Overview: In this piece, I examine the stories I learned about my ancestry growing up versus what I have since uncovered as an adult and hold the both/and of a legacy of revolutionaries and oppressors. I talk about the importance of acceptance and acknowledgement as first steps towards apology, restitutions, repair, and transformation and how white denial has left a hole for white supremacy and authoritarianism to fill.

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“I do believe that the great trouble with us all more or less is that we [Mennonites] are…living far below our privileges.” — W.B. Page, Chicago Mennonite Mission Physician

I was that one kid in the family who made friends with the old people. As a child I would quiz my mama about our family tree. I knew her parents’ siblings by name and was unusually enthusiastic for our extended family reunions. I drank in the family stories, tales of my aunt from her childhood, and the family slideshow hour. Sitting at the feet of elders, I was curious about how and why our history had taken shape. Listening to family stories made me feel the warm fuzzies of connection. It gave me a sense of belonging, a rootedness to my history and my purpose—a strong core of identity that whiteness has attempted to sever, distort, and obscure. 

Often families have an informal archivist, someone who takes an interest in genealogy and keeps the research flame lit. My family had several such enthusiasts. Thus, showing interest in family stories came with a flood of additional resources, stacks of books, pages and pages of family trees, and descendent lists.

Of course, not all people with European ancestry have access to such meticulous records. As a descendent of Swiss German Mennonites and the Amish, my people have certainly had the privileges of access, and, also, the genetic need to know who we come from (important info if you don’t want to marry your cousin).

As I’ve aged, I’ve continually been confronted with how that family lore only told part of our story.

When I was 15 years old, I was selected along with 14 of my peers to represent the Atlanta Public Schools as a Junior Ambassador in France. After a couple weeks of summer prep, we were flown across the Atlantic Ocean and meted out to host families. across the Midi-Pyrénées. I landed in a picturesque town called Albi, located in southwestern France.

Albi’s La Basilique Ste. Cecile is not difficult to spot. This French Gothic Cathedral sits an imposing 78 meters (255.9 feet) high, which some claim as the largest brick building in the world. It also marks the massacre of my spiritual ancestors; a fact I was unaware of the first time I climbed the brick stairs and found my way through the haunting fresco paintings into the main chapel located at the front of the Cathedral.

Almost weekly, I repeated this sojourn, walking down to the old city center, enjoying the sights of the bustling market, and ending up at the Cathedral chapel where I wrote my struggles in the book by the altar and sat down to pray. At the time, I knew nothing about the history of the Albigeois, the Cathars, and their connections to Mennonites. Yet, something inside my heart and gut pulled me in the door and guided me to the chapel week after week and that something nourished my soul.

Unbeknownst to me, the early heretics who lived in Albi were the spiritual ancestors of Anabaptism, the theological movement that spawned the Mennonites and Amish. Historian Silvia Federici describes how these heretical sects flourished for several centuries “among the ‘lower classes’ in Italy, France, the Flanders, and Germany, in what undoubtedly was the most important opposition movement of the Middle Ages” (Federici, p.30, 2004).

The more I researched Anabaptism through the lens of feminist Marxist scholarship, the more surprises I encountered. This was not the history I had been taught in church. The martyred history I learned had been viewed through a compartmentalized religious context with a focus on teaching peace. But never did a Sunday School teacher hint at the examples of economic revolutionaries, which Federici sites: 

“It was through the prism of the Peasant War and Anabaptism that the European governments, through the 16th and 17th centuries, interpreted and repressed every form of social protest. The echoes of Anabaptist revolution were felt in Elizabethan England and in France, inspiring utmost vigilance and severity with regard to any challenge to the constituted authority. ‘Anabaptist’ became a cursed word, a sign of opprobrium and criminal intent, as ‘communist’ was in the United States in the 1950s, and ‘terrorist’ is today” (Federici, p.119, 2004).

Adult me is often not sure how to grapple with the mix of complex emotions that these revelations bring. Certainly, I feel joy, a sense of resonance, and—dare I say it—pride(!?) that my ancestors resisted the authoritarian structures of their time. But the swell of pride that bubbles up also feels forbidden, and dangerous. My instinct is to push it down, make it small, and hide it in my pocket. As someone who has been raised within the cultural conditioning of Mennonite Humble, I know better than to draw attention to our greatness. I especially know better than to show that I may feel good about it. 

