A White Liberal's Dilemma - Hoping For Black Blood But Getting A Slaveowner's Instead

Bob Muzelle was a liberal's liberal.  There was no progressive cause that he didn't espouse, no battle for social justice he didn't enjoin, and no barricades that he didn't storm.  His beliefs were unshakeable, rock solid, and immured.  He invoked Eugene Victor Debbs, Jane Addams, and Louis Brandeis; had been one of the first Freedom Riders, had gotten whipped and beaten by Bull Connors thugs, crossed the Pettis Bridge with Ralph Abernathy and told of his crusade from pulpit to lectern across liberal America. 

 

Bob was proud of his heritage, working class with American ambitions, son of a New England father and dark-eyed, graceful Missouri mother, the kind of a legacy that added credentials and credibility to his liberalism.  His father had been a Communist organizer in the 30s, founder of the Babylon cell, Long Island's purist and most passionately Marxist-Leninist organization.  His mother had followed suit. a charter member of The Women's Long Island Socialist Congress and equally passionate about social reform. 

Bob won a scholarship to Yale and despite urgings from his parents to avoid that sentinel of white Anglo-Saxon privilege in favor of Brooklyn College, Jewish yes, but solidly progressive, Bob went to New Haven.  The boys at Brooklyn were sons of tailors, garment workers, and diamond cutters who had rallied around Samuel Gompers and fought for trade unionism when it was in its infancy and would be proper, appropriate company for Bob.   

Serving the rich and privileged of Park Avenue, the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts in their carriages and European finery, these Brooklyn workers had tasted the insolence of the rich.  They hated to see their finely cut stones, beautifully tailored dresses, suits, and formal wear worn by these captains of industry, robber baron capitalists, and enemy of the working man. 

 

Bob's parents were not only socialist activists but people of profound rectitude - their fight was a moral one, a righteous one, even a spiritual one.  They were proud of their economic modesty, for their simple home, simple clothes, and simple social aspirations were expressions of belief; so when Bob went off to Yale, their settled world of principle was shaken. 

Despite the seriousness but understated convictions of his parents - neither was one to howl about injustice only to work quietly but insistently for it - Bob wore his progressivism proudly and noisily.  He was the one who addressed the Student Union and shamed them for their social conservatism.  When would Yale welcome Jews and Negroes?  When would it shed its mantle of aristocratic elitism and join 'the commonwealth of the colored'?  He banged on at Woolsey Hall, was a fixture at socialist rallies on the New Haven green, and a tireless advocate for liberal aldermen, legislators, and Congressional candidates. 

 

In all this Bob had become a screechy, male harridan, a hectoring bore, a sanctimonious intellectual thug.  As much as the small liberal claque at Yale admired his political enthusiasm, they hated being around this humorless, arrogant prick. He graduated nominally, so occupied had he been with extracurricular issues, was however accepted at the University of Chicago for graduate study - the admissions committee had been more impressed with his progressive activism than his academics - and kept up his banging and hammering about doing the right thing, but this time in a much larger, more appreciative, and more passionate socialist community. 

They too, however much they admired Bob's singlemindedness wanted no part of him outside the demonstrations, marches, and sit-ins.  He was the same undesirable, obnoxious prick that he had been at Yale, even worse, for he took this universal student espousal of liberal causes as a personal tribute, missing the point that to a man and woman they hated this loudmouthed creep. 

He only became worse after he had been invited to be a visiting scholar at the National Progressive Institute, a think tank which was born in the Sixties and came of age in the Seventies; and it was there that Bob found the big tent he had always looked for.  Gone were the insular days of racial civil rights and in were the halcyon days of women, gays, the environment, and peace.  It was a tasty smorgasbord of every liberal cause under the sun.  He was in his element, but as he gained currency as an eclectic advocate of reform, he became even more intolerable, a canker sore, a reminder to all that even the best impressions may hide a jerk. 

