Bliss Broyard\'s One Drop Many

Bliss Broyard's One Drop

Many people today try to deny that race has continues to play an important and central role in American society. They like to suggest that Americans have moved beyond race, and that it is important only because of the physical differences it dictates. Even those who recognize that race continues to play a dramatic role in the political and social landscapes of this country, like to pretend that some groups have moved beyond racial issues. These groups generally include those that are considered "intellectuals," as if academic pursuits place one beyond the taint of racism and prejudice, as if the basic human drive towards stereotype can be entirely eliminated by education. However, most people know this to be false; America continues to be plagued by racial strife and racial injustice. Being black in America is still considered a badge of inferiority by a sufficient enough number of people, both black and white, that being black can have a very real impact on quality of life, even once one has considered all other variables.

Interestingly enough, Bliss Broyard, the author of One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - a Story of Race and Family Secrets, addresses the notion that a society can ever be "color-blind," and acknowledges the role that racial prejudice played in her own life:

grew up believing, without exactly realizing I believed it or knowing where this belief had come from, that blacks were different from whites, probably inferior, and possibly had even brought on some of their own ill treatment. If you asked me if I thought this way, I would have objected vigorously. As a well-off white kid with artsy parents growing up in the 1970s and 1980s just outside New York City, I gave lip service to principles like justice and equal rights and considered myself immune to racial prejudice. (Broyard, p.42).

However, these were thoughts that were not discussed in Broyard's home during her childhood.

At the time, she did not notice the lapse, though she certainly would have if she had known of her father's mixed background. Instead, looking back, she realized that the subject of race was not really discussed in her home during her childhood, not overtly or covertly. Her parents did not endorse racial equality, but they also did not make overtly racist beliefs. However, towards the end of his life, Broyard's father made remarks about black people being lazy and dependent, and even made disparaging remarks about black children on his street. Only the deathbed acknowledgment that her father was an African-American demonstrated to Bliss the reality of her father's hypocrisy.

One Drop is partially Broyard's description of her journey from self-perceived WASP to a person of mixed ancestry, in the racially-charged United States. It is also the story of Broyard's father, Anatole Broyard, a man of mixed race, who chose to pass for white rather than acknowledge his black heritage and accept its perceived disadvantages. Broyard's reaction to the fact that her father had passed was initially one of open-minded acceptance and a melting-pot mentality that made the notion of mixed ancestry seem appealing. However, that reaction may have been due to the fact that Broyard found out this information while her father was dying of cancer, which made it highly unlikely, if not impossible, that could ask him serious questions about his decision, or make any real effort to ask him about it. The attitude was also discouraged by Broyard's mother, who discouraged them from feeling enthusiastic about their African-American heritage, and told them that they were white. (Broyard, p.17).

The problem with One Drop is that it is not only the story of Broyard's discovery that she has some African-American ancestry and what that means for her opinion on race. It is also the story of her father, Anatole Broyard, her immediate family, her father's family, and the history of race relations in the United States. She does not have the same success with telling all of these stories, which may not be surprising given that they are very different stories. She succeeds the most in telling her father's story. She obviously cares about him and has made an effort to portray his life as realistically as possible, without denying that she has a daughter's bias. She also does a good job of portraying her family life. However, she is less successful at relaying information that was obviously gleaned from research; both tales about her father's family and the history of race relations in the United States. Therefore, to truly understand this book, it is essential to review the various different stories.

The first problem with Broyard's tale of her father is that she appears to be very dishonest about his abilities as a father. Early in the story, she indicates that her father had two children before beginning his relationship with her mother: one from a previous marriage and another by a girlfriend. However, when at his funeral, she states that her father's survivors included only six people, conveniently omitting any reference to those children. She also talks about people who eulogized Anatole as a wonderful father, but they do not appear to have referenced those children, either. In a story about the discovery of roots and family history, the omission of an investigation of her father's children seems glaring, as if Broyard is only interested about the people who contributed to creating her father, and not interested in exposing herself to people who could contradict her opinion of Anatole as a father.

Broyard's story of her father and his decision to pass reveals a level of dishonesty by the man that was so dramatic that it actually evokes a feeling of pity for him. The decision to pass as white, whether it was initially intentional, or a just the side effect of not being rejected as a black man when people mistakenly believed he was white, was clearly something that impacted Anatole's life in a dramatic manner. He distanced himself from his family, and his children had no real relationship with either of his sisters or his parents, though their grandmother was alive for much of their childhood. When Broyard saw her father's older sister and her son at her father's funeral, she could see features that were clearly identifiable as black. Moreover, Broyard had never even met her father's younger sister before his death. He gave up his association with his extended family, and he seemingly did so in order to preserve the idea that he could be perceived as "white." Broyard does not shy away from making this inference. When asked about why the family had no relationship with his sister Shirley, Anatole responded that he disagreed with her husband's politics and later suggested that it was because Shirley had a schizophrenic son. However, Shirley was very obviously black. Furthermore, her husband was political:

In fact her husband, Franklin Williams, who died a few months before [Anatole], was a civil rights lawyer who worked under Thurgood Marshall in the NAACP in the 1940s. He started the Constitutional Rights Division in California in the early sixties and had served as the U.S. ambassador to Ghana in the seventies. The speakers at his funeral included New York City mayor David Dinkins and the South African independence leader Bishop Desmond Tutu. (Broyard, p.36).

