BALLYMONEY is in a bit of a bind. They’ve come on some indications that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris may have her roots – fado fado – in the north Antrim town.
It seems that Hamilton Brown was born in a townland near there in 1776, and then emigrated to Jamaica where he ran a sugar plantation. And Hamilton Brown, the genealogists tell us, was the Kamala’s great-great-great-great grandfather. He founded a town in Jamaica called Brown’s Town and he was an enthusiastic promoter of slavery. Linda Lunney, who has researched the family, feels conflicted: “It’s very hard to disentangle any of these stories from the slave trade without dirt getting underneath somebody’s fingers.”
How does Linda Lunney get to think this way? Only if she applies the morality of today to a time centuries ago. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, most people didn’t see slavery as a crime. Some were even fond of quoting verses from the Bible to support their thinking. They accepted slavery the way we accept the fact that around three people each week are killed on Irish roads. It happened last week, it’s happening this week, it’ll happen next week. Unfortunate, but that’s the way it is.
Kamala Harris shouldn’t feel guilt over her great-great-great-great grandfather’s slave owning, as he was the one who did the slave-owning, not her. The sooner this rubbish of feeling guilt for something you didn’t do is consigned to the historical trash-can, the better. If your granny is a murderer, do you bear any guilt? Of course not. Right-wing Unionists may have tried (in vain) to sabotage the election of Pat Cullen in Fermanagh-South Tyrone, by demanding that she denounce and apologise for all killings carried out by the IRA. But their demands are absurdity on steroids. Follow through that line of thinking and a court could try a killer’s brother or father or family member, because the same blood flowed in their veins.
‘An extremely bad man’: @SeaninGraham22 reports from Ballymoney as the town reacts to news of Kamala Harris’s Irish slave-owning ancestor – The Irish Times https://t.co/uq95BWK5Wp
— Freya McClements (@freyamcc) July 26, 2024
A more positive attitude to lineage shows when someone like John F Kennedy or Joe Biden return to Ireland to link up with those in their family tree. They’ve ‘come home’, we say. It’s as if they’ve sadly been snatched away but now are back.
People have a hunger to know what their grand-father, grand-mother did, how they lived, how they are related to today. To find out about such things is what TV programmes like ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ do. It’s very interesting when a skeleton tumbles out of the family cupboard, but only an imbecile would suggest you are responsible for creating the skeleton.
The past is another country, and people are responsible for their own actions. I have no more justification to feel proud that my auntie is a walking saint than I have to feel ashamed that my great-uncle stole a goat. I didn’t do it, I knew nothing about it, and I deserve neither credit nor blame.
So, dear right-wing unionist, would you stop it? Please? Pretty please???