{"id":55101,"date":"2017-11-11T23:31:55","date_gmt":"2017-11-11T23:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55101"},"modified":"2017-11-11T23:31:55","modified_gmt":"2017-11-11T23:31:55","slug":"youre-the-one-with-the-slaves-in-your-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55101","title":{"rendered":"\u201cYou\u2019re the one with the slaves in your family\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou\u2019re the one with the slaves in your family\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Salon<\/a>
\n2017-10-28<\/p>\n

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

<\/a>
\n(Credit: Salon\/Ilana Lidagoster<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n

I went looking for information on my mother\u2019s side of the family. My experience was eye-opening<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted with permission from \u201cWhite Like Her: My Family\u2019s Story of Race and Racial Passing<\/a>\u201d by Gail Lukasik. Copyright 2017, Skyhorse Publishing.<\/em><\/p>\n

The windowless basement of the Buffalo Grove Family History Center<\/a> had the feel of an underground bunker\u2014fluorescent lights, cinder block walls, the musty scent of dampness. At the room\u2019s entrance sat a gray-haired woman, birdlike and benign. With robotic precision, she meted out instructions on how to use the machines, where the microfilms were located and how to order original documents. She appeared as nondescript and gray as the walls.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d come to the family history center in search of my grandfather Azemar Frederic. I was between adjunct college teaching jobs, applying for tenure track teaching positions in creative writing, and working part-time as an assistant editor for a medical journal. The year before, I\u2019d been offered a position in creative writing at a liberal arts college in Tennessee<\/a>. But I turned it down. Uprooting my life at the age of forty-nine for a position that paid in the low five figures seemed foolhardy. My husband would need to obtain a Tennessee dental license to practice dentistry, and we would have to pay out-of-state tuition at the University of Illinois for our daughter Lauren. So I resigned myself to seeking positions in the Chicago area<\/a> where the competition was especially rigorous and my chances for success slim.<\/p>\n

I had time on my hands and an insatiable longing to find Azemar who over the years had become more and more unreal to me as if he never existed, was a figment of my mother\u2019s imagination. Without a photograph of him, I had nothing physical to connect him to me. This need for a physical image of him was primal. It was an aching absence that I needed to fill…<\/p>\n

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

I went looking for information on my mother\u2019s side of the family. My experience was eye-opening<\/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":[27595,25614,1438,10962],"class_list":["post-55101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-azemar-frederic","tag-gail-lukasik","tag-new-orleans","tag-salon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55101","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=55101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55102,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55101\/revisions\/55102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}