Obviously if you live in America with any amount of whiteness you get some benefit from systemic racism. I take an irreverent attitude to most things in life, but this one isn't so easy for me to dismiss.

It wasn't too long ago that I could walk the streets confident in the idea that anyone I met would see me and anyone else as equals in potential, with minimal bogging down from cultural clutter around race.

That has changed drastically in recent years. Admittedly, I am more anxious now than I used to be about what others would think of me based on my race.

I'm half Korean, with a little Cherokee, and I tell people my white side is Scottish. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I'm claiming it regardless.

My family name, Crowder, is one that has a lot of history. I can trace my ancestry all the way back to the lowland reivers in Scotland, to the nobility of the Korean royal court, to the Cherokee who fled into Appalachia to avoid the Trail of Tears. And without having to give my DNA to some sleazy data collector. Seriously, don't do that.

So obviously I've gotten a lot of racism. But y'know, I've participated in a lot of it myself. In this country, systemic racism is a huge thing. You can probably get the deets from some intersectional texts or a particularly informative Tumblr post, but it's still an abstract concept for most people.

Well I got to see my place in the systemic racism up close.

It was 2015 I think. I was volunteering with NAICCO on the southside of Columbus (Native American Indian Cultural Center of Ohio). Once a month, they give out free groceries to some of the lower income folks around town, and I would usually pop down to help them out with that.

One day, in the late spring, I think, it was pretty late in the day. We'd mostly run out of groceries, when this old black woman wandered in and signed in. My friend Harriet says "Hey, this lady has the same last name as you" and I froze up, because I knew what it meant.

The old lady turned to me and said "You're a Crowder?" And I said "Yes I am, ma'am."

I don't usually ma'am or sir people. I find those to be terms of reverence that I reserve for people who I want to be extra sure know I take them seriously.

She asked me immediately "Did you know our family were slaves in Georgia?" To which I responded "Yes, I was aware of that."

I was told the story by my Dad in high school. And admittedly, I didn't take the right lesson from it. I saw myself as the scion of impoverished patricianship, rather than the descendent of a despicable regime.

I'd learned a bit about the systemic issues of this culture by this point, but I'd never really applied any of it to myself until that very moment.

She told me that her grandmother was born a slave, and that she had come to Ohio and had raised her on stories of her childhood. Stories of slavery.

She'd lived all her life in poverty.

In stark contrast, my family had been homeless and had faced a great amount of adversity and yet had always managed to claw our way back to the stability of the middle class. Such as it is, anyway.

Were my parents special in some way? No, they're just neurodivergent mentally ill baby boomers who never did quite as much introspection as perhaps they should have. And the universe saw fit to have me pick up the slack where they didn't.

The lady invited me to a family reunion held in Georgia. I didn't go, and I'm not sure if she was aware I was from the other half of the family, so to speak. I don't get down to NAICCO very often anymore and I haven't seen her since, but it got me thinking a lot.

Who knows what my family took from hers. The effort and labor taken for me and mine more than a century ago seems like something easy to dismiss, but it isn't right. These days I live as close to a life of leisure as a guy who has to be in an office five days a week can. I'm a pretty laid back, cartoonishly irresponsible caricature of a millennial. It's something I'm proud to be, and something that feels like it was inevitable for my character.

Maybe I'm overthinking it. Every white guy I've ever told this story to certainly thinks I am, with responses like "white guilt is bullshit." But y'know, someone needs to be responsible.

It was done in my name, after all. The people who did these awful things did it so their descendants could live better lives. That evil was inflicted for my benefit, and no matter how little I've reaped of it, I've still reaped. Regardless of what I chose to participate in, I have participated in it.

My cousins after the Civil War moved out to Missouri, where a few became prominent founders of the KKK. One of their children, an Enoch Crowder was the Army general who basically invented the draft in this country. A prominent Crowder spreads right wing nonsense around the mediasphere today.

There's a lot of taint in my name, a terrible thing that gets reveled in to this very day.

I'm not sure what the best use of my self is to bring even a modicum of justice into the world, but I think it's important to think about. Probably the best thing I can do is to just be kind to people I meet.

But I think the complexity of how we got here is worth thinking about.