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There must be a lot more than 5% of white Americans who have one or more slaveholders in their ancestry. Anyone with white Southern ancestors probably has at least one slaveholder in the batch, perhaps someone who owned just one slave, since each generation back you have twice as many ancestors (unless some of your ancestors married their own cousins), and Southern whites are largely of pre-1776 English, Scots-Irish, Irish, German or French Huguenot ancestry.

Until they can show us how anyone can have any choice in who his ancestors were, no one should have to feel guilt over any ancestor (unless, of course, one of them was a Democratic office-holder).

Obama had slaveholding ancestors on his mother's side. When is Henry Louis Gates going to do a program on them?

Until they can show us how anyone can have any choice in who his ancestors were, no one should have to feel guilt over any ancestor (unless, of course, one of them was a Democratic office-holder).

Some of my ancestors had slaves, but I most ashamed of my Great-Great-Grandfather who was a Democratic state rep in the 1860s.

>> Anyone with white Southern ancestors probably has at least one slaveholder in the batch <<

I've consistently read its about 5% of modern-day white americans. The vast majority of white southerners in 1860 did NOT own any slaves, they simply couldn't afford them (a fact that the neo-confederate on this crowd uses to argue that slavery was not a major factor in the civil war, despite the fact that the southern GOVERNMENTS and political elite in the south were overwhelmingly pro-slavery and said so at the time).

Furthermore, of the people who did own slaves, most of them owned no more than 2-4 at best, as house servants. Slave owners with vast plantations and hundreds of slaves were probably about 10-20% of slave owners.

It was an elite class similar to today's billionaires. There are more billionaires in the US than anywhere else in the world. But that doesn't mean the average american is directly related to a billionaire.

But the situation is different with black americans -- most of them DO have at least one ancestor who was a slave. That's because the slavery business was a couple of elites buying and selling hundreds of people.

>> Some of my ancestors had slaves, but I most ashamed of my Great-Great-Grandfather who was a Democratic state rep in the 1860s. <<

Hmmm. Are you sure the RAT State Rep. ancestor wasn't the same person as the "slave owning ancestors"? It would make sense. ;-)