I was recently reminded of one of those historical incidents you know you learned about in middle school but can’t totally remember the details of. The incident was Bacon’s Rebellion, and in case it’s been a while for you, too, here’s a quick recap: in 1676, a group of white and Black indentured servants and enslaved people formed a coalition which attacked the ruling class in colonial Virginia. The rebellion was unsuccessful — and, it should be noted, not exactly organic. They were encouraged by the white property owner they worked for, who had his own motivations.
But this uprising terrified other rich landowners: they witnessed the power that subjugated people could wield if they banded together. And in the aftermath of the rebellion, new laws were passed that would make it harder for would-be rebels to find common cause. These laws kept Black people enslaved while offering expanded rights and social status to light-skinned servants from Europe.
In a piece for BorderLore earlier this year, writer Kimi Eisele makes the case that Bacon’s Rebellion was a pivotal moment in our history. Eisele’s essay is called What Does It Mean to be White?, and in it, she points out that in order for European servants to gain that racist bounty, they had to give something up. And this is a phenomenon that Eisele and other scholars refer to as “cultural loss.”
Full conversation
KIMI EISELE: I don’t know how much we can say it was a choice for European servants, but there was a moment at some point when they began to see that if they used this label for themselves or allowed this label to be used on them, they would gain some privileges and priorities. And so it was kind of this cleaving moment where they become white. You let go of your European specificity to become this other thing that afforded you a lot of advantage.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes. And even if we don’t know how conscious it was, it does seem like a really pivotal moment in our understanding of the invention of whiteness. And there’s kind of an inverse of cultural loss that you also discuss in the piece, which is this idea of ancestral recovery, which I believe is a phrase used to refer to a very specific kind of educational practice. Could you describe that practice for us?
EISELE: Yeah. And this comes from an organization called White Awake. They offer courses in this kind of ancestral recovery. This idea of ancestral recovery is really just having a sense of curiosity and a willingness to look at the past. And to do so, yeah, in part to heal one’s own feelings of loss, but also to look at maybe some of the difficult affiliations, practices, injustices that our ancestors may have committed.
And so it’s sort of the “both and” of let’s look at what we can celebrate and let’s look at also maybe what some of what our people committed. And that was not something we’re proud of.
DINGMAN: Right. You give yourself permission to engage with all of the richness of the traditions that you may have lost, as well as all of the terrible legacy that is associated with some of those traditions. And one of the elements of that is “deepening our access to folk life without appropriating.” So can you give us some examples of that?
EISELE: Yeah. I think it’s very easy when you’ve been disconnected to something and then you suddenly find a practice that somehow feels good for you and you may not understand why or it may not have originated with your culture. And so I think that can be a very dangerous project. The example of white people flocking to sweat lodges, for instance.
One person that I interviewed, David Walker, he’s a sustainable builder. He makes Adobe using buffelgrass, to sort of help rid our region of this invasive species. And one of the things that sort of doing this work helped him understand and validate was that his ancestors had a deep working knowledge of living on the land, working with the land. And that sort of gave him just a deeper understanding of his own interest, really.
DINGMAN: Absolutely. And something that strikes me as kind of beautiful about this is you use the example of white people sort of appropriating the idea of a sweat lodge from more indigenous cultures. And what I love about this is it doesn’t shame the person who might be interested in something like that. For craving some kind of Earth-based practice.
It instead invites them to say, rather than claiming this other culture’s ritual or practice as your own, consider the fact that folks in your own tradition might have had a version of that that you could engage with. It honors the the sense of loss that the person feels that might make them want to enter a sweat lodge, but it also invites them to make a less fraught decision.
EISELE: And I think there’s something really important about shame and blame. One of the things I really appreciated about researching this story and talking to the folks at Wide Awake is that there has to be a place to have hard conversations among other people of European ancestry where you can express those feelings and that you don’t offload them onto other folks who have been disadvantaged without the privilege of whiteness.
And so can we move from shame and blame to something that is deeper and more healing and creates understandings of solidarity?
DINGMAN; Another good example of it in your piece is, this guy Mateo Pomilia, who is Jewish and Italian by ancestry and for a time didn’t know as much about those things as he would like. And he ends up realizing that there’s a way of looking at Jewish religious tradition as somewhat shamanic in nature.
EISELE: Yeah. He talks about sort of going from speaking his sort of morning ritual and prayers in Spanish to shifting that, and he switches that language to Hebrew.
DINGMAN: One of the quotes from the piece that really sticks with me is — this is something that Eleanor Hancock, the creator of White Awake, says to you. She says, “White nationalism exploits the lack of a sense of belonging.” What do you think she’s saying about that sense of belonging that is so easily exploited?
EISELE: I think that migration causes wounds, right? And so whether it’s forced migration or voluntary migration, there’s always something that’s left behind. I’ve been working at the Southwest Folklife Alliance for almost a decade, I’d say. And what we do is we celebrate and uplift expressive culture, which often is linked to countries of origin. Not always. there’s many ways to understand culture and how we express that.
But there was often invitations at gatherings, say, to like bring in an object that that describes your folk life. And so oftentimes that can have a ethnic, an ethnicity marker to it. But I always struggled with that. What am I going to bring?
I’m like Polish, German, Irish. And it’s not like we had like a German Christmas or anything. It was just so far receded into the past that I struggled with that, and it was kind of a painful feeling. There’s something about acknowledging the pain and what that leads us to do. And so really facing that and to say, “Yeah, this is painful. And it’s not like, “Look at me, I’m a white woman and I’m crying about this pain.”
No, it’s like I’m going to look at this and then I’m going to metabolize it. We all carry trauma. And if we don’t metabolize it, then it can get the better of us. And I think that could be a lot of what we’ve seen and sort of the unfolding of the history of America.
