My ancestors did not linger in Brewster, Massachusetts, practicing a strain of Protestantism that would come to be as “mainline” as the original Puritanism had been radical, thriving through hard work and Puritan virtue in prosperous and level-headed New England. They went south, became Baptists, impoverished themselves, learned to embrace desperation as a mode of being. They remained “white” (as far as I can tell from the scanned records, though perhaps the DNA results will confute this), but did so in a way that made them feel as if they must hypothesise an impurity of the blood somewhere in there, in order to make sense of the kind of Americans they were: white trash, to cautiously utter the slur I know I’m not supposed to use, but which seems necessary in order to get to the heart of the matter.
The existence of this class of people is part of America’s success and its tragic failure. It is through them that Jefferson’s hope was realised: the expropriation of the continent and the near-total annihilation of its Indigenous people. But this process also degraded the people who carried it out, and part of the degradation was a sort of forgetfulness, a loss of an orientation to the world through an idea of the ancestors that can ennoble a person even without proper nobility in the political and economic sense, a nobility the Americans rejected from the outset, even if they did not hesitate to set up societies for the descendants of the Mayflower, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and so on. And at the end of several generations, it yields up someone like me, who spends his life insisting he is descended from no one at all. This insistence is born of a sort of pride, and its results in their Senecan inflections are perhaps valuable, but it also conceals, and poorly, a history of violence (both enacted and received) and loss.
“But at least you get to be white,” will be the refrain from both the white-supremacists and the identitarians of the left. In the history lessons on the Pilgrims, it is true, my inchoate thought was not simply that this does not concern me, but that while it does not directly concern me I might at least get to be included among the descendants of the Mayflower par courtoisie. And this is where I think the lesson of the history of race, as it makes its leap from horses to kings to nations to “races” in the current sense of essentialised biogeographical populations, may be of particular value to our thinking about ancestry and identity in the American context. When Leibniz extends genealogy from families to nations, he is enfolding great masses of people, from different social classes, into the same dynasty, and so into the same great narrative of the origins of the body politic, even if only, again, par courtoisie. This surely served to delegitimise the hereditary forms of sovereignty his work was meant to glorify, and to tip early modern Europe that much closer to the republican revolutions that grounded sovereignty in the people. It also served, though he could not have seen this coming, to contribute to the racialisation of political communities, a process that would eventually mutate into such an absurd, contradictory, and destructive form as we still know in the United States today.