Dissin' Cousins
could family ties sway oval office policies?
2007-10-22
By Monroe Anderson

     Back when "Roots" was all the rage, the brother of an old college girlfriend of mine became curious about their family tree. He did the same due diligence that Alex Haley had done to trace his ancestors back to Ghana. But he didn't get that far. After tracing several generations back, he discovered that they were direct descendants of General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the confederate army. His search came to a screaming halt.
     Tap TiVo to last week's TV news. While making the rounds to pitch her latest schmaltzy tome, Second Lady Lynne Cheney announced that while doing research on "Blue Skies, No Fences," she discovered her husband, Dick, and our candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, Barack Obama, are distant cousins. In launching what some would view as a smear campaign, the vice president's wife claims she traced a common ancestor of the 66-year-old Republican and the 46-year-old Democratic presidential hopeful to a 17th century immigrant from France. Mrs. Cheney's surprising research results have Obama a descendant of Mareen Duvall whose son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney, who arrived in Maryland in the late 1650's from England. That makes Obama and Cheney ninth cousins once removed -- and then some.
     If ever there was a distant-relative version of the evil twin, Cheney is it. Obama, with his politics of hope, is hoping to right everything that Dick and his bumbling buddy, George, have done wrong. He wants to end the Cheney-Bush war on Iraq and to reduce the greenhouse gases the two oilmen denied existed during most of their seven-year rule. And, you can sum up the Cheney-Bush team's love for black America in a word: Katrina.
     Blacks and whites have been dissing cousins and closer since 1619, long before the colonies became states and the states became united. Nearly a third of all black Americans who take DNA tests in search of their African lineage discover the baby's daddy was white. Obama is just the latest to have an embarrassing white man in the family closet. Earlier this year, Rev. Al Sharpton discovered that William Thurmond, Sen. Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather owned his great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton. The late Senator ran for president in 1948 on a platform of keeping the races apart and fought tooth and nail against us receiving full citizenship. A couple of years ago, it came to light that Thurmond, the Mighty Segregationist, had an illegitimate black daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, with whom he maintained contact throught his vitriolic career.
     Not only are Cheney and Obama distant kin, so are, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama and George W. Bush. The contender and the decider share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents --- Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley of 17th century Massachusetts, making them tenth cousins once removed. Bush, in case you've forgotten, is also the ninth cousin, two times removed, to Sen. John Kerry. Our 43rd President, George W. Bush, is also the son to our 41st President, George H.W. Bush. And, if Obama can't pull out of his rut, our next President may be Hilary Clinton, mother of Chelsie Clinton, President Bill Clinton's daughter. Talk about all in the family. This is the stuff of a juicy political soap opera: Call it, "The Old and the Relentless."
     If elected, will President Hilary Clinton be more faithful to black America than her husband before her? Or will she pull a maneuver slicker than Willy's desertion of his Yale classmate Lani Guinier, after the radical right labeled the candidate for Assistant Attorney General "the quota queen?" Will she turn a blind eye to the genocide in Darfur in the same way Bill did the genocide in Rwanda? And what about Obama? Would a President Obama pardon his cousins Cheney and "W" should it come out that their breaking and entering into Iraq was both a national and international offense? And might Strom's kin, Al end up in Obama's cabinet? Only time (and the polls) will tell.
     The plot lines in this soapy aristocracy have been brought to you by the blackened, well-greased, cast iron melting pot that is America.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com.