Mixed Race Studies

Since the publication of my second book One Drop, I have heard from hundreds of people who similarly discovered later in life a previously unknown ancestry, some of whom have had their sense of themselves changed, seemingly overnight, as a result. Sometimes the revelation came as the result of a DNA test, which was then corroborated with some genealogical research. Other times, the discovery of a “MU” (Mulatto) or “B” (Black) on a grandparent’s or great grandparent’s census record had uncovered the truth. With cheaper genetic testing and more and more genealogical records easily searchable online, the number of people discovering they are not what they thought they were will only continue to increase.

Bliss Broyard, “Rachel Dolezal isn’t alone – my family history proves choosing a racial definition is hard,” The Guardian, June 15, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/15/bliss-broyard-father-black-roots-race-ethnicity-rachel-dolezal.

Rachel Dolezal isn’t alone – my family history proves choosing a racial definition is hard

The Guardian
Monday, 2015-06-15

Bliss Broyard

Bliss Broyard’s father kept his black roots a secret his whole life. Her journey of self-discovery led her to the understanding that believing the results of a DNA cheek swab to be more meaningful than one’s experiences is a ridiculous notion

How do you determine who is black? Is it simply a matter of inheritance – you are what your parents are? Does having a black grandparent make a person black? Must she have been raised as black, in a black community? Is one black ancestor, one drop of blood, enough?

These were the kinds of questions asked during the legal trials undertaken in the late 19th and early 20th century throughout southern and midwestern US states, to determine a person’s “true” racial identity. Then, as now, ancestry trumped lived experience. In Ohio the courts ruled that having 50% black ancestry, a single black parent or two mixed parents, made a person black – and hence socially and politically inferior – while in Louisiana, the “one drop” rule prevailed, and any traceable amount of Negro ancestry denied one certain legal rights, including the right to vote and the right to marry a person of another race…

Read the entire article here.

Daughter Discovers Father’s Black Lineage

National Public Radio
2007-10-02

Farai Chideya, Host

Famed literary critic Anatole Broyard carried a big secret most of his life. He was a black man passing as white. His daughter, Bliss Broyard, writes about how she learned of her father’s hidden life and explored her black ancestry in the memoir One Drop.

Anatole Broyard was one of the most respected literary critics. The late editor and columnist for the New York Times book review provided a lavish life for his family in New England, but he carried a secret so deep that he couldn’t tell his own children.

Now, his daughter Bliss Broyard has written the memoir “One Drop” about his life and her search for her family.

Bliss, welcome to the show.

Ms. BLISS BROYARD (Daughter of Anatole Broyard; Author, “One Drop”): Thanks, Farai, for having me.

CHIDEYA: So when your father was dying, you find out the big family secret: That your father is part-black. Your brother says, that’s all? What was your reaction?

Ms. BROYARD: Pretty much along the same lines. The afternoon that we found out, we had just witnessed my father suffering terrible pain. He was in the last stages of prostate cancer. So my mom took it upon herself to tell us because it seemed clear that my father wasn’t going to live very much longer.

So it seems, frankly, like not a big deal. And we had known about a secret for a couple of months, and I imagined that it was, you know, my dad had witnessed some horrible crime or incest or something. So the fact that it was just that he was part-black and we didn’t even realize or understand exactly why had it been a secret at all…

Listen to the interview here. Read the transcript here. Download the interview here.

Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010

State University of New York Press
July 2014
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5227-2
Electronic ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5229-6

Edited by:

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of American Literature
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Explores how the trope of racial passing continues to serve as a touchstone for gauging public beliefs and anxieties about race in this multiracial era.

The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century. With contributors working in the fields of African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, film studies, literature, and media studies, this book offers a rich, interdisciplinary survey of critical approaches to a broad range of contemporary passing texts. Contributors frame recent passing texts with a wide array of cultural discourses, including immigration law, the Post-Soul Aesthetic, contemporary political satire, affirmative action, the paradoxes of “colorblindness,” and the rhetoric of “post-racialism.” Many explore whether “one drop” of blood still governs our sense of racial identity, or to what extent contemporary American culture allows for the racially indeterminate individual. Some essays open the scholarly conversation to focus on “ethnic” passers—individuals who complicate the traditional black-white binary—while others explore the slippage between traditional racial passing and related forms of racial performance, including blackface minstrelsy and racial masquerade.

