By Dave Lindorff
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I'm a white American, but like a majority of us, that's only small part of the story.
In a country where the federal government is currently in the hands of so-called "nativists" like Trump and his white mostly male Republican Party backers only celebrate white roots, I like many of us have various genetic strands that include a little of what might best be called "diversity." There is a touch of Native American on my mother's side -- hardly enough to qualify for inclusion in the Algonquin Nation, but enough to remind me and my siblings that our ancestors include both conquerers and the conquered.
Then too, while there is a direct line on both my mother's side and my father's side tracing back to the same Warren family that arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, there are also immigrants who came from Scotland (the Stewart Clan) and Ireland on my mother's side, and from Germany (Kerpol) and England (the Plymptons and Lincolns) on my father's.
For me, one of the most interesting roots is my great great grandfather, a Lindorff who left Sweden for Germany, marrying a German woman. According to family lore I'd always heard while growing up, this Scandinavian immigrant had been chased out or fled from Sweden because he was a thief or something, though I later learned it was more likely that he was hounded out as a "red" or socialist undesirable.
That seems to be correct because his daughter -- my great grandmother -- who with her German husband immigrated to the US in the early 1900s with her young children so they wouldn't get caught up in Europe's wars, according to my father proudly voted Socialist in US elections all her life -- first for Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs for president and then, after he died, for Socialist leader Norman Thomas. (Her sister, though, was a Nazi sympathizer during the 1930s, hosting gatherings at her home in New York City, to the consternation and embarrassment of my great grandmother.)
As an aside, there's an irony in the family's having moved to escape Europe's wars: Both my grandfather and his older brother ended up fighting in WWI -- my great uncle as a bi-plane pilot, and my grandfather as an ambulance on the front lines in France, where he won a Silver Star for heroism under fire saving countless lives of wounded soldiers.
I mention all this because it's important to think about all of this rich complexity -- racial, social and political -- when we talk about the historical and cultural roots of the United States.
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