This week, I’m reflecting on graduation, wanting to be a good ancestor, and a question that has been sitting heavily with me lately: How do you cope when ancestors disappoint us?

Starting from my own experience walking across the graduation stage and thinking about the intellectual ancestors who made my work possible, I move into a conversation about what happens when the people who shaped us also disappoint us. What do we do when an ancestor says something isolating, harmful, or contradictory to the liberatory futures we hoped to find when we went looking for and thinking with them? How do we sit with disappointment without reducing entire movements to individual lifetimes or demanding ideological perfection from people who were also trying to survive?

Chapters:

00:00 Teaser: Ancestral Disappointment

00:15 Grounding in Graduation & Feeling Different

05:39 How to Not Be Pissed Off at Your Ancestors

15:04: Coping with Ancestral Disappointment: Two Frameworks

References Mentioned:

Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Onaci, Edward. Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Sorett, Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

For my note on the myth of charismatic leaders making and breaking religious movements, see: Richardson, James T. 2021. “The Myth of the Omnipotent Leader: The Social Construction of a Misleading Account of Leadership in New Religious Movements.” Nova Religio 24 (4), 11–25.