Who Do I Think I Am?

I am so into a TV show right now called “Who Do You Think You Are?” on NBC. It basically follows celebrities as they research their genealogies. So far, I’ve seen Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmett Smith, and Lisa Kudrow. Sarah Jessica discovered that she was related to someone who travelled to California during the gold rush and a woman who was accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials. Emmett Smith began his search in Pensacola, FL and traced his roots to a tiny town by the name of Burnt Corn, AL. He discovered there that his ancestors were slaves that were bought from a slave trader in Virginia. Lisa Kudrow’s great-grandmother was killed during the Holocaust in a village in what is now Belarus. During Lisa Kudrow’s episode I got very emotional. Seeing names of people who were massacred and seeing groups of people with the same last name….knowing this meant that these were entire families killed together. One of the women she talked to in the village lived there during that horrible time. She had hidden a little Jewish girl under her bed. We also recently watched a movie that depicted a farmer in the French countryside who, when faced with the threat of being killed, confessed that he was in fact hiding Jews under his house. Both of these scenarios really made me think.

What kind of person would I be if I were in their shoes…then? They say that hindsight’s 20/20, and when we look at history it’s usually so obvious what’s right and wrong. It certainly is in this situation…or in the case of slavery…or in the case of getting caught up in a frenzy that leads to the death of many innocent people. It’s also easy for me to not really grasp the fear that many of these people dealt with. I’m a white, Christian, American, English-speaking, fairly conformist young woman. I’m not usually lumped in with groups that have been persecuted in the past. So, given that knowledge, what if my neighbors were being rounded up and sent to a ghetto? What if my family owned slaves? Or, even more recently, what if I lived every day in a segregated society? I’d like to think that I would be brave enough to fight an institution and idea that I knew in my heart was wrong and evil. I’d like to think that I’d be willing to put my own life and safety on the line to defy that evil.

I’d like to think that, but sometimes, I’m so ashamed to admit, I think I’d be too scared.