On one level, this mix of glee, shame, and performative humility has got to be left over from the traumatic dangers of religious persecution, when drawing attention to oneself might have meant certain death. There are epigenetic reasons to blend in, conform, and not cause a fuss. Yet, I can see how it’s also become a maladaptive coping mechanism, a cultural cover from the things we’d rather not know and claim as ours. 

Afterall, drawing attention to our greatness also draws attention to our faults. As it turns out, there are many faults to contend with, especially in the stories of how my ancestors became white.

The first Anabaptist settlement in the eastern hemisphere was founded on the banks of the Delaware Bay in 1663. After England quickly destroyed this earliest settlement in 1683, Mennonites established a community in Germantown near Philadelphia. At the invitation of William Penn, European Anabaptists begin arriving in Pennsylvania in droves. I can trace multiple ancestral lines back to early 1700 arrivals in Berks, Bucks, Chester, and Philadelphia counties. 

Penn had been “given” the historic lands of the Lenape people by the King of England, who failed to mention that much of the territory was still held by Indigenous people. In 1737, William Penn’s sons further cheated and stole from the Lenape through the infamous Walking Purchase by misrepresenting the extent of land they were signing a purchase agreement to. This deception by the Pennsylvania government, along with the invasion of increasing numbers of settlers, caused distrust and tension between the Lenape and other native tribes and the encroaching Europeans. It is in this exact area that I have several known ancestors who arrived in Pennsylvania between 1704 and 1741. 

Mennonite Humble would encourage me to mention that Mennonites helped draft the first statement against slavery but would dissuade me from sharing the ways my ancestor in 1911 described our earlier ancestors’ experiences, using racist slurs and villainizing the Lenape and Susquehannock, and painting the pacifist settlers as holy victims of their “assault and slaughter,” as my distant cousin C.Z. Mast writes in Mast Family History, one of those family resources I’ve inherited.

Mennonite Humble would insist I mention how Jacob Hochstetler and his children at the Amish Mennonite settlement of Northkill refused to take up arms even to defend themselves against local Lenape tribes and French scouts due to their faith in nonviolence, dying in the Hochstetler Massacre, but would prefer silence around the history of my ancestor John Mast who migrated south around the 1760s, disappearing as Mennonite, and ultimately assimilated into the white Protestantism of the rural South. 

This great great great great great great great great great great great great great uncle reappeared through his descendants, Dwight Roth and Sharon Cranford, who co-authored a book, Kinship Concealed: Amish-Mennonite & African American Heritage. Dwight Roth, my 12^th-ish cousin who is white, and Sharon Cranford, my 12th-ish cousin who is Black, challenge decades of Mennonite denial around our connection to and participation in the brutal institution of chattel slavery. 

How quickly my ancestors traded persecution for persecuting. How seamlessly our victim narrative stayed in place. How quickly whiteness consumed our humanity, inspiring us to see the land as beautiful but its people as savage and ownable. 

I am thinking about how the stories we tell ourselves matter. And it matters that we take responsibility for both our greatness and our flaws. 

Which leads me to a story of Ezra. No, not the story of Ezra, but another one, who was most likely named after the bible story character. Ezra was a boy in my third-grade class. 

As you can imagine, “Gross” would not have been my personal choice for a last name as a third grader. Ever since my peers learned to talk, “eeeeew gross!” was a typical almost-daily elementary school experience. My parents’ advice was to simply explain to the taunting eight-year-olds that “Gross” was a German last name that meant “big.” Their advice clearly had never been tested on a playground, and when put into practice resulted in all sorts of bonus taunting. 

Enter Ezra, who was Jewish. Having heard many stories about Germans, my classmate adamantly accused me and my German last name of killing his people in the Holocaust. 

This I was ready for. I knew Mennonites were pacifists, so we couldn’t have fought in any wars or killed anyone including Jewish people. I was precocious with the genealogy, so I knew my people left Europe in the 1700s, a whopping 200 years before the Germans turned evil. I answered with my stock retort, “Mennonites are pacificists which means we don’t kill people.” 

