My brother's mother-in-law is a genealogist who has been slowly researching our family tree. This is what ancestry dot com has put together as our ethnicity so far. We are like the whitest people to ever white.

Fun ancestry finds include:

- A colonist who went on a drunken bender, stole a boat, & picked a fight with an Indiginous man on the way home who promptly beat his ass

- The dude who started the Salem witch trials

- A guy who got killed by his own tractor

- German beer tycoon

- Medieval royalty

- Mystery adoption

- A new baby "daughter" is born ...while the teenage daughter of the family went away for the summer & returns looking to have lost several pounds suddenly

- One-eyed pharmacist who suddenly moved states & changed his name & profession

Not so fun ancestry finds:

- Confederate war "heroes"

- Plantation owners

- Many suicides...like, my people are haunting several houses in St. Louis MO right now

- A 12 year old bride

- Severe mental illness - people were institutionalized

- Several criminals

I use my family history to talk about white privilege to students. From day one my ancestors benefitted from being white here. They colonized, stole Indiginous land, bought and sold enslaved POC. They built their wealth on the suffering of others and rose in wealth and power.

Were all my relatives wealthy? Lord no. A whole branch is blue collar all the way, but the path created for them was due to their whiteness. They came over in boats with white colonizers, benefitted from land stolen from Indiginous people, & though poor enjoyed many freedoms.

My great grandfather was the ne'er-do-well of the family. He was disowned by his wealthy Southern family, partied & gambled, & lost his inheritance. During the Great Depression, his kids were split up & sent to live with his wife's relatives when he couldn't afford them.

So my grandpa grew up in deep poverty. Like, starvation poverty. But he was white. So when he joined the army to fight in WWII & became eligible for the GI bill, he took it. He got a degree at a local college and worked for a good company.

Was he wealthy? Oh hell no. He sold furniture. My mom was one of eleven kids and they lived in a one bedroom house. But they were white. And with grandpa educated, his kids were raised with the expectation that they would be educated too.

So my mom and her siblings went to college. They are now very successful. We have lawyers, CEOs, stockbrokers, etc. in the family. My cousins and I were all raised with the expectation of going to college. Now we are doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, engineers (& 1 English prof!).

But it was the white privilege that got us here. While the GI bill was available for Black veterans too, hardly any colleges were admitting POC. Academia was a white-only club. Even with funding available, there were few to no higher ed options for POC of my grandpa's generation.

Additionally, white power structures made it easier for my family to get jobs. The powerful employers looked like us. Did job hunting take work? Yes. But with a college degree and a white name, our resumes were statistically more likely to be chosen. And they were.

Additionally, while my family has a history of blue collar work and some poverty in it, the poverty tends not to last more than a couple of generations at a time. For centuries my family has successfully climbed back up into the middle class. Upward mobility is a white privilege.

So when I talk about my personal story, it helps my white students see their privilege better. It creates a less stressful discussion. I'm not preaching at them; I'm experiencing the awakening of my own privilege with them. I also talk about my childhood & parents.

As a kid, my dad was trying to get his own business started & money was tight. I wore hand-me-downs from older cousins. We ate venison my grandpa hunted. We sealed off part of the house in winter. We ate pawpaws off the ground. St. Nick brought us cereal. I was a happy child.

When my dad's business began to grow, we found ourselves in the middle class. We moved to an all white neighborhood. The only thing to fear from cops was a speeding ticket, and even then my white uncle who was a lawyer would pull some strings at the precinct to get it fixed.

College was an expectation. Because my parents went to college, because their parents went to college, I had an advantage. I knew how to navigate that higher ed world. The education advantage in my family goes back to the GI Bill. My grandpas wouldn't have been able to go w/o it.

I cannot undo all the harm my ancestors have done, but I can recognize how white privilege has given me an advantage & I can continue to work for equality. I can amplify BIPOC voices. I can help white students understand how they benefit from racist power structures & speak out.

My own journey in allyship is a process, & one I am trying to shift from an ideology into concrete practice. I try to move it into spaces where my privilege can help others. I am learning to be a better teacher & advocate. I'm learning how to better support my BIPOC students.

I make a lot of mistakes and fumble a lot, but it is way better than the alternative. People are literally dying because of white bias and racist practices and policies. White people have to get over themselves and get uncomfortable. We need to get out there & do the damn work.

I'm not sure where I am going w/this, but the more I look back on my ancestry, the more fucked up it is, & the more disturbed I am of how normalized power was in my family. It is fucking nuts that all my speeding tickets as a teen were tossed or fixed. That shouldn't be normal.

Anyway, I guess I'll sign off with the following:

#WhitePrivilege is real, is intersectional with other privileges, and needs to end.
#BlackLivesMatter
#StopAsianHate
#PoliceReformNow
#EndRacism
#MMIWG