Photoessay 1447 - Mixed

I'm musing about the book I'm reading "One Drop" by Bliss Broyard, daughter of Anatole Broyard, a noted intellectual and book reviewer for the New York Times. Bliss grew up in an white affluent area in Connecticut. As a child and young person, she prided herself on knowing her father more than anybody. On his deathbed, it's revealed that Anatole is 'black' and he's been passing for white all these years.

It was a secret, but not a secret. When I look at the photos of Anatole Broyard, on the internet, it's hard for me to see how this could be a surprise. Apparently a large number of people in his life "knew about it". Yet it was kept from his children.

Bliss decides to explore this in this memoir which I am now reading. Near the beginning, she gets in touch with her father's family who Anatole had almost complete broken relationship with. She goes to meet some extended relatives in Los Angeles. The first photo is from "One Drop" page 121. Bliss doesn't really know what to make of them. They're all descended from New Orleans Creole stock. But, do they look black. Or not. One relative unequivocally identify as 'white' no matter what. So it's nice group of folks taken in the early 1990s.

This reminded me of a photo that we took in 2007. The University of Oregon softball team traveled to Berkeley during Susanna's senior season. Susanna's best friend on the team, Ann-Marie, is biracial. A lot of her relatives made a point to come to the game in honor of Ann-Marie's senior season. The second shot is group photo taken in the parking lot. I'm not sure why Dennis and I were part of it; that's JJ to the left of me hamming it up a bit. I think it was more "here are two friends and their families!" I think that's Ann-Marie's half brother to the right of her. I didn't get a chance to know this group or how they all fit together. But they were Ann-Marie's family and she was thrilled that they came to watch.

But it struck me at the time that this really wasn't the 'black side' of her family, it was her family and trying to label everybody was certainly beside the point.

Same with the first group.

About 20 years ago, I had an epiphany when I realized that I was a person of color myself.

It was in an adult education session at the Jewish Sunday School. A young rabbi was giving at talk, "The history of the Jewish people, in under an hour". My family, other Jewish families, considered themselves European, a variation of white. Most all Ashkenazi, my forebears came from Germany, Russia, Poland.

But the Jews were a Semitic people, from the middle east, Israel and all that. Not from Europe. So, if you assume that you are descended from that Semitic group (myself, you're looking at Ashkenazi all the way), then how does the Europe thing work? Since the Jews generally hung together, they migrated through eastern Europe and beyond. But they were not 'white' like the rest of the Europeans.

At one point somebody said "Well, look around at us. Do we look white?"

That's when I realized that I was not white, in the same way as the rest of the European immigrants. A whole different ball game. I was a person of color. Despite my parent's all out assimilation efforts, the result remained, we were not a 'white' family.