But in the era of Trump, this is a time of ugliness being revealed, and so too my cognitive dissonance has been put under a spotlight.

As an adult, I visited an elite preparatory school located in a wealthy Pennsylvania township. I was there to talk to a group of highly privileged, mostly white sixth graders about institutional racism. 

At some point, I was explaining the difference between race and ethnicity and how in the U.S. you get both. As an example, I shared how my cultural and religious ethnicity is Swiss German Mennonite, but my race is white. A skinny arm shot up and the sixth grader asked with lots of emotion, “Does that mean your family was part of the Holocaust?” 

Third grade came flooding back. I managed to compose myself and shared that Mennonites are pacifists and my ancestors came to Pennsylvania in the 1700s, however there definitely were Mennonites living in Germany during that time.

Afterwards, sitting in my car in the parking lot, I realized the extent to which I was still in denial. I had just spent an hour explaining racism to eleven-year-olds, how it is all around us and deep in our histories. I shared how people who would come to be called white, including my Swiss German ancestors, had displaced Indigenous people from their lands as a matter of policy. I had just talked about the importance of seeing oneself as white in order to use that identity to make change.

How had I been so able to distance myself while I was trying so hard not to distance? I was aware of it rationally, yet on the emotional level the sixth grader’s questions activated a deep inherited wound. Once activated I grasped for the habitual stories, rather than investigate the pain and the other truths it may hold.

Like all white people, I have been shaped by the racist lies and partial truths about my own whitewashed history.

Historically speaking, Mennonite identity and culture was very much under threat and my ancestors sacrificed in order to ensure the cultural, religious, and physical survival of the community. Much like other European narratives, the deep contradiction is that in our fleeing persecution we wiped out whole communities. Still our identity and narrative are so tied into us being the victims and martyrs and at the very least not actively participating in the violence of the state. 

But is this actually true?

That evening after I got home from the middle school presentation, I received a message from a friend with a link to Mennonite historian, Ben Goossen’s article Mennonite Fascism. It was as if my friend had conspired with the author to provide the painful answers I had been resisting. 

To sum up this horrific and little-talked-about part of Mennonite History:

• Mennonite fascism was a thing in the early mid 20^th Century.
• It was a separatist and puritanical movement with an eye towards creating a separate Mennonite state (Mennostadt) to bring together Mennonites of a “pure blooded nation or race” scattered across the world who “supposedly faced a global plague of racial defilement” (Goossen, 2017).
• Patriarchy was all up in this brand of fascism. (No surprise there.)

In fact, some point to Mennonite settlements in the Black Sea Region as an example of such a separatist endeavor. For over 100 years Mennonites exercised judicial, administrative, and educational independence in parts of Russian-controlled Europe. What the article also shows is how those settlements received visits, praise, and support from prominent fascists during Nazi occupation, and generally collaborated with Nazis to the point of (and I had never heard this before) violence: “Death squads some with Mennonite members massacred nearly all of Ukraine’s 1.2 million Jews, including tens of thousands in and around Mennonite colonies” (Goossen, 2017). 

So in answer to the sixth grader’s question, yes. That does indeed mean that my people were part of the Holocaust.

Upon first reading the article I dismissed the Mennonites referenced as those other Mennonites, the Canadian ones. My people were already in Pennsylvania so they couldn’t have been participating in the Holocaust in the 1930s. But what exactly was my family doing in the 1930s? In my case, my grandparents were benefiting from newly institutionalized Federal Housing Authority policy that gave them access to new housing stock and mortgages that were intentionally and explicitly not offered to People of Color. My family wasn’t actively participating in 20^th Century genocide because they were direct beneficiaries of 17^th and 18^th Century iterations, which had assisted them in relocating to the other side of the Atlantic.

I get wanting to deny association with the violence of whiteness. But the system doesn’t care if you’ve been here two or two-hundred years or if you self-identify as white or liberal or Italian or Swiss German Mennonite or if you enslaved human beings or got paid to be on slave patrols. The systems don’t care, because if they see you as white today, you are treated as white and you belong to the collective of white that racism creates. 

When we buy into Mennonite Humble (or insert your particular version of it here) we are trying to distance ourselves from those other racist white people. The secret is we are really only deceiving ourselves.

