Radical Genealogy*:
Tools for Uncovering the Origins of Wealth & Privilege
Robert G. Williams, Voehringer Professor of Economics,
Guilford College, Greensboro, N.C.
ANTHROPOLOGY LOUNGE 313A ALUMNI, APRIL 25, 1:00-2:30 PM
Wealth in the United States was built off a series of atrocities: first, the seizure of lands
from Native Americans, then the seizure of labor from African Americans. All this has been
carefully documented in histories of this country, but few white people of privilege today are
aware how their ancestors may have participated in these atrocities. Obituaries omit these
details and ancestral narratives are cleansed. Starting with a traditional family tree, critical
researchers can quickly search name-indexed data bases (land patent records through Bureau of
Land Management and federal censuses and slave schedules through Ancestry.com) to test twodimensional family legends and arrive at a 3-D view of the origins of wealth and privilege.
Slower to access county probate records reveal how wealth and social opportunities are passed
down to successive generations. Williams will demonstrate the methodology using examples
from his own ancestors, who were part of a mass migration of white settlers to Alabama and
Mississippi during the first half of the 19th century. Williams encourages other white people
born into college-educated families to apply radical genealogy to their own roots.
Mindfulness of the origins of wealth and privilege is a first step in halting the replication
of atrocities and beginning a process of repair.
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same as drowning in it;
it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks
and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
~ James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket.
*Excerpts from Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity
By Aurora Levins Morales, who coined the term radical genealogy.
“Raicism—from raices or roots—is the practice of rooting ourselves in the real, concrete histories of our people:
our families, our local communities, our ethnic communities. It is radical genealogy, history made personal. It is
a keeping of accounts. Its intent is to pierce the immense, mind-deadening denial that permeates daily life in the
United States, that drowns our deepest grief and horror about the founding and ongoing atrocities of racism,
class and patriarchy in an endless chatter about trivialities."
Robert G. Williams graduated from Princeton University in 1971 and received a PH.D. in Economics from
Stanford University in 1978. He has taught economics and political economy at Guilford College since 1978.
Williams is author of three books: Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America, Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986. States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National
Governments in Central America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. The Moneychangers:
a Guided Tour through Global Currency Markets, London: Zed Books, 2006. He is currently researching the
Political Economy of the Deep South: an Exercise in Radical Genealogy.