Ron Higgs says he'd skip famous historical figures and instead meet his own ancestors at age 30, to show his father, grandfathers, and enslaved forebears his life now and what's ahead. Bob Fabien Zinga says he'd never thought of it that way.
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You're not gonna like my answer, or maybe not, right? Honestly, if I had that kind of power, I would not waste my time with anybody that's considered famous, right? You know what I mean? I would go with my dad and my two grandfathers and have all of us be the same age, like 30 years old or something like that, right? Because that's what I care about, and those are the people that I want to talk to, right? Because we have never— you've never been able to talk to your elders this equals, right? Another— I would love to, my 30-year-old self, to talk to my grandfather's 30-year-old self and my father's 30-year-old self, right? So those things I, I have never considered. Um, you know, when people ask me that, I'm like, you know, there's just—
I haven't considered.
I don't want to talk to Napoleon. I don't want to talk to Ben Franklin. I want to talk to my grandfather. I want to talk to my father, great-grandfather maybe, right? Or someone else, right? And maybe, maybe someone in my ancestry that was a slave, and to let them see where I am now. Wow. And what's— what their future looks like. So, wow, it's a different answer than you probably expected.
No, no, that is, that is very, very, very powerful. I really appreciate that because I can tell you, you are definitely the wildest dream of your slave ancestors. I only if they knew. But it's just because I was really lucky. I did talk to my father quite a lot before he passed away. Actually, he gave me part of our genealogical tree and which I am working on. We started with like 12 people and I have more than 200 people and I'm still building this kind of part of his legacy. And me being originally from Africa, in Africa we say when an old person dies, like an entire library that dies because unfortunately we didn't have the written history like we do in the Western world. Most, most of our history is
