Back When Skin Color Was Destiny — Unless You Passed for White

[Vitruvius]

By BRENT STAPLES

The New Yorker was trying not to speak ill of the dead when it described Anatole Broyard as the "famously prickly critic for the (New York) Times, a man who demanded so much from books that it seemed he could never be satisfied."... (Broyard) was a light-skinned black man born in New Orleans in 1920 into a family whose members sometimes passed as white to work at jobs from which black people were barred. The largest private employer of black labor at the time was the Pullman Company, which sought college-educated black men to work as servants on train cars (for) white travelers only.

Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer — and not just a "Negro writer" consigned to the back of the literary bus. He followed the trail blazed by tens of thousands of light-skinned black Americans. He methodically cut ties with his family (including a mother and two sisters) and took up life as a white man with a white wife in white Connecticut. By the late 1980's, he had been "white" for 40 years, with two adult children who were unaware that they were part of a large black family that included an aunt who lived an hour away in Manhattan.

This was raw meat for Philip Roth, who may have known the outlines of the story even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. told it in detail in The New Yorker in 1996. When Mr. Roth's novel about "passing" — "The Human Stain" — appeared in 2000, the character who jettisons his black family to live as white was strongly reminiscent of Mr. Broyard. The novel generated an interesting discussion among the black elite, some of whom were surprised that a (white) writer had exposed the centuries-old conspiracy of silence among black people that permitted passers to live without fear of being outed. (SNIP)

Light-skinned black people who passed typically did so by moving to places where they were unknown. The 1940's offered millions the chance to get lost, both through the Great Migration — in which blacks moved en masse from the rural South into the cities — and especially World War II. (SNIP) One demographer estimated that more that 150,000 black people sailed away permanently into whiteness during the 1940's alone, marrying white spouses and most likely cutting off their black families. The people left behind would describe these relatives as "passed" (a euphemism for dead) or as "lost to the family." (SNIP)

MORE

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/opinion/07SUN3.html

My own Father made a similar transition from Native American to white. We kept in touch with his side of the family by telephone, but somehow never saw them -- tho' we were on very good terms...

Then, as Father's executor, I had to go thru his papers -- and I found a box of letters from his family (with carbons of his letters to them), with a note saying that he must have died without the chance to burn them (true), that I could read them, but that I was then to burn them and not tell my siblings -- because such knowledge is dangerous in a racist country -- like this one. I did so, tho' I have kept in touch with the family.

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Kick

Wonderful, but sad, piece.

[beanball]

2. The colour line

"come in from the cold brothers and sisters,its ok to be black in america,be proud,be yourself."