America has never been so divided.

So goes an increasingly common saying in the era now known as “Post-2016.” Any Internet search reveals a cascade of articles that reinforce the notion.¹ Yet I wonder how true this supposed truism really is. Moreover, true or not, perhaps the more important question is: How useful is this assumption as a political tool? Perhaps, rather than trying to locate the point of peak division, we can work to better understand the tools used to entrench and maintain the rifts that run between us—a genealogy of division, so to speak—and locate the tools that we might use to refill those trenches.

Genealogy—the tracing of familial lineage along bloodlines—is a multifunctional tool a bit like a Swiss Army Knife. With it, one can reinforce the classificatory walls and borders between people and the planet or one can break those same barriers down. This text is an exploration of the historical abuses and disruptive potential of genealogy as a tool—not a tool to dismantle the Master’s house, which Audre Lorde makes clear is an impossibility,² but rather a tool to sabotage the Master’s tools so that we may reach beyond them for our own.

Taxonomic Genealogy, or, A Brief Genealogy of Division

Derived etymologically from the Greek word genealogia, genealogy is literally the “making of a pedigree;”³ in other words, it is a tool to record the “purity of breed of an individual or strain.” ⁴ Genealogy unifies through fragmentation; it fuses some humans together by focusing on their belonging as a family unit that is distinct and separate from everyone and everything else. This mode of doing genealogy, which is umbilically connected to Linnaean taxonomy, I’ll call taxonomic genealogy.

The “New World” provided the experimental grounds in which the newly patented category of “race” could go through a thorough and rigorous 400-year long trial period. Upon the newly cleared sacrificial slab they called a tabula rasa/vacuum domicilium/terra nullius, colonial powers severed the intricately intertwined cosmological relations among Earth’s peoples, places, and species. The Indigenous peoples of the New World and the enslaved Africans kidnapped to these lands were re-encoded with a symbolic order designed to reimagine, and thereby reinforce, European economic class structures.

The cultural and legal construct of race designed in the 17th century Virginia Colony enabled the fusion of the English working class and landed gentry into a new identity of “White” solidarity and the relegation of “Black” and “Red” people to new, permanent underclasses maintained and policed through taxonomic genealogy.⁵ Scientific “objectivity” was weaponized as a precision tool to fortify the already-codified atrocities of racial slavery and genocide.

The classification of biological life into distinct categories was initiated by Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. In 1735, Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema Naturae, which introduced binomial nomenclature, a rank-based system of scientific classification that orders living things by genus and species. In the 10th edition, published in 1759, Linnaeus subdivided Homo sapiens one degree further, into four varieties. They were:

– Americanus: reddish, choleric, and erect; hair—black, straight, thick; wide nostrils, scanty beard; obstinate, merry, free; paints himself with fine red lines; regulated by customs.

– Asiaticus: sallow, melancholy, stiff; black hair, dark eyes; severe, haughty, avaricious; covered with loose garments; ruled by opinions.

– Africanus: black, phlegmatic, relaxed; hair—black, frizzled; skin—silky; nose—flat; lips—tumid; women without shame, they lactate profusely; crafty, indolent, negligent; anoints himself with grease; governed by caprice.

– Europeanus: white, sanguine, muscular; hair—long, flowing; eyes—blue; gentle, acute, inventive; covers himself with close vestments; governed by laws.⁶

This belief that one can sort existence into simple compartments according to clearly definable rules that are hinged on a conflation of external and internal being renders classification a blunt and childish tool. Such a device becomes deadly serious if taken too literally—which, of course, it was.

Linnaeus’ descriptions of the four human sub-groups “indiscriminately mixed physical features with supposed traits of character, disposition, and behavior, features we would see today as specifically external and cultural.”⁷ Sight does not beget knowledge. The “observer effect” in quantum theory reveals that phenomena change under observation. The flesh is a mirrored, rather than transparent, surface, reflecting the conditioned biases of the observer. Under a hostile gaze, my self ripples laughingly and slips away into my impenetrable depths. Such realms of the world are unchartable on Cartesian maps.

Today, the segregative principle espoused through Linnaeus’s taxonomic system remains the guiding cosmology of “Western civilization”; the blunt knife of classification shapes our outlook onto Earth’s diversity and humanity’s place within it. We easily conceive of the infinitely divisible (into species and races and classes and myriad microcosms of identities) but quickly lose sight of the infinitely unified (our common biosphere, common ancestors, common dreams, and the spark of life we all hold in common). But still, we can’t simply look with wide-eyed naivete away from America’s foundational faultlines to behold the “blue marble” holism of Gaia.⁸ We need tools that enable us to conceive of the entanglements of existence without flattening it into two-dimensional lines.

Unsettling Genealogies

And yet, despite the abuses of taxonomic genealogy, genealogy can also serve as a bridge: a radical tool that enables a shift from a classificatory approach to human relations to one grounded in a sense of Kinship. Genealogy becomes radical when it gets to the root (the etymological origin of the word radical), which is to say, when genealogy unsettles its own segregative and classificatory function, dissolving the boundaries of ethnicity and class.

