Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
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.
The history of Afro Latinos is not taught in American schools, and the idea that someone can be Black and Latino still feels novel to some people, according to Tanya K. Hernández, a professor at Fordham University School of Law.
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Nelson German, the chef and owner of alaMar, a seafood restaurant in Oakland, remembers the day a Black family asked a staffer about the Black owner they had heard about.
“This isn’t a Black-owned restaurant,” he recalled the staffer telling the family. “This is a Dominican-owned restaurant.”
Hearing about that interaction was a turning point for German. As a Black Dominican American, German, 41, realized he hadn’t done enough to educate those around him about his Blackness and the importance of it.
“We are Black. We are part of the African diaspora. We just speak Spanish,” German said. “The African continent influenced the world. We should embrace that, and really give tribute to it now, because there’s a lot of people who had to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for us to be in this position. We should show them some respect.”