Broyard's most honest and most revealing writing is when she is discussing her own personal feelings about race. She cannot know why her father chose to pass. Not only died he die soon after she learned about his race, which meant that she could not ask him about his decision to pass, but she also simply could not truly understand what it meant to be a black person growing up in the Jim Crow South. Therefore, her conjecture about her father's feelings and motivations leaves the reader unsatisfied; the vast majority of her audience cannot really claim to understand Anatole's reasoning any more than Broyard can. However, her musings about race tend to hit home. She talks about her desire to talk to her family about race. However, she acknowledges why that is a problem:

The problem was, I'd never had a conversation about race. In the world I was raised in, it was considered an impolite subject. The people I knew lowered their voices when referring to a black person. I didn't know anything about African-American history, nor had I ever known anyone black well enough to call them a friend. I don't remember issues such as affirmative action or busing, which dominated racial politics in the 1970s and 1980s, ever coming up for discussion in my house. Although I grew up within an hour's drive of three of the poorest black communities in the United States- Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford- those neighborhoods seemed as distant as a foreign country. I'd make jokes with my brother about getting lost in "Father Panic Village," infamous as the worst section of neighboring Bridgeport, but I never gave any thought to the people who lived there. I couldn't have imagined their lives even if I had tried. (Broyard, p.42).

When she reveals this, Broyard demonstrates an attitude that is probably shared by many white people; a desire to talk about race, but the concern that even broaching the topic is impolite. Therefore, the gulf between the races gets wider and wider.

Broyard also acknowledges the problem with claiming her own African-American identify. Talking about her first post-funeral meeting with her father's family, Broyard discusses her thoughts about claiming to be black, when she had no real life experiences as a black woman. She asked herself:

Had I ever had trouble getting a cab or service in a store or the respect of my colleagues because of the color of my skin? Was I ever judged not as an individual but as a credit or an embarrassment to my race? Had anyone ever assumed I was stupid, lazy, or dishonest because of the way I looked? No to all of it, yet I remained caught in that loop of logic: This is my father's family, and they're black, therefore I must be black too. (Broyard, p.78)

One thing that Broyard's tale makes clear is that there is something terribly wrong with the American educational system, when someone with access to schools considered among the best in the nation has such a horribly limited knowledge of the history of slavery and race-relations in the United States. As a reader whose education included an early and thorough introduction to those topics, it is hard not to feel condescension and superiority towards Broyard, not because of her own admissions of racism, but because of her appalling ignorance about the reality of racial strife in the United States. It really is difficult to imagine how someone of Broyard's age could have grown up without exposure to the reality of racial discord. That also hammers home the fact that, while racism is generally equated with the South, the fact is that many traditionally white communities, like those found in Broyard's Connecticut, have not engaged in overt racism, not due to not sharing racist beliefs, but because they have not been called upon to do so. Broyard mentions this novelty when discussing the yacht club where her father's memorial was held, which had not admitted African-Americans for most of its history, thought that may not have been due to overt racism; there may simply have been no African-Americans who attempted to become members.

In fact, Broyard acknowledged that she simply did not seem to deal with issues of race until she moved to Charlottesville, a city with a diverse racial population.

She struggled with her own identity and whether she should self-identify as white or black. She also began to recognize her own subconscious actions that contributed to her own feelings of racism. She challenged herself when she found herself thing in stereotypes, and shamed herself when those stereotypes were negative. At the same time, according to Broyard, she made an attempt to deprogram herself from the stereotyped thinking:

First, I would forgive myself, because the only other choice, self-censure, didn't leave any room to correct the problem. I reasoned that given the pervasiveness of racism in America, it's impossible for a person to escape its effect. Of course I was racist, meaning I made judgments, valuations, and assumptions about people based on what I perceived their ethnicity to be. After all, fitting information into categories is how we made sense of the world. Perhaps if people felt less apprehensive about acknowledging their racist thoughts, then they could move on to addressing them. (Broyard, pp.99-100).

One of the things that Broyard's memoir makes very clear is that she spent much of her life feeling very conflicted about race. One description in her book is particularly telling. Relaying a meeting with her friends after the publication of a story revealing her father's racial identity, Broyard said the following:

knew that these old friends looked to me to set the tone about my father's blackness. If I didn't make a big deal out of it, then neither would they. They'd look past it, just as we had looked past that time when we'd seen another friend's mother run screaming across their front lawn as her husband chased her and the friend's little brother hopped up on his father's back, crying and yelling for him to stop. It was clear that we'd seen something we shouldn't have, and so we gathered our things together and stood to go. (Broyard, p.113).