Classification is divisive. It is used to fragment, cut, segregate.

Kinship is adhesive. It is used to fuse, sew, integrate.

Used as a detonative device, genealogy blasts black holes through classificatory walls, opening portals onto the rolling expanse of Kinship.

Radical Genealogy opens onto Kinship when it functions as:

a legal tool,
a political tool,
a reparative tool.

Legal

We can’t show white people everything. If you tell everybody, it is like selling your country. You have no law there behind. You can give a little bit, but not too much. Kartiya can take away the stories, the pirlurr (one’s spirit), the power for your country and leave you with nothing.⁹

So spoke Australian Aboriginal artist Tommy May, referring to the severing force of genealogy. Since 1992, when Australia’s highest court “overturned” terra nullius (legally, if not historically or geospatially) in Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2), Aboriginal communities must use genealogy as a tool to claim rights over their ancestral lands from the Australian state. To prove legal title, communities must submit evidence of the following:

– their culture, law, and traditional law; – where they come from and who they are; and – where they walked on the land.

In 1993, May’s community, along with three others from the Great Sandy Desert, united to make such a claim. Yet how, they asked themselves, could they possibly communicate their lineage with the land—their other-than-human kin—through the vulgar language of taxonomic genealogy? How much of themselves could be disclosed without segregating and sacrificing the dignity of their more-than-human communities?

They landed on a radical symbolic gesture: a collective painting. The painting was a non-Cartesian map performed as a visual dialogue about ancestral belonging, anchored by watering holes held in common between the four neighboring communities, with one member from each community tracing the land that they and their ancestors have walked, painted together, in tandem, on one canvas representing 83,886 square kilometers of Earth. It was a legal intervention to serve as evidence of collective land stewardship while shielding the sacred interiority of these relations from the scalpel of genealogy. In a decision that would seem to explode outward onto a parallel universe, this painting was accepted as proof of title: “The law says to all the people in Australia that this is your land and that it has always been your land.”¹⁰

We need tools that enable us to conceive of the entanglements of existence without flattening it into two-dimensional lines.

Political

I would have loved to have been part of an identity group. I wish I could have been able to say that I belong to ‘my community’: But there is no community to which I truly belong. Here is my proof:¹¹

So begins Ariella Azoulay’s introduction to Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Here, Azoulay draws attention to the disruption of heritage by the construction of national identities. What Azoulay calls “potential history” is a glue that can repair that which has been severed by imperialist drives to conquer lands and peoples and collect and classify cultures. Potential history hinges on refusal of purist categories, such as Azoulay’s rejection of her politically-assigned national identity as an Israeli in favor of the forbidden complexity of her heritage as a Palestinian Jew. Potential history unsettles the imperial identity of nationhood and reforges bonds of shared community across racial and religious borders.

Reparative

For the past few years, my mother has been deeply engaged in genealogical research into our family’s ancestry. We are Black “Creoles” hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana; our ancestors are enslaved West Africans, slave-owning mulatto Haitians, Indigenous Atakapa, Cajun French exiles, colonial Spanish, and Irish (a people welcomed to the club of Whiteness rather late in the game). Heritage is a complicated gumbo of theft, oppression, resistance, and refusal; we embody the contradictions of taxonomic genealogy.

While my mother is phenotypically brown and politically, culturally, and legally Black (and was segregated as such while growing up in the Jim Crow South), she learned through a DNA test provided by Ancestry.com that her genes are 52% European. Much of my mother’s genealogical research is a cautious navigation of the social anxieties and racial protectionism of those newly discovered branches of the extended family whose lives have been defined by and fortified through their phenotypical and legal Whiteness. For many of those relations, she asks too many questions; her insurgent inquiries and additions to the official record destabilize fragile social structures and unsettle racial classification, revealing Linnaean purity as an absurdity and phenotype as flourish.

A Tool to Sabotage The Master’s Tools

Classification is a uni-dimensional system that corrals the entanglement of humanity into single congregation points. Taxonomic genealogy moves into two dimensions, charting lines of descent between these points. Radical genealogy twists away from itself, unsettling the very classificatory tools—and their precepts, codes, and goals—that seek to restrain it, reaching, as a collective painting, a forbidden heritage, an explosive revelation, toward Kinship.

Radical genealogy cannot dismantle the master’s house. But it can be used to sabotage the master’s tools—the classificatory walls that hold us back from Kinship. Kinship is the tool that can dismantle the master’s house.

Kinship is not, however, a tool innovated by humans and thus it cannot be wielded by us. Kinship, along with Magic, Shelter, and Food, are the Earth’s tools. It is therefore, by extension, also our tool, if we can only re-member.

Kinship is a tool to carry us below the skin and the surface, into nests of roots entangled in mycelial networks of relations where 99% of human genes are shared (and where half of human genes are shared with flies and fruit), where messages and nutrients, prosperity and protection, are transmitted between existents. Webs of kinship connect us with our more-than-human ancestors.

Kinship is the tool that will re-integrate the world.