Ouch. I feel seen here. Yes. I write a monthly column about genealogy for my local paper. I did the DNA test from multiple sites and built a huge family tree on a well known website. So I think you are talking about me. I recently wrote an essay about the racist history of genealogy, something I am becoming more and more aware of.

I think genealogy at its core is classist as well as racist. It goes back to my days as a child when we would compare with our peers whether we were Irish, German, Swedish, Italian, and what percentage of each. It was a way to figure out who we are and compare ourselves to our peers.

I think genealogy itself can be neutral and it can have more to do with how it is used. Many white people in the United States are just "Americans" and that means a sort of amnesia about history. We learn that America is the greatest country in the world and we are the inheritors of the freedom and righteousness of the pilgrims, founders, and the Union army. A neutral history and a neutral genealogy is an effort to fight against this sort of myth making. Americans are fascinated with finding out the true stories of our ancestors because it holds a mirror up to us and allows us to see events and people as they were and are. It sort of unravels a cloth that was woven. I think this is why there is such an uproar about CRT and the 1619 project.

I wonder if not caring about ancestry a sort of way to acknowledge that we are all "the same." I don't care if you have Irish or German or Nigerian great grandparents. I try to treat everybody the same. America is having a reckoning with the "I treat everybody the same" mindset because it has been exposed that most people in America who think that actually just are blind to discrimination based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, etc. So we are starting to become hyper-aware of those characteristics in an effort to not be "color-blind" or blind to anything else.

There is a writer here on Medium who writes about this every day it seems. He goes by Comrade Morlock. He claims that many Americans, in an effort to not discriminate based on someone's identity, have gone overboard and become "Identitarians" and started dividing people up and forcing people to see differences where none existed. He styles himself as a Universalist. He gets into arguments with people who call themselves anti-racists, because they claim he is falling into the colorblind trap. I read some of his stuff, until I realized he keeps saying the same thing over and over.

I think that the point of focusing on identity is to actually get to a point of seeing the common humanity in all people. My goal in my genealogy practice is solidarity, not exclusivity. The same could be said for the people who responded to "Black Lives Matter" by saying "All Lives Matter." Yes. Of course All Lives Matter, but that misses the point. We need to bring Black lives up to the point where they matter as much as white lives.

I think in the USA there are so many stories that did not get woven into the initial cloth, that it is worth unraveling the cloth and reweaving it.

Part of what made us weave the cloth in the first place is that the United States was a new country in 1776. Like you said, Portugal's borders go back to the 1100s. As a new country, it was a deliberate act of self-creation. Interestingly, much of the racist genealogy that I wrote about can be traced back to the white Protestant population wanting to tie themselves back to the founding of the country, and distinguish themselves from the "new" immigrants of the late 1800s. Genealogy can be used in many different ways.

One final note. I think many modern genealogists want to absolve themselves of some of America's sins. They want to say something like: well, my people did not own other people. The truth is that we are all connected, whether our ancestors owned people or not. And looking to DNA or ancestry for absolution is a fools errand.

I look forward to reading more of your work!