{"id":35499,"date":"2014-01-16T17:31:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T17:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35499"},"modified":"2014-01-16T17:31:12","modified_gmt":"2014-01-16T17:31:12","slug":"passing-strange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35499","title":{"rendered":"Passing Strange"},"content":{"rendered":"

Passing Strange<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2007-10-21<\/p>\n

Joyce Johnson<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1855, Henry Broyard, a young white New Orleans<\/a> carpenter, decided to pass<\/a> as black in order to be legally entitled to marry Marie Pauline Bon\u00e9e, the well-educated daughter of colored refugees from Haiti, who was about to have his child; their marriage license describes them both as \u201cfree people of color.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The daughter of the writer and New York Times<\/em> book critic Anatole Broyard<\/a>, she had grown up with a feeling \u201cthat there was something about my family, or even many things, that I didn\u2019t know.\u201d 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<\/a>. 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, \u201cYour father\u2019s part black,\u201d not long before Broyard died of prostate cancer…<\/p>\n

…In one way, he wasn\u2019t wrong at all. \u201cMy father truly believed,\u201d Bliss Broyard writes in \u201cOne Drop: My Father\u2019s Hidden Life \u2014 a Story of Race and Family Secrets<\/a>,\u201d \u201cthat there wasn\u2019t any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself.\u201d 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\u2019t interest him. During the 1960s, he expressed no sympathy for the civil rights movement, opposed, his daughter writes, to a movement that required \u201cadherence to a group platform rather than to one\u2019s \u2018essential spirit.\u2019 \u201d His posthumously published memoir, \u201cKafka Was the Rage,\u201d revealed only that his people were from New Orleans…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Bon\u00e9e, the well-educated daughter of colored refugees from Haiti, who was about to have his child; their marriage license describes them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[5427,1871,16788,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-35499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-anatole-broyard","tag-bliss-broyard","tag-joyce-johnson","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}