{"id":62804,"date":"2022-01-19T02:36:43","date_gmt":"2022-01-19T02:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=62804"},"modified":"2022-01-19T02:36:44","modified_gmt":"2022-01-19T02:36:44","slug":"americans-color-outside-the-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=62804","title":{"rendered":"Americans Color Outside the Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Americans Color Outside the Lines<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Dispatch<\/a>
\n2021-04-26<\/p>\n

Chris Stirewalt<\/strong><\/a>, Contributing Editor<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Photograph By Marlin Levison\/Star Tribune via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even today, bigots and the progressive proponents of race science hold fast to the idea of fixed race and ethnicity. Thankfully, Americans largely ignore them.<\/em><\/p>\n

In his autobiography, Life on the Color Line<\/em><\/a>, Gregory Williams<\/a> tells the story of discovering at the age of 10 that he was black\u2014or at least that the world saw him that way.<\/p>\n

Williams, who would go on to serve as president of both City College of New York<\/a> and the University of Cincinnati<\/a>, was raised as a white boy when and where it really mattered: rural, central Virginia<\/a> in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But when his parents\u2019 marriage broke up and his mom ran off, his no-account, alcoholic father could not manage to care for his two sons. So, Williams\u2019 dad moved them to his hometown of Muncie, Indiana<\/a>. It was on the bus trip there that Williams\u2019 dad told his boys that he was not the Italian-American called \u201cTony\u201d who ran a roadhouse west of Richmond<\/a> but a light-skinned black man from the wrong side of tracks in the industrial Midwest<\/a>. \u201cMiss Sallie,\u201d the black woman who had worked at the family bar for a time, was really the boys\u2019 grandmother.<\/p>\n

Ultimately abandoned by both of his parents, Williams found himself brutally rejected by both cultures. And what a time to live on that line. In 1954, the year after he arrived in Muncie, the Supreme Court struck down school segregation laws<\/a>. Segregationists had warned after Harry Truman integrated the military<\/a> six years earlier that the federal government was intent on the mixing of the races\u2014and ultimately making intermarriage appear to be normal, leading to the dilution of the white race. The blending of children in classrooms was to them just the next step in the demise of America\u2019s dominant white culture by miscegenation<\/a>. Williams remembered a Klansman<\/a> on television saying the court was trying to encourage race mixing and the rise of the \u201cbestial mongrel<\/a> mulatto<\/a>, the dreg of human society.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Even today, bigots and the progressive proponents of race science hold fast to the idea of fixed race and ethnicity. Thankfully, Americans largely ignore them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,26,394,20],"tags":[32793,7539,1365,7540,9186,32794],"class_list":["post-62804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-chris-stirewalt","tag-gregory-h-williams","tag-gregory-howard-williams","tag-gregory-williams","tag-richard-alba","tag-the-dispatch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62804","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=62804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62805,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62804\/revisions\/62805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}