Today’s offering comes to us from Rev. Ron Padrón. Rev. Padrón (he/him/his) is the creator of White Rose Witching. He is a gay Cuban-American hedge priest from the swamps of Florida, now living in the mid-Atlantic with his husband and their small werewolf. He is specifically interested in divination, Queer Ancestor veneration and necromancy, bio-regional druidry, and spiritual activism. He has presented at gatherings such as the Salem Witchcraft and Folklore Festival, Hallowed Homecoming, Free Spirit Gathering, and Sacred Space. He is a co-founder and co-editor of a punk spirituality zine, ALTAR PUNK, an interfaith project focused on reclaiming faith and spirituality from nationalist movements, and the founder of the PaganPunk Community Grimoire project, a collection of short zines on varying pagan topics.
Ancestor work is inherently historical research. It involves an understanding and appreciation of the past. This can take many forms, depending on practice or culture, ranging from oral history, digging through old letters to learn more about someone, or scouring databases to piece together the lives of lesser known figures. My own practice of Queer Ancestor work tends to fall more into the latter, attempting to uncover the erased and hidden histories of same-sex or same-gender loving folks who lived before me. This work has taught me the importance of engaging honestly with the histories that you find; otherwise you run the risk of slipping into idolatry and hero worship.
[Pixabay]
We tend to cling to stories of our ancestors that highlight their valor and virtue. We want to walk in the footsteps of heroes, to continue the good work of those who came before us. We too often ignore, or actively erase, the uncomfortable parts of our past. Some of our ancestors were assholes, even the ones who did important work. Some of our ancestors were bad people who did horrible things.
People too often avoid acknowledging the darker parts of our history because they assume it requires them to take on a mantle of guilt, sometimes for things that happened a century ago or more. In reality, being honest about our ancestors’ legacies means we take responsibility for repairing the harm they caused. Guilt and shame are not necessary components of an ancestor honoring practice, but honesty and accountability are. When we choose to honor a lineage, we cannot cherry pick only what makes our ancestor – and by extension, us – look good. We take on the responsibility of sitting in the totality of the legacy they have passed down to us.
The modern era of the United States of America has been a long, slow burn of a dishonest recounting of our history and insincere relationship with our ancestors by those in power. By “power” I do not only mean political power, but also cultural power. Those communities and demographics whose stranglehold over the country situates their identities as the default norm, while the rest of us are “special interests.” We see this in the sanctioned narratives in schoolbooks, the propagandized versions of history that get churned out in annual miniseries events, and live action tourist-trap reenactments that dot the country.
Rainbow fist [DepositPhotos]
Most importantly, for this current moment at least, we also see that in the narratives being chosen by those self-identified “resistors” to the burgeoning authoritarian theocratic regime of Donald Trump. Take a look at almost any social media post or Substack manifesto and you’ll find some combination of the following:
- “This isn’t who we are!”
- “America right now is 1930’s Germany!”
- “ICE facilities are just like Nazi concentration camps!”
- “We’re becoming just like Russia/Hungary!”
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the above showcases the current mainstream reaction to search for something elsewhere to explain the current situation in the United States. These are the psychic cries of a people unwilling to reckon with their own dark history, the shadows of this country’s ancestors, manifesting before our very eyes.
Are the ICE facilities reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps? Absolutely, but it bears reminding that Nazi Germany studied our treatment of Indigenous communities and Jim Crow laws as blueprints for their Nuremberg Laws and forced displacement of “undesirables.” We also don’t need to reach across the Atlantic for an example of mass imprisonment of an ethnic group during the mid-20th, century given our incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Everything we are seeing in this current moment is deeply American.
There is a direct line connecting the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort to the 1919-1920 Palmer Raids and the 1837 murder of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy.
ICE is the direct descendant of slave-catchers and stop-and-frisk and the militarization of local police over the last 20 years.
The Lost Cause and the Ku Klux Klan and the German American Bund are the ancestors of The Big Lie and MAGA and its various splinter-factions. (Ironically, Madison Square Garden shows up twice in this lineage for the same reason.)
Far-right social media influencers are the spiritual inheritors of AM talk radio propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and the antisemitism of “The Radio Priest” of the 1930’s, Charles Coughlin.
The tech-bros are the robber barons are the Southern planters, each of which pulled the strings of government through massive wealth in their time.
Every system of oppression and second-class citizenry in the United States is some variation of Jim Crow, which is itself the post-Reconstruction specter of chattel slavery.
The United States is incapable of healing as long as it refuses to be honest about its past. So long as we choose to ignore uncomfortable history and turn a blind eye to the moral failures of our ancestors we remain swept up in a form of idolatry and a fanatical secular religion. The work of justice and progress will always be undermined by the shameful history we choose to bury instead of taking responsibility.
Yes, we should celebrate the histories and the ancestors that highlight those moments when we live up to the ideals of the American experiment. Shout from the mountaintop the names of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, of Cesar Chavez, of Harvey Milk, of Judy Heumann, and of everyone else who didn’t make it into the history books. However, ancestor work, especially in the modern era, must consist of more than celebration and aesthetically pleasing altars curated for social media. Ancestor work in a country marked by colonization, scapegoating, and exploitative resource extraction must also include healing – generational, community, and personal.
And, the first step in healing is acknowledging that something is sick.
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