Second, critical race theory examines how, through the commodification of land and people for profit, whites established the basis for whiteness as property, thereby cementing material advantages with race. According to Cheryl I. Harris, in her 1993 Harvard Law Reviewarticle, both slavery and seizure of Indian land “established and protected an interest in whiteness itself, which shares the critical characteristics of property” (p. 1724). Whiteness guaranteed legal entitlement to freedom, gradually taking the form of an object protecting one’s personhood, giving whites a vested interest in maintaining it. How did white peoples’ seizure of Indigenous people’s land, enslavement of Africans, and laws deriving from those racial relationships impact on the material conditions of one’s own family? This is a question I trace in my own family in Racism, Inheritance, and Family Financial Aid.

Third, critical race theory gives centrality to experiential knowledge, particularly in relationship to people who have been oppressed by racism – those who are or have been victimized by it everyday, but whose perspective is silenced by the dominant ideology that denies the existence of racism. Family stories — shared in a variety of forms that include stories handed down through generations, interviews, testimonios, biographies, and community documents – these stories are important sources of knowledge. Family stories by people of color usually direct name race and racism, creating counter-stories to the dominant ideology.

In the case of white families, attending to family stories means listening for silences, as race and racism may be “washed out” of stories the same way they are in the dominant ideology. Critical whiteness studies, a subset of critical race theory, focuses on invisibility of racial power to whites, social privileges associated with whiteness, and interpretations of race and ethnicity through which people of European descent minimize the significance of race. I understand whiteness as comprising 1) a set of social relations in which people are categorized hierarchically by race, and those who are accepted as white collectively hold power and control over material resources; 2) an ideology that renders white power and white people’s participation in an oppressive system as invisible to them; and 3) an identity when people of European descent accept these relationships, this ideology, and ways of life lived within this system of relations as “normal.” When listening for silences in white stories, these understandings guide my listening.

Critical feminist theories examine the institutionalization of patriarchy, internalization of gender identity, and how women have resisted oppression based on gender. Although there are different types of feminisms, the range of feminist theories draw attention to the position of women within families, communities, and the economy, and to strategies women used historically to both navigate and challenge a subordinate position. Critical feminist theory offers at least two analytical tools.

First, it challenges us to consider how families embody hierarchical structures based on gender, and how patriarchy is taught and learned within the family. When considering one’s own family generations back, without diaries and other forms of storytelling, it may be impossible to know how gender relations were acted out and “normalized” in everyday life, but one can theorize based on the roles of family members documented in the census, laws in existence at the time governing marriage and the rights (or lack thereof) of single and married women, and historical accounts of gender relationships. What kinds of roles and relationships became “taken for granted” and passed down through family relationships? Since women´s lives tend to show up in family history research materials less than men´s lives do, asking the question of what the women were doing is an important place to start digging.

Second, critical feminist theory directs our attention toward actions women took to challenge patriarchy, which in many cases were organized actions outside the home. For example, if a given ancestor was a member of a local organization of women, to what extent was the work of that organization directed toward gender-related issues? In sum, critical family history applies insights from various critical theoretical traditions to an analysis of how one’s family has been constructed historically within and through relations of power.

This all gets complicated because one cannot simply add up critical theory, critical race theory, and critical feminist theory as separate lenses. For example, feminist work at times embodied racism and class privilege, an example of which I found in an analysis of how a great-great grandmother became white, then later in her life joined an organization to advance the interests of white young women.

It also gets complicated because you are probably starting with a specific history of a specific family, rather than a broad look at the social structure. As you map out your individual family, start asking questions about the context of their lives. As you look into how they were situated within a class system, a racial structure, and a gender structure, then ask how that knowledge might enable you to understand yourself, and how it might help you see how unjust relationships formed and can be transformed, then you are doing critical family history.

 “In America, we have only the present tense,” observed Adrienne Rich in The Burning of Paper Instead of Children. America’s “presentism,” constructed mainly by white people, erases memory of the violent foundations of white supremacy. Critical family history, as memory work, disrupts that erasure. 

Family history has become a popular journey into the past. Yet most people approach that journey through individualized stories that do not significantly disrupt presentism or understandings of the past. After interviewing family historians about how they seek information, Darby and Clough, writing in the Journal of Information Science in 2013, explained that most people focused on building out the family tree. Less than 20% of their interviewees sought contextual information about their ancestors’ lives, yet it is in the contextual information that larger historical understandings can be unearthed. Family tree templates and software packages, such as the image to above, encourage reconstructing individualized memories through boxes they provide and questions they ask. Christine Scodari, writing in the Journal of American Culture, shows that even family history TV shows like Finding Your Roots are biased toward individualized narratives and rarely connect the past with present social issues.

To move us out of presentism , family history should involve not just unearthing details about one’s family, but also constructing a larger story of the past and its links with the present. Annette Kuhn characterized family history research as “memory work” in her 1995 book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. She explained that memory isn’t the past itself, but rather a reconstruction of the past that serves present purposes. Family memories hide secrets in order to construct a story that is “agreeable or acceptable.” We should be asking critical questions about what those present purposes are, and looking as much for the silences and secrets that are hidden as for the stories that are more readily available.

We can see the process of navigating what is acceptable to tell in the context of historical racism in Angel Parham’s observations of white and Black genealogists researching their Haitian/Dominican immigrant family histories in New Orleans. Writing in Social Identities, he explained that he noticed the white genealogists tracing individual ancestors, using the past only as a background context in which to locate them within a traditional narrative that minimized racism, while the Black genealogists linked their family’s story with a larger narrative of navigating and challenging racial oppression.

The prevalence of individualized stories set within simplistic white narratives is a huge concern for those of use who work with teachers. Teachers should know themselves, including their own roots. Yet, noncritical approaches to exploring roots reinforce selective memory, with its dangerous impact on how white teachers understand the racially diverse communities in which they may work. Bree Picower, for example, writing about “The Unexamined Whiteness of Teaching” in Race, Ethnicity and Education, expressed concern about reconstruction of “a hegemonic story about how people of color should be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.” She illustrated with a story told by a daughter of Italian immigrants, whose parents struggled but eventually succeeded. Since meritocracy seemed to work for the parents of this student, she resented policies such as affirmative action that are directed toward effects of racism, which she believed no longer exists.

As Kuhn argues, shadows from the past do not disappear, even if we continue to hide them. Instead, they always return, whether recognized or not. Essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in his acclaimed book Between the World and Me, observed what he called white people’s forgetting habit: “They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world.” Similarly, Toni Morrison worries that by forgetting how white supremacy was constructed, we lose our ability to imagine a more just future. Speaking with Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, she said, “We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is lean. The past is absent or it’s romanticized. This culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone with coming to terms with, the truth about the past. That memory is much more in danger now than it was thirty years ago.”

Critical family history as memory work interrogates the interaction between family and historical context. The most powerful place to begin is to ask: For any family unit in one’s own history, given specific times and places, who else was around? Who else could have been around but wasn’t, and why? What were the relationships among socio-cultural groups in specific contexts where one’s ancestors lived? These are the questions Parham’s Black family historians were asking; these are the questions white family historians need to begin to ask.