{"id":50399,"date":"2016-12-03T00:14:20","date_gmt":"2016-12-03T00:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50399"},"modified":"2016-12-03T15:38:06","modified_gmt":"2016-12-03T15:38:06","slug":"secrets-and-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50399","title":{"rendered":"Secrets and Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secrets and Lies<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Ms. Magazine blog<\/a>
\nMs. Magazine<\/a>
\n2016-05-17<\/p>\n

Gail Lukasik<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The following is an excerpt from <\/em>White Like Her: My Family\u2019s Story of Race and Racial Identity.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1995 when I discovered my mother\u2019s black heritage, she made me promise never to tell her secret until she died. I kept her secret for 17 years. Nine months after her death in 2015, I appeared on PBS\u2019s <\/a><\/em>Genealogy Roadshow<\/a> and revealed to 1.5 million people that my mother had passed for white<\/a>. Three days later the family she never knew found me. \u201cSecrets and Lies\u201d recounts the stories my mother told me about her life in New Orleans<\/a> before she came north to marry my father. After I uncovered her racial secret, I realized her stories held clues to her racial identity and the hardships she endured as a mixed race woman in Jim Crow<\/a> south.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Parma, Ohio<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

When I was a young girl my mother would tell me about her life in New Orleans<\/a> before she came north to Ohio<\/a> to marry my father. Each story so carefully fashioned, so artfully told I never questioned their validity. It was one of the rare times I\u2019d be allowed to sit on my parents\u2019 double bed in the cramped downstairs bedroom that faced the street, its north window inches from the neighbor\u2019s driveway where a dog barked sometimes into the night.<\/p>\n

The room was pristine with its satiny floral bedspread, crisscrossed white lacy curtains and fringed shades. Area rugs surrounded the bed like islands of color over the amber shag carpet. A large dresser held my mother\u2019s perfumes neatly arranged on a mirrored tray. An assortment of tiny prayer books rested on a side table beside a rosary<\/a>. Over the bed was a painting of a street scene that could be Paris<\/a> or New Orleans, colorful and dreamy. A similar painting hung in the living room.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until I married and left home that my father was banished to the other first floor smaller bedroom, even then he was an interloper in this feminine domain. His clothes were exiled to the front hall closet where he kept his rifle. On story days the room was a mother-daughter cove of confidences where my mother came as close as she ever would to telling me who she was, dropping clues like breadcrumbs that would take me decades to decipher. As I grew older, she confided intimacies of her marital life best shared with a mother or a sister. I was the substitute for the family left behind in New Orleans…<\/p>\n

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

Secrets and Lies Ms. Magazine blog Ms. Magazine 2016-05-17 Gail Lukasik The following is an excerpt from White Like Her: My Family\u2019s Story of Race and Racial Identity. In 1995 when I discovered my mother\u2019s black heritage, she made me promise never to tell her secret until she died. I kept her secret for 17 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,369,8,6462,20],"tags":[25614,7303,25613,1438],"class_list":["post-50399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-gail-lukasik","tag-ms-magazine","tag-ms-magazine-blog","tag-new-orleans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50399","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=50399"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50421,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50399\/revisions\/50421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}