Aw CRAP! I Think My Family Owned Slaves!

My family comes from Alabama. We're white. Our name is uncommon. There just aren't many people with that name. In the whole world, there are probably less than 3000 people named Garlington. Many of them live in England where the family originates.

I've moved a couple of times and whenever I got to a new town, at some point I'd look up people with my name in the phone book just for the sport of it. Never found any. Until I moved to Chicago. There are a lot of people (compared to everywhere else I've been) with my name. And they're all African American.

Now Garlington is a distinctively English/Welsh name. It doesn't come down from pre-Britanic origins. It didn't come from Rome. It's not a derivative of some Spanish or Arabic surname. It's Celtic as the day is long. So how did a handful of African Americans end up with a Celtic name?

THEY DESCENDED FROM SLAVES MY FAMILY OWNED!

Christ, I never thought about it until today. I've always argued that everyone is predjudiced. I regularly implore people to really think about it, to consider real world scenarios where their feelings are not obvious. We're all racist at some level. I make this argument as an excercise in truthfulness: I can't eradicate my own racism if i can't idnetify it.

But now I have to consider that my family really did own slaves. I can't be one of the millions of white people who can shrug and say "I'm sorry those asswipes in the south owned slaves" I can't even make arguments about the pervasiveness of slavery in that period (it was crazy--and a lot of the slaves were purchased from African's, the original black-on-black crime; and a lot of Irish and chinese were railroad slaves after the civil war) I can't bring up the apprently unconscionable argument (for a white to bring up) that some slave owners in Florida were black.

No, I can't do any of that because I am apparently of the guilty party. It would just be disingenuous. It would sound not like historical reasoning, not like I was presenting a broader view of the period. It would seem like I was deflecting the blame.

I would like to think that several African American slave families keeping that name indicates good relationships between the slaver and the slave. Although the mere condition of slavery is evil, I hope that the conditions in all other instances where my family is concerned were humane and in good conscience. I hope that my family was among the first and foremost to free their slaves.