My opinion on the phrase "we're the daughters of the witches they couldn't burn"

I have heard this phrase coming from mainly young white liberal women, I often see leftists respond with "no, you are the daughter of colonizers/enslavers". My point is that these are the same people, and it's fine to be proud of one and not the other. (In fact, if you are proud of them both- you might be a terrible person.)

During the hysteria of the 1690s, people of Salem (mainly girls age 11-20) accused members of their community of witchcraft. Because this was Massachusetts in the 1690s, most people in Salem were colonizers. (I say most, not all, because calling enslaved people colonizers is problematic as hell and indigenous people exist.) Therefore most survivors of 1690s Salem, were colonizers and some were enslavers. These groups will always overlap.

I had a professor in one of my first upper level classes talk about who 'our people' are on our first day of class. We figured out who in history we related too. This could be literal or just about shared characteristics. For example 'my people' might include: white people, women, empathetic people, German people, and academics. In his class several of our papers had sections where we discussed how 'our people' interacted with whatever event/issue we were learning about. 

Culturally, it makes sense for people to care about 'their people' in history. That can be pride or shame. It makes sense for anyone to say "we're the children of [historical badasses]". And all historical badasses are going to overlap with other people who were terrible. And all historical badasses will come from groups that are problematic and terrible in the same period.

This matters because if you don't let anyone be proud of any historical badasses because they overlap with terrible people then you get into a sticky situation of not letting people being proud of 'their people'.

(This part is just a theory.) The Salem Witch Trials had the most consequences for poor, older, women. Obviously, none of the accused were criminals. So who were the teenage girls accusing? People they didn't like. The weird, the mentally ill, the eccentric. Being proud of being the descendant of these mentally ill women isn't wrong. 

TLDR; Saying "we're the daughters of the witches they couldn't burn" is another way to say "I am proud to be a weird woman." And trying to make that a problem is weird and feels a bit misogyntistic.

Being proud of being the descendant of these mentally ill women isn't wrong. However, being proud of being a colonizer is absolutely wrong. And history is complicated because good and bad groups will always overlap.