Table of Contents

• Preface: The “Posts” of Passing / Gayle Wald
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The (Not So) New Face of America / Julie Cary Nerad
• 2. On the Margins of Movement: Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs / Irina Negrea
• 3. “A Cousin to Blackness”: Race and Identity in Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life / Lynn Washington and Julie Cary Nerad
• 4. Can One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century / Jené Schoenfeld
• 5. Passing in Blackface: The Intimate Drama of Post-Racialism on Black. White / Eden Osucha
• 6. Broke Right in Half: Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone / Julie Cary Nerad
• 7. Passing for Chicano, Passing for White: Negotiating Filipino American Identity in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son / Amanda Page
• 8. Race in the Marketplace: Postmodern Passing and Ali G / Ana Cristina Mendes
• 9. Passing for Black, White, and Jewish: Mixed-Race Identity in Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna / Lori Harrison-Kahan
• 10. Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Racial Passing/Performativity, and Film Blackness / Michael B. Gillespie
• 11. Consuming Performances: Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure / Meredith McCarroll
• Bibliography
• Contributor Biographies
• Index

Passing Strange

The New York Times
2007-10-21

Joyce Johnson

In 1855, Henry Broyard, a young white New Orleans carpenter, decided to pass as black in order to be legally entitled to marry Marie Pauline Bonée, the well-educated daughter of colored refugees from Haiti, who was about to have his child; their marriage license describes them both as “free people of color.” A century and a half later, their great-great-granddaughter, Bliss Broyard, who had been raised as white, abruptly found herself confronting the implications of her newly discovered black identity.

The daughter of the writer and New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, she had grown up with a feeling “that there was something about my family, or even many things, that I didn’t know.” What was lacking was any real sense of the history of the father she adored or any contact with his relatives, apart from one dimly remembered day in the past when her paternal grandmother had once visited them in their 18th-century house in the white enclave of Southport, Conn. Even in the last weeks of his life, the secret Anatole Broyard had kept from Bliss and her brother, Todd, was one he could not bear to reveal himself; it was their mother who finally told them, “Your father’s part black,” not long before Broyard died of prostate cancer…

…In one way, he wasn’t wrong at all. “My father truly believed,” Bliss Broyard writes in “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — a Story of Race and Family Secrets,” “that there wasn’t any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself.” But for Broyard to construct a white identity required the ruthless and cowardly jettisoning of his black family. He would later lamely tell his children that their grandmother and their two aunts, one of them with tell-tale dark skin, simply didn’t interest him. During the 1960s, he expressed no sympathy for the civil rights movement, opposed, his daughter writes, to a movement that required “adherence to a group platform rather than to one’s ‘essential spirit.’ ” His posthumously published memoir, “Kafka Was the Rage,” revealed only that his people were from New Orleans…

Read the entire review here.

Rite Of “Passing”

CBS News
2007-10-28

Russ Mitchell

For 23 years Bliss Broyard was white, living in tony Greenwich, Conn., isolated from people of color and influenced by the racial attitudes of her surroundings, reports CBS News’ Russ Mitchell.

Asked if she used to tell black jokes, Broyard said:

“I did, in high school and it’s a very painful memory looking back now. There was a student, an African-American student who was sitting at the table who got up and left and I felt horrible about it and kept wanting to apologize to him but never did.”

Her life was based on a secret held by her father, Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990. He was the influential book critic for the New York Times for 18 years.

“I think my father, as a consequence, cut himself off from his family and history, and I think he suffered for that,” said Broyard.

Anatole Broyard was Creole, born in 1920. His light-skinned parents, the children of free blacks, moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn, New York, where during the Depression they passed as white to get work…

…”One Drop,” Bliss Broyard’s new book, chronicles her father’s failure to tell her and her brother about his racial identity and how they had to learn the news from their mother only weeks before he died.

“It’s amazing because we’re the people that are closest to him and the secret was about us too,” said Broyard.

And, she says, one that has had lasting consequences.

“I was really angry at him and one of the hardest things, his immediate family his sister and cousin, it’s been very, very hard to repair that rift,” said Broyard.

Historically, Broyard’s secret was not unique. According to an Ohio State study published in the late 1950s, the number of fair-skinned blacks crossing the color line between 1861 and 1950 grew from 3,000 a year to more than 15,000 a year. And by the trend’s peak in 1950, it was estimated 28 million Americans who identified themselves as white had black ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

A Daughter Discovers Branches of the Family Tree Pruned by Her Father

The New York Times
2007-11-07

Mimi Read

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 6 — In a white-box living room in an apartment on lower St. Charles Avenue here, the dining table was set for a family party: plastic bowls of chips, dip and salsa; a plastic bag of sepia-toned family photographs waiting to be opened; and a copy of Bliss Broyard’s new book, “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets.”

In town late last month for a publicity tour, Ms. Broyard, 41, grabbed and greeted cousins one after another as they came through the door. The gathering was at the temporary apartment of one cousin, Sheila Marie Prevost, 43, who lost her Upper Ninth Ward house and most of her possessions in Hurricane Katrina. Swing-era jazz filled the room. Ms. Broyard was guest of honor and auxiliary hostess.

