Imagine my grand-grand-grand-father was a murderer. Am I guilty of his crime?

It depends, how much stolen loot did he bequeath to you?

The amount that can be proven to criminal trial standards (beyond a reasonable doubt) is exactly zero. In that case, am I guilty of his crime?

You seem to think that people will care about this proof or believe you in any way. Even if they do, they can still hate you because hating people on the internet is easy.

Indeed. There is no avoiding people hating people for things they haven’t done and no amount or form of payment from the latter group will cause that to statement be falsified.

Equating lack of legal proof to morally defensible is laughable in any context.

No. Of course not, don't let others tell you otherwise.

No.

Did you change your name from Sokolov? Was your grand grand grand father the creator of Shagohod? Big Boss stopped it before things got out of control. But, otherwise, we are not guilty of our predecessor's crimes.

> Imagine your class mates would discover, that your grand-grand-grand father owned slaves and they had pictures...

Why would I worry about people knowing what my great great grandfather did?

This is one of the episodes of the Atlanta TV series.

I bet you don’t believe in original sin but here you are.

Children get made fun of by other children all the time based on their families. Sometimes they get special treatment because of who they are related to as well: scholarships do this all the time, but punishments get lighter sometimes too.

It isn't fair, but no one can really escape their family history.

And while mature folks understand that their ancestors were probably horrible people, sometimes by both today's and yesterday's standards - it isn't something that always shows in actions.

Genealogy sites make this sort of thing very easy.

If your ancestors were slave owners, that information is there. If there is a picture, that will be there too. You would be astounded the sorts of detailed records that people have found and digitized.

It's not that much effort either as owned slaves were included on the census.

Pretty much if you were an affluent family that could afford one, you owned at least one slave.

Notably, Mitch McConnell's, Obama's, and Biden's ancestors are all confirmed to have owned slaves. Not surprising as they all come from affluent families.

Maybe if everyone stopped pretending they weren't descended from slaveowners, it would be less of a stigma and more of observing a fact about the world as it is? Everybody denying that they're descended from slaveholders just wipes slaveholders from history.

It becomes significantly harder to talk liberal/libertarian shit if everybody knows you're a descendant of slaveholders speaking to an audience of descendants of slaveholders, ridiculing the descendants of slaves.