Opinion: Say no to white guilt

I am 100% American. My heritage is a quarter Cuban, a quarter Puerto-Rican, a quarter Irish, an eighth French, and an eight English. All of my ancestors arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1925, except for the English.

My English great-grandmother was from Vermont Congregationalist stock, who came to New England as a result of the English Civil Wars of the mid-1600s.

So, the only ancestors of mine who were here in the U.S. were on what most of us now see as the “right” side of American history; Green Mountain Boys, Abolitionists, and Union Civil War veterans. So, nowhere in my bloodline do I bear the proverbial “Mark of Cain” with which usually-White woke progressives try to tar all who seem to be of European American stock.

In fact the Irish, both on the Emerald Isle and until recently here, were considered by polite society to be lazy, shiftless, untrustworthy minorities whose immigration would be the ruination of America.

I have no doubt that in my Cuban and Puerto-Rican heritage I have ancestors who were both Arawak natives and African slaves. My Ginorio name originated from three brothers who settled Puerto-Rico from Italy.

My mother’s mother was “Black Irish;” a descendant of survivors of the Spanish Armada. My French great-grandfather came from a nation that was an admixture of all Western Europe. The English were a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman, and likely even a little Welsh bloodlines.

I know all of this from my family’s oral history. If I took a modern DNA test, no doubt I would learn even more about my overgrown family tree.

As fun as all of this can be to a historian, none of this matters! I am a child of the Melting Pot; 100% American in thought, word, and deed.

Culture matters, not blood. What we take for granted, what we believe is worth living for, how we conceive of decent behavior, how we conduct ourselves, what we say, and what we dream; none of this is of the blood. All of this is culture.

Even the language in which we think and speak is a product of culture, not of blood and soil. Our shared English language is literally the miscegenated child of nearly every other language group on Earth.

I would be hard-pressed to find a language that has not contributed words and phrases to our common mother tongue. Thanks to its openness to slang, English is constantly mutating.

Nothing about us is “pure.” We, our language, indeed everything human about us is a synthesis distilled from countless generations of warfare and intermarriage.

We are now more egalitarian than we have ever before been. We have come so very far, at such great cost, from slavery, Jim Crow, and even socially-acceptable casual racism. Who we choose to be matters so much more than how we happened to be born.

Yet it is now that demagogues proclaim our need for what they’re selling. In a power grab that would destroy the basis of our individual freedom to rise above our circumstances at birth, these race-baiters sell what they call “equity, inclusiveness, and diversity.”

They tout racism to fight racism, sexism to fight sexism, and pigeonhole people by their accidental birth-characteristics.

Guilt is their universal key used to exploit our vulnerabilities. They claim that “white privilege” exists, and that the USA and the rest of the West is systemically racist. They proclaim that every European-American should be ashamed! And, in being ashamed, we should all cede our power and freedoms to them.

I say, “No!” We are not our blood, we are our choices. We are not responsible for the choices of others, only for ourselves.

Even if I was descended exclusively from Southern slave owners, I would not allow myself to be shamed into submission because of choices my ancestors made. I am responsible for me, not for anyone else.

As to “White privilege,” I’m from the Bronx! Watch “West Side Story” if you want to understand an idealized version of the world where my parents met.

If we continue to indulge the self-serving racist fantasies of Socialists who want to destroy freedom in America and Judeo-Christian Western Civilization around the world, we doom ourselves to stunted futures of servitude.

Refuse to be shamed for things you have not, yourself, done! Refute their narrative of collective guilt. Insist that your own choices, alone, define you!

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com