What it means to lack history

I don't know the names of my great grandparents.

My mother and father probably know their names, but I haven't bothered to write them down. I know very few of my distant cousins by name and really don't have many ties to family members beyond my aunts and uncles.

Wednesday night, this made me sad.

I watched Dr. Henry Louis Gates take several black celebrities through the histories of their families on PBS's African American Lives 2 .

Chris Rock learned that one of his distant relatives was a Union soldier, one of South Carolina's first black legislators and, ultimately because of white racism, a sharecropper. I watched Rock grapple with the idea that his ancestors were people of substance, and then come to the conclusion that if he had known this as a child he might have lived a different life.

Don Cheadle learned that his family was owned by Native Americans and for 30 years lived without being citizens of any country before finally receiving 40 acres of land for their trouble. Cheadle clearly struggled with the idea that his family was enslaved by the same Native Americans who watched their race nearly exterminated by white America.

Obviously, it was a powerful show.

My father watched it with me. He's been urging me to contact Gate's company about getting our own genealogy traced. Through his company, Gates can trace your genealogy back to slavery and then use DNA testing to determine which part of Africa you came from.

It's an enticing offer for nearly $900.

My family has never really been big on history. I know that my maternal great grandfather managed to acquire roughly 150 acres of land in Mississippi before he died and left it to be divided among his children. I know that further back on my mother's side there is an Irish family waiting because of her very Irish maiden name.

But, I really don't know much.

I don't know the true arc of my ancestor's lives. I have very little information about the scope of their character.

It diminishes me.

It strips me of a very valuable sense of pride, a very important feeling of accomplishment.

Tina Turner learned through the show that the very school she attended as a child in Nutbush, Tenn. was built on land once sold at a discount by one of her relatives. All those years, and she never knew what her ancestor had accomplished.

I understand her ignorance. Like most of us, I've gotten caught up in the here and now. The daily demands of life easily strip of us of the impetus to seek information about our past.

But that must change in my life. I will learn more about those who preceded me. Those black men and women who lived through this country's most troubling and dangerous times.

My history will empower me.