Bob was ignorant of all this for his self-confidence and assuredness were such that nothing could dampen his enthusiasm or mend his ways.  He went on blissfully stupid.  

Later on in his tenure at the Institute the old integrationist policies of Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and their colleagues and the militantly segregationist ones of H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael had become passe, to be replaced by African idolatry.  The black man, born of tribal intelligence, forest wisdom, and natural abilities, was to be honored, feted, and promoted to the top of the human pyramid where he belonged. 

 

Racial purity was the new meme, origins, bloodlines, and tribal legacy were front and center, displacing discredited notions of civil rights.  Legally the black man had one his battles; it was now to restore the dignity that he, tribal genius of the jungle, much deserved. 

Bob remembered a story that had been retold many times at Sunday dinner - a joking reference to family forbear's sexual dalliance. There was a gap in the family history - no one could place Annabelle's (Bob's mother) great-great grandmother between 1850 and 1855, and rumor had it that she had willingly left home to go off with a compatriot of Nat Turner, the black insurrectionist slave.  This accounted for Annabelle's  'darky' looks. 

When Bob heard this story, fabulist and unbelievable as it seemed, he thought that quite possibly this was the chance to burnish his credentials to a high shine - the one undeniable requisite for the American liberal.  To have black blood - and in this case the black blood of a black patriot. 

He proudly began to talk about this part of his heritage - this, the most significant part - and spoke assuredly about his African legacy.  When the opportunity came for him to take a DNA test, he had no doubt that the results would come back in his favor, black as the ace of spades, putting him in the black pantheon and the undisputed king of the hill. 

'Watch out what you wish for', said Bob's uncle Dave who retold the lesser-known family tale about a great-great grandfather on his father's side who had been a Newport shipbuilder involved in the Three Cornered Trade, had made enough money in transporting slaves to the New World, that he bought a Mississippi Delta plantation where a thousand Angolans were bought and put to work on the cotton fields. 

 

Now, this story was only speculation and hearsay, for there were apparently no written records available at the time, but the shipbuilding part was true, and it took very little intuition to guess at the transatlantic trade and very little logic to jump to the conclusion of slave ownership. 

And so it was that Bob Muzelle spit in a cup and waited for the results of his genetic assay.  To his absolute, crestfallen dismay, there wasn't a scintilla of African DNA in his sample, only European.  What was most troubling was that the greatest dollop of European genetic material was Scots-Irish, the very ancestry of supposed slave-owning great-great-grandfather Hiram Burns

Nonplussed, stopped in his tracks, and befuddled, Bob set out to find out if there was any truth to the story which would corroborate the genetic suggestion of his recent test. The Internet being what it is, ancestry search is now far easier than it was when Uncle Dave did his cursory research, and lo and behold there was indeed a record of a Hiram L. Burns owner of the Waverly Plantation of Indianola, Mississippi.  Waverly was not just a plantation but the plantation of the Delta, a 3000 acre expanse of cotton fields worked by 250 slaves, one of the most profitable enterprises of the South.  

Now what? wondered Bob.  Not only did he not have any black blood in his veins, but coursing through them was that of the most reviled, hated, categorically evil class of people ever to have set foot on American land. 

Now, in most cases of this type, the applicant would simply take the results in stride, fill in the gaps of family history, and close the registry; but Bob was such a jerk, so clueless and hopelessly ignorant, that he withdrew his membership from all the institutes, congresses, caucuses, and advocacy groups to which he belonged. 'I'm white!', he shouted at his reflection of the mirror in his living room, ironically a piece from the classic Southern Empire period. 'Bloody white as the driven snow', and with that little more was heard from him. 

'A proper liberal disappearance' commented one of Bob's conservative Yale classmates who had noticed the absence of his monthly screeds in the Alumni magazine, and who remembered hearing nothing but Bob's belligerent ranting in the tower of Trumbull College as he practiced his speeches.  Not good riddance exactly, but a welcome respite from this noisome pain in the ass.