I don’t know what ancestral racism is, but I do know what ancestral laws are. The Constitution is certainly one and I wouldn’t ban it because the ancestors who wrote it are dead. But after slavery ended, the South gutted the 14th amendment and repressed the clear constitutional right to vote black Americans had in the South, through violence and laws banning black Americans from voting, like the poll tax, the grandfather clause and literacy tests. These were aimed at black Americans for one hundred years while those 15 states defied the constitution and made their own laws by banning black Americans from participating in government through voting.

So, technically I guess “ancestral racism” end in 1965 when LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. But I hardly think signing an act waved a magic wand and instantly turned the those defiant states, some of them 30 to 40 percent black, as not racist. They practiced repressive racism defiantly until 1965, and such entrenched practices did and haven’t stopped. Renaming slavery to sharecropping didn’t stop the basic practice of slavery, and Democratic Senator Jim Eastland had “sharecroppers” (or slave croppers) on his cotton plantation in 1965. Does that make him not a racist because the word slavery was erased?