Inheritance

The film Django (the Tarantino version) struck a cord with me this evening for one fundamental reason.  I am the descendant of people who owned slaves in the American South prior to the Civil War.  Not large slave holders with columned mansions and thousands of acres of land, but small scale middle class crackers with a clapboard house full of children and a small handful of slaves obtained by marrying a woman from a more prosperous family.  All the same, slave holders and southern loyalists who also fought in the "War of Northern Aggression".

 

Tarantino makes good films, from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction up through Inglourious Basterds and even Django, but with this last the murder and vengeance was directed closer to home.  The vengeance of someone so inhumanely treated, as a representative of all those victimized by slavery, feels cathartic, as if our society can overcome the past by accepting theatrical revenge by the oppressed (as if theatrical vengeance 150 years hence makes a difference to those who lived and died at the hands of their oppressors).  However, concomitantly, horror at the attitudes and deeds of the theatrical oppressors and cheering for vengeance serves to reinforce continued anger directed at Caucasians and reinforce the inherited guilt that some of that race carry in their consciousness.  Can we overcome the past if our representations of the past contain murder and destruction of characters inhabiting that past?

Inherited guilt is the guilt of descendants of ancestors who performed sinful, illegal, or immoral acts.  From the Holocaust, the gulags in the former Soviet Union, genocide against Native Americans, to slavery, around the world individuals, groups, races, and nations have raped, destroyed, and murdered throughout history.  How do the living deal with the deeds of their fathers, mothers, grandparents, great great great grandparents, etc...?

The following two links are about inherited guilt.  The first is more philosophical, and makes some interesting points about the potential absurdity of inheriting moral guilt.  The second is specific to descendants of Germans who were integral to the Nazi Holocaust.

Inherited Guilt 

Nazi Legacy

A descendant of a commander at Auschwitz, Rainer Hoess, is quoted at the end of the article as saying, "To receive the approval of someone who survived those horrors and knows for sure that it wasn't you, that you didn't do it.  For the first time you don't feel fear or shame but happiness, joy, inner joy."  But who is alive to remove blame and guilt for descendants of American slave owners?  Can descendants of former slaves have the same effect of removing the inherited guilt, or is the first person effect lost?  Whether or not it is absurd for following generations to feel guilt for their ancestor's deeds, the feeling still exists.  Maybe it is a minor burden to have to carry in the face of the burden carried by African or Native Americans, or Jews, or...how many millions more victimized through history?