I just finished reading One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets, by Bliss Broyard, which I found very interesting. Upon his death, Bliss learns that her father (Anatole Broyard, New York Times book critic and writer) had been "passing" as white. This book details her searching for her black ancestors and living relatives that she never knew, nicely contextualized in American racial politics from slavery to contemporary times. She really does a fine job of exploring personal ambiguity/conflicts of racial identity and the accompanying social attitudes attached to racial identity. Highly recommended...
Also, it seems to me that the book The Human Stain by Philip Roth had to be inspired by the public revelation of her father's secret. The similarities are just too convenient.
1 comment:
Bliss Broyard is a white woman (as opposed to the myth of just looking like one). Her father, Anatole Broyard, was a white man, although "tarbrushed."
Everyone wants to be part Indian precisely because Indians do not try to claim everyone who has "Indian blood." Hypodescent yields contempt. Unfortunately, elite American blacks like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (the one who first denounced Anatole Broyard as a lighter kind of "black" too inferior for the honor of calling himself white) actively mislead people of good will by promoting and demanding obedience to the lie that whites "tainted" with Negro blood have no right to be "white." If that were true, Hispanics and Arabs would be "black" since nearly all of them have some "black blood."
Instead of Bliss Broyard, read Legal History of the Color Line by Frank W. Sweet and "Passing" for Who You Really Are by A.D. Powell.
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