Tracing lives of three ‘white’ families and their black forebearsPosted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Law, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2011-03-03 22:26Z by Steven |
Tracing lives of three ‘white’ families and their black forebears
The Boston Globe
2011-02-20
Dan Cryer, Globe Correspondent
Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.
Randall Lee Gibson, an urbane, Yale-educated Confederate general, mocked black people as “the most degraded of all races of men.’’ Later, as a US senator from Louisiana, he helped broker the end of Reconstruction, freeing the South to harass and lynch blacks virtually at will.
In the 20th century, his orphaned son, Preston, was raised by an aunt and her husband, who had been a justice on the US Supreme Court that legitimated racial segregation in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson.
At the beginning of the 21st century, a rent-a-car employee and genealogy buff dubbed himself Sir Thomas Murphy after tracing his mother’s lineage to English aristocracy. His father’s line remained a mystery.
None of these white people knew that they had African-American ancestors who had “passed for white.’’
Race has always been an inherently unstable construct of nature, culture, and law. Should one be considered black if one grandparent or great-grandparent was black? Or does the “one-drop’’ rule hold, that a single black forebear makes one black? Does “race’’ exist in the eye of the beholder, or solely in the mind of the beheld. In today’s age of mixed-race chic—in which Mariah Carey and Derek Jeter are hailed as beautiful royalty—such questions may seem quaint. But throughout American history, the consequences have been deadly.
“The Invisible Line,’’ Daniel J. Sharfstein’s spellbinding chronicle of racial passing in America, reminds us that the phenomenon has existed since our Colonial beginnings—as escape from oppression, enhancement in status, and path to economic opportunity. However well defined in law, the racial line has always remained porous, breachable under the right conditions…
Read the entire review here.