In one animated moment she stood in a doorway tossing her dark curls, waving a chicken leg in one hand and a bowl of red beans and rice in the other.

“Thank you for letting us invade your house — it’s Creole domination!” she called out to Ms. Prevost’s companion.

It has been a decade since Ms. Broyard discovered her New Orleans kin. Despite skin tones ranging from alabaster to brown, most of them regard themselves as black. Ms. Broyard believed herself to be completely white until 17 years ago. She grew up in an idyllic enclave in Southport, Conn., and spent weekends at an all-white yacht club there. She attended prep school and summered on Martha’s Vineyard.

Her father was Anatole Broyard, a longtime book critic and essayist for The New York Times. Somewhere during his years at Brooklyn College he slipped over the color line and began passing as white.

It was only on Mr. Broyard’s deathbed in 1990 that his daughter, then 24, learned the family secret: “Your father is part black,” her mother, Alexandra, blurted out to Ms. Broyard and her brother, Todd, when their father couldn’t muster the words…

…When Ms. Broyard first showed up in New Orleans in 1993 to research her book, released last month, she couldn’t help noticing several Broyards in the phone book. On a later trip she worked up the courage to call some.

“I was worried they wouldn’t want to know me or they’d be angry,” she said.

In fact, many cousins who convened at the family get-together last month had known about Ms. Broyard and her father long before she contacted them. Even though they kept his secret, they talked about him among themselves. Anatole Broyard had been their high-achieving superstar. Occasionally, a Broyard aunt would clip one of his reviews and pass it around town…

Read the entire article here.

The Autobiography of an Ex-White Woman: Bliss Broyard’s One Drop

Mother Jones
2007-11-09

Debra J. Dickerson

Suddenly, white people are fascinated by race. Good for them. Good for all of us?

If you haven’t read Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, you must. No matter how well you thought you understood, this book makes you realize just how relentlessly integral race is to American life and just how crucial it is to move beyond it. A complex book on a complex issue, it’s hard to know where to begin (good reviews here, here and here).

Here’s the easy part: One Drop is about having a semi-famous father who gave you all the insulated, WASPy pampering any white girl could want but who turns out, on his deathbed, to have in fact been black, then backtracking to figure out why and how he did so. And where that leaves you in a nation where boxes must be checked and sides must be taken. Only in America could a strained conversation in your dying father’s sickroom change your race. This just in: you’re black.

Pere Broyard, Anatole, was a New Orleans Creole, as it turned out, who helped create a post-war, bohemian-intellectual Manhattan where he and his friends “didn’t know where books stopped and they began.” But the world did. The only way for the cerebral, wavy-haired Negro to claim a place in that rarified atmosphere, seduce numberless white girls, or even get a decent job, was to stop being black. The price of doing so for two generations left Broyard a twisted soul, self-eliminated from family and culture, adrift in a world which existed mostly in the minds of the trendy Communist sympathizers and slumming trust-funders who fed on each other until it was time to marry and move to Connecticut. “Our tribe of four made us seem alternately special and forsaken,” Bliss writes, “the last survivors of a dying colony or the founding members of an exclusive club.”She and her brother had almost no interaction with either side of the family, so deeply ‘incognegro’ was Anatole. So were they black now? If they’re not, is it because it’s too late or because it’s too easy?…

…Still, these works do what America never will; participate in all the truth and reconciliation we’re ever going to have—piecemeal, caveated, hazy, statute of limitations-expired but more than blacks knew before. More than whites could bear to admit to before. Leave it to white narcissism to do for us what the urgings of conscience never will: put white perpetrators center stage. Now that it’s safe. Given that America won’t hold its breath until a black person goes digging for the ancestor who narc’d on Denmark Vesey, maybe blacks should cut whites some slack on their long overdue introspection. There’s no denying that blacks desperately want to know what the hell happened and how and only whites can tell us that…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets

Little, Brown and Company
2007
544 pages
5-1/2″ x 8-1/4″
ISBN: 9780316008068

Bliss Broyard

Ever since renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard’s own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to “pass” in order to get work, he had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity.

Read an excerpt here.

Writing in 2010 about the Idea of Racial Identity

The 17th Annual Oxford Conference for the Book (2010-03-04 through 2010-03-06)
2010-03-05, 13:30 – 15:00 EST (Local Time)
Overby Center for Southern Journalism
University of Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi

Ted Ownby, Professor History and Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
University of Mississippi

Bliss Broyard

W. Ralph Eubanks

Danzy Senna