Another painful product of the environs of Mennonite fascism is the life and legacy of Ben Klassen, an avid and vocal white supremacist born into a Mennonite family in Ukraine in 1918. His family’s story is similar to many Mennonite immigrants at that time who fled Europe first to Mexico and then to the Saskatchewan Valley in Canada. After doing the very Mennonite thing of attending an independent German-English school founded by Mennonite settlers and then the very white thing of making money off of land development projects and patenting shit, Klassen ended up in 1960s Florida politics and co-founded the Nationalist White Party. In the 1970s and 80s he started an atheist church that worshipped whiteness, popularized the term RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), and established an indoctrination camp for white boys in North Carolina. With cultural ancestors like these who needs skeletons.

Getting in touch with our full histories isn’t just a cultural nicety, it is crucial to combatting the denial of whiteness. My sense of belonging to “the most important opposition movement of the Middle Ages” does not erase the ways I also belong to the violence of whiteness. I can belong both to a history of nonviolent resistance as well as to the violence of anti-Semitism and settler colonialism. 

And even while acknowledging their interconnection, I feel tempted to keep these truths general and abstract. Instead, my healing work is to uncover the nitty gritty intersections and sit with and feel their weight. My work is to name, claim, and work with the threads.

It feels undeniably icky to sit with the repulsive parts of my history. It is distressing to read passages where my ancestors dismiss the people whose land they’re stealing as “savages.” It is gut-wrenching to uncover relatives who enslaved and who raped. It stings to know that my ancestors weren’t exceptional in 1737 or in 1933 or even in 1982. They bought into whiteness just like their European peers. It feels disgusting, embarrassing, and so cowardly commonplace, that people of Mennonite ancestry fought in wars, murdered Jewish people, and explicitly organized for white supremacy. 

I especially don’t want to think about how the cultural values and practices I was raised on make up the same milieu that inspired and motivated fascism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacy. But I need to. We need to. We need to understand how order and hard work, purity and plainness, belonging and community have historically had as much to do with upholding oppression as with resisting it.

I am thinking about how not reckoning with white supremacy has left hundreds of thousands of white people susceptible to it. Not teaching about enslavement, colonization, and genocide has left a historical void for authoritarian power to fill. Not modeling a path forward through acceptance, acknowledgement, and action has inflamed the impulse to blame, punish, and eradicate others in order to avoid the intolerable feelings of shame.

I am still working through intense anger at my ancestors for their hypocritical choices and for the blankets of silence they hid them under. I feel lied to and misled. Their silence has kept subsequent generations from reckoning with these truths. It has kept us from acknowledgement. It has prevented historical wounds from much-needed healing. Just as our physical bodies are prone to heal, our collective human body has this capability too.

I write this not only for Mennonites of European descent, but for all of us who have come to be called white. All of us have truth-digging to do to uncover and tend to the wounds. Your specific threads are important to this collective healing justice assignment.

What are your silenced legacies? Which of your ancestors need acknowledgement? What are the wounds that you need to address, dress, and heal? What is the pain that needs to be exhumed, honored, and felt? What is the complicity that needs to be mourned? 

And crucially, how will you ground yourself in order to support this disinterment? How will you not go at this alone? How will you wrap yourself in love? 

Acceptance and acknowledgement are only the first steps on the long road to apology, restitution, transformation, and repair, but they are here for us. I personally find a lot of comfort in knowing that if I am part of the problem, then I also have agency to be part of a solution. If I am complicit, then at least part of the repair is up to me. And that is something I can fight for in the here and now.

References:

Cranford, Sharon, and Dwight E Roth. Kinship Concealed: Amish-Mennonite & African-American Family Connections. Morgantown, PA: Masthof Press, 2017.

Federici, Silvia. (2004.) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.

Gollner, Philipp. (April 2016). “How Mennonites Became White: Religious Activism, Cultural Power, and the City.” Mennonite Quarterly Review. Vol. XC.

Goossen, Ben. (April 27, 2017.) “Mennonite Fascism.” Anabaptist Historians. https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2017/04/27/mennonite-fascism/ 

Mast, C.Z. (1911). Mast Family History. Elverson, Penna.

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