Since blogging is a new enterprise for me, I’ve been encouraged by the number and range of responses here.  I have appreciated all the comments from people who shared their efforts to answer the question “what are you?” and to understand the aspects of our country’s racial legacy that made the answer so significant.  However, the comments section is not a referendum for how I or anyone else identifies themselves, despite a small number of people trying to hijack it for that purpose.  If you read ONE DROP, you’ll see that I don’t view racial identity as simply black or white, based on some calculation of blood percentages.  Rather, I think it’s the sum of a person’s experiences, the culture and times in which he or she was raised, how a person is seen by the world, and how he or she sees him or herself.  For my part, I don’t deny one identity nor claim another.  I do try to reclaim the history and family that my father prevented me from knowing.  Please continue to engage in thoughtful nuanced dialogue about the challenges of constructing one’s racial identity and sifting through the legacy of a time when people had no choice in how they were categorized.  Please refrain from judgment or assertions that there is a right answer to these questions.  And please keep your comments to the posts at hand.  If you must grind your axe, then I recommend starting your own blog (especially since you’ll be barred from posting on mine).  Wordpress is very user friendly!    

Every day I get email from people who, like me, learned later in life about some previously unknown heritage–more often than not African heritage.  The secret finally came out when a parent or grandparent was dying.  Or they stumbled across a census record online where an ancestor was listed “b” or “mu” (mulatto was a census category until 1920 when the census bureau got rid of it, determining that 75% of African Americans were mixed).  Usually this revelation explains the mysteriousness around a family’s origins, the aunts and cousins never known, and the reluctance on a parent or grandparent’s part to talk about their childhood. I’ve even heard from people where the ancestor who decided to start living as white had once been race people, working hard for civil rights.

I think to begin to understand the phenomenon of passing you have to appreciate the consequences of being black in America. In my own family, even living in the New York City, my aunt (who couldn’t pass for white) was told by the state employment office that they had no jobs for colored girls. My grandfather had to pass for white to join the carpenter’s union, which in New York state was still segregated as late as 1959. My grandmother had to pass as white in order to get a job ironing clothes in a laundrymat. Being white was seen as a matter of economic survival. Of course there are lots of examples of black men and women who managed to succeed despite Jim Crow and discrimination. And so people who crosssed the color line did so simply to benefit themselves or because they’d adopted the attitudes at large that to be black was to be inferior.

In One Drop, I noted “In 1958, Robert Stuckert, a sociologist and anthropologist at Ohio State University, published his findings in the Ohio Journal of Science about the frequency of black-to-white passing. After analyzing decades of census records and fertility data, he estimated that by 1950 one in five Americans who identified themselves as white had some African ancestry. And he predicted that the percentage of white people with black ancestry would increase as these individuals went on to have children.”

As genealogical records become more available online, as DNA tests become more accurate and affordable, finding out that you too have some unknown heritage could be as easy as a few clicks on the keyboard, a quick swab of your cheek. The longer a person’s family has been in this country, the higher the chances… Are you mixed too?