I want to personally thank Ibram X. Kendi, the intellectual King of Woke, for reminding me of my past.

Before the ideas of unconscious bias, systemic racism, equity, and Critical Race Theory were required doctrine, I hadn't thought of my family background too much.  That all changed when "anti-whiteness" became not only accepted, but promoted by the government to the exception of all other doctrines.

So I did what a reporter was at one time trained to do: ask questions.  I'd talk with my eldest sister Shelly, who's done a lot of family genealogy research, and who'd benefited from a family genealogy done by my Aunt Cass.

Many stories came up (and memories, too).  Some I knew; others were new to me.  Like Great-Grandfather Frederick Hawes, who signed up for the Union army shortly after the Civil War began, just shy of 16, fibbing to get in.  He chalked a "1" on the sole of his left shoe and an "8" on the sole of his right shoe, so he didn't have to lie.

Standing in front of the recruiter to sign up, the recruiter asked Hawes: "Are you over 18?"

"I'm over 18," he replied.

You could sign up at 16 with a parent's permission, and many Union and Confederate soldiers did.  That also was true in the Revolutionary War.  How many fibbed about their age to serve, and how many of them were killed, is anyone's guess.

But all I have is the family story and the records of his service to go on.  Hawes served for nearly four years in an artillery unit and fought in several battles and earned field commissions.

I have tinnitus, so this feels personal.  I can only imagine how deaf Grampa Hawes was at the end of that service, his hearing repeatedly assaulted by U.S. canons firing on Confederates.  He was about twenty when he got out, with the hearing impairments of an old man, I bet.  His name is on a monument at Vicksburg.

My cousin inherited his service rifle.  When I was in fifth grade, my mother allowed me to take small original photos of Grampa Hawes in his uniform with his saber to school for Show and Tell.  My teacher was tickled pink, and she was a tough, gaunt lady.

"Now, be very careful, those pictures are fragile," Mrs. Gerlach told the class.  Brownie points galore for me at that moment, though it didn't last long.  I was often the class clown.  I had my own desk in the hallway, and in earlier grades, my own chair with my name on it in the principal's office.  I think he unwittingly turned me on to cigars and pipes, secondhand smoke–wise.  We liked each other.

The wannabe "destruction of whiteness" is the proposed destruction of our shared national and personal histories, which include much good.  This destruction is weak, unoriginal, and no fun.

CRT, deconstruction, postmodernism, Marxism, and the rest of the Woke Pantheon are dull, drab, and sour stuff.  There's no room for boundless joy, no place for firm commitment, no chance for absolutes of goodness — it's all a pile of judgment of some without a humanizing influence.  And their stories don't inspire, but depress and divide, and sow enmity with lies.

Providence is in the details, fellow Americans, and we must remember and repeat these family stories because they are the truth about what made America.

When we forget our history, we forget ourselves.  I did some enquiring and found I have two great-grandfathers named Jonathan.  Both served with the Patriots.  Three others on the one side served, making it five ancestors in total.

I never knew that before.  Thanks, CRT folks!

To Critical Race Theorists like Kendi, these stories are evidence of guilt.  Many of us know that's hooey.  So I'll offer another vignette.

In college, I wrote a family history paper for my favorite history professor, Joe Trotter (who is black and still teaching).  Around that time, I interviewed Prof. Trotter for a story in a campus publication on his book Coal, Class and Color.  It's possible that that book on black West Virginian miners influenced me.

I wrote about my mother's Croatian side and interviewed kin, including my Great-Uncle John Vukelich — one of my Gram's (Mum's mum's) brothers, who was a lifelong educator and high school principal in Nashville, Tennessee.  John was 6 feet, 6 inches tall and had been recruited to play college football in Tennessee, out of the Virginia, Minnesota iron ore mining town his father Franjo had been recruited to work as a miner from Zagreb, Croatia.

But John didn't want to go to college.  His dad said, "If you're not going to college, then after you graduate, you have to work in the mine," Uncle John told me.

The day after John graduated, his dad woke him at 4 A.M. to go to work.

John had to carry around the timbers that support the mine ceiling — backbreaking work even for a strong footballer, and the low height had him stooped over.  He didn't know his father had set him up with that particular job to dissuade him from being a miner.

At the end of the day, on the way home, Franjo (or Frank as he was known in America) asked his son how his day went.

"Dad, I don't know if I'm cut out to work in the mine," John said.

"Are you going to college?" Frank asked.

"Yes," John said.

"Good," Frank replied with typical Croatian loquacity.

Jonathan Barnes is a freelance writer in Pittsburgh.

Image: Stephen Voss via Wikimedia Commons (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0.