One Drop

On Saturday I finished reading "One Drop" by Bliss Broyard. It's a story about a young woman who finds out as her father is dying that he was partly black, but because he was so light skinned he lived, or, "passed", as white. She sets out to find her relatives that her father cut out of his life, and his friends from when he was younger, in a quest to discover for herself just how black she is. It turns out, not much, less that 20%. It was an interesting story, with a good overview of the history of race in the deep South. One of the things I liked best about it was, Bliss would question newly found cousins who had lived their whole lives as black as to what they would call her, and they would always say "Bliss" rather than "white" or "black" or "biracial". One of her father's old friends said he didn't understand why Anatole (her father) made such a big deal about race; everyone knew he was part black and didn't make a big deal over it or care. Does finding out at the age of 23 that your father was part black mean you're a different person than you thought you were? I don't think so. I do understand her frustration with her father for denying her the opportunity to know her relatives on his side of the family, but I understand where he was coming from. It was a different time (he was born in 1920), and unfortunately blacks were not treated as fairly as they should have been, and in some parts of the country, still aren't. One of the amazing things about this country is that no one is really purely one race or another anymore. We're all mixed up, and it makes us stronger. Mutts are always healthier than purebreds. If we all had our DNA tested like she did, I bet some of us would be pretty surprised when we learned the results! I'm curious myself as to how mine would turn out.