperialism, class oppression, and racism. It is the African American experience that caused my great grandfather to reject the Catholic Church and seek a more African form of worship in his later years. My grandfather, who could have easily claimed to be white, married a Garveyite.
“Out of seven children only one married someone lighter than themselves.”
When I compare my genealogy to Obama’s, I see there is another parallel and divergence also. My father’s family, like his paternal line, is the strong African root. Unlike Obama who’s grandfather was a trusted cook for the British soldiers in Kenya who were torturing and slaughtering scores of thousands of Kikuyu fighting in the Land and Freedom Army under Dedon Kimathi, my grandfather was a fugitive from the law for shooting a white man in North Carolina in the late 1930s. My grandfather’s people had lived in the Virginia since colonial times, and during the American Revolution many of my ancestors fought the fake American Revolutionaries who had no intention to extend freedom to everyone. Many of my kin fled the colonies for Canada and, from there, to Sierra Leone, and they are among the most respected families in Freetown. Those of my ancestors who could not flee to Canada found refugee in maroon communities, and they lived in the Great Dismal Swamp for decades as free people. Resistance to oppression and domination by white supremacy is an integral part of being an African American. Ivy League degrees and DNC walk-around money endorsements of sellout preachers do not make someone a legitimate African American politician or leader of any sort.
As human beings, we all share a common ancestor but our experiences, culture and struggles cause us to see and react to life in very different ways. Obama’s Plantagenet roots and his life experience as a Kenyan-American allows him to be a profoundly confused, bifurcated enemy of all black people, while my Plantagenet heritage, massaged by centuries of struggle for freedom and dignity, have melding me into someone who would resign office before I could be party to bombing any land in Africa.
“During the American Revolution many of my ancestors fought the fake American Revolutionaries who had no intention to extend freedom to everyone.”
The scam in the genealogical stories concerning Obama – that most African Americans deliberately over look because they see him as a deus ex machina of social liberation – is that none of the narrative involves intergeneration struggles for justice or freedom. Any African American who has a general knowledge of their family is aware of generations of struggle and toil. A people without an identity are primed to be destroyed. We have failed to realize that there is a unique African American identity that is pan-African, anti-imperialistic, anti-capitalistic, and is anti-hegemonic. This African American identity cannot be gained in one lifetime. What constitutes an African American cannot be conveyed through having a spouse that is African American, nor does joining a black church or attending a Historically Black College or University. The richness of the psychosocial reef of African Americaness comes from grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends, and even the denizens of the black culture. None of what I have described could be granted to Mr. Obama in one lifetime where most of his time has been spent in places expunged of any strong black presence or influence.
When it hit me that Obama and I are more than likely distant cousins, I was floored. Not because I was happy. After all, there has been another important politician that is supposed to be related to me: John C. Breckinridge (1821-1875) was a Representative and Senator from Kentucky and the 14th Vice President of the United States. Breckinridge ran against Abraham Lincoln as a Pro-Slavery Democrat—coming in second place. When the Civil War broke out, Breckinridge served as a general and Secretary of War for the Confederacy. Like Obama, this ancestor of mine was on the wrong side of all the issues that impacted African people. The only political figures, celebrities, athletes, preachers and otherwise that move me care about the plight of African American people and that of the wider Diaspora.
“It is high time that African Americans start to understand that they are a people with a history and destiny that should not be entrusted to Madison Avenue Callboys and Wall Street Manchurian Candidates.”
The deeper one probes into genealogy, the more you come to terms with the fact that every family has its doctors, lawyers, police, preachers, engineers, businessmen, and a variety of ne’er do wells: hookers, pimps, sellouts, racial traitors, drag queens, druggies, predators, and users. However, it is high time that African Americans start to understand that they are a people with a history and destiny that should not be entrusted to Madison Avenue Callboys and Wall Street Manchurian Candidates. A standard has to be raised for everyone seeking our political or social support. Obama is not alone in being an asp embraced to our bosoms, and it is high time that we jettison those who betray and backstab us to the dustbin of history as we seek new paths in this century toward self-determination and freedom. No assimilationist nor harlot to finance neither capital nor a neo-liberal fakir bereft of any struggle credentials with a telegenic family can fulfill our dream to be “forever free.” Only those with committed minds and a grasp of the entire spectrum of what must be done to break the yoke of white supremacy can be trusted as worthy vested leadership. Five decades of fence sitting on the issue of the fact that we African Americans are a national minority has cost us considerable blood and treasure.
My appeal is not to African American nativism but for us to look beyond color. Eric Holder, a Barbadian, and lacks the same feel for the kids around the way here in Washington. There is no greater evidence of the damage that white supremacy has wrought on us than to have made our sense of existing as a unique people with our own particularity and personality null and void or something that is to be cleansed or defined by those that hold us in Faustian contempt. We must always guard against the dualist identity politics that is being imposed via the elite. These fashionable identities have no currency in a civil court, nor sunder vestiges of American Apartheid, nor shield one from blows of fascist cops. If we allow Madison Avenue and the Anglo-American elite to steal our souls by following Pied Pipers who look like us but mean us ill, we have nullified all the sacrifices made by those who came before.
“There is no greater evidence of the damage that white supremacy has wrought on us than to have made our sense of existing as a unique people with our own particularity and personality null and void.”
This writer is confounded by the irony of the fact that a black president who is not African American has so impressed African Americans to the extent that they would shunt aside the twenty generations of lessons and lore that have sustained us in the belly of this Anglo-American beast. His rise has not proffered us reparations, jobs, justice, peace, or even a stubborn embrace—except when our ballots have been needed. Even the lowest and venal race-baiting black politicians of last century showed a greater finesse in exploiting us. However, as a Kenyan-American he has none of the savoir-faire of rogue scoundrel’s politicos who feed urban slumlords’ and city machine bosses pockets. Our prodigality from our mother wit, gained from the rope and faggot and shackle and giblet iron, threatens to thrust a comeuppance of Biblical proportions if we mock our ancestors this fateful year.
Obama has never claimed to be African American. It is our Stockholm Syndrome and assimilation wish fulfillment that causes us to confuse a Kenyan American sociopath with a smile as the second coming of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In spite of his constant political cues to African Americans that he is not one of us and never wishes to be, we claim him as family. I simply wish to tell my distant cousin, with whom I share white ancestry, that I am so glad that I got that “old time religion” of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and real roots in this African American people that he and his Wall Street handlers will never destroy. I share the faith of my cousin Jesse, that “if we are true to the dreams of our ancestors to be free on our terms” we can redeem our people from their Dark Age of White Supremacy.
Nathaniel X. Turner, is a Human Rights Activist, Black Christian Nationalist Minister, Pan-Africanist, and African Polemicist, and Professor of Diasporan History who lives in belly of the beast in Washington, D.C. He is praying for Obama to lose in 2012 [email protected].
In this week’s segment, we discuss the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe in World War II, and the disinformation that centers on the U.S.'s role and dismisses the pivotal Soviet role in that…
Roger McKenzie is the international editor of the UK-based Morning Star, the only English-language socialist daily newspaper in the world. He joins us from Oxford to discuss his new book, “The…
The late Bruce Dixon was a co-founder and managing editor of Black Agenda Report. In 2018, he provided this commentary entitled, "US Fake History of World War II Underlies Permanent Bipartisan…
Nadiah Alyafai is a member of the US Palestinian Community Network chapter in Chicago and she joins us to discuss why the public must be aware of the Nakba and the continuity of Palestinian…
Black people who are among the rich and famous garner praise and love, and so do those who are in distress. But concerns for the masses of people and their struggles are often missing.