To equate the fact that her father was black to the fact that someone's father was a wife-beater demonstrated a level of racism that Broyard apparently has not yet confronted within herself. Yes, at some point in the history of the United States, such as when her grandparents decided to pass for white in order to get work, seeing that a person was African-American was seeing something that should not be seen. However, that does not mean that it was ever something that should not have occurred, and Broyard later acknowledges that both white and black communities were complicit in this passing. In contrast, domestic violence is something that should not ever occur, not simply something that should not be seen. It is something that reveals a tremendous lack of morality and character in the person offending. Moreover, the fact that Broyard and her friends ignored the event, offering no solace or comfort to their friend or her little brother, demonstrate the superficial nature of their friendships and their own self-involved attitudes. The equation of the two "family secrets" race and violence, as if they are somehow equal, bolsters the assumption that Broyard has not abandoned her own racist ideals.

At the same time that Broyard was struggling to determine her own place in the world, she was also struggling with how to tell her father's story, and how to keep others from telling it. Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was determined to tell Anatole's story, which Broyard felt was a betrayal, given that she had established a personal friendship with Gates. However, she does acknowledge that Gates' interest in Anatole's story was legitimate. "My dad was the most well-known defector from the black race in the latter half of the twentieth century, and Gates was determined to tell his story." (Broyard, p.108). Gates did tell Anatole's story, and managed to get the majority of it accurate, though Anatole's friends "disputed the extent to which [Anatole's] racial identity was described as a secret- most everyone in his life knew." (Broyard, p.110). He also passed along the research he had compiled to Broyard, so that she could continue her investigation into her father's family. Interestingly enough, it was Gates' article that led Broyard to the discovery that many of her family members had been passing as white, and that they were very unhappy about Gates revealing Anatole's African origins. There is an entire side of the Broyard family that does not deny its black ancestors, but still strongly maintains that they are white. Interestingly enough, these "white" cousins offer a telling commentary about American racial attitudes. They refuse to self-identify as black because they suggest that many black people self-identify as inferior and lower-class. While this may seem like an inflammatory statement to many people, the fact is that years of race-based discrimination have contributed to a national consensus that black people are somehow lesser than white people, and this attitude has been adopted by some members of the black community. Light-skinned blacks who can pass for white are not the only people who have identified this issue; it is one that has been repeatedly addressed by various black leaders, thought they have addressed it in different ways. It is also an idea that seemed to help shape Anatole's decision to pass for white.

Broyard's decision to delve into the history of slavery and race relations in the United States appears to have been prompted by a conversation with her aunt, at which Broyard asks if her aunt knew whether they had any slave ancestors. In the United States, being African-American is frequently equated with having escaped from the vestiges of slavery. Broyard made that assumption about her ancestry, and found herself a little disappointed that her assumptions were not proven to be true. On the contrary, the evidence that she did find demonstrated that at least one of her ancestors was from a slave-owning family of free blacks. However, the reality is that Broyard can safely make the assumption that, coming from a family of New Orleans Creoles, there is an overwhelming likelihood that some of her ancestors were slaves. Not being able to document this fact is not unusual, given the dearth of information available about enslaved people.

What Broyard does uncover is very interesting, because her father was not the first person in her family to pass. However, the first person to do so, did it in reverse. With the introduction of the French Code Noir, or Black Code, it officially became illegal for blacks and whites to marry. However, white men could still acknowledge the paternity of their mixed-race children, and offer them legitimacy. Broyard's great-great-great grandfather has both a white wife and a mixed-race mistress. When his wife died, his mistress took in the wife's child Henry raised him with her family. The family seemed to accept Henry as a sibling, though societal conditions dictated that they would be treated differently. Eventually, Henry made a decision that many simply would not understand. He had been raised in a mixed-race family and associated with "Negro" people. It is no surprise that he met and fell in love with a colored woman. However, intermarriage between blacks and whites had been outlawed in 1808. Therefore, Henry Broyard began passing as black, and in 1854, also married the first known black person in Broyard's direct genealogy. (Broyard, p.189).

It is important to understand that Broyard's story is not about black people, or even about white people, but about the group of people composed of both races. First, the vast majority of African-Americans do have some percentage of white blood, a taint that has not been viewed favorably by many members of the black community, because it serves as a reminder of the sexual assaults that their ancestress were forced to endure by slave masters. However, Broyard's treatment of this topic is far too brief for her story. While blacks may have understood why someone would pass for work purposes, the decision to pass in one's social and home lives would have been seen as a betrayal. Not simply because to do so involved denying part of one's history, but because it also involved choosing to self-identify with a group of people who had traditionally been viewed as oppressors. While a certain level of race mixing generally lightened African-Americans, the fact that many people pushed their daughters into relationships with white men, in order to improve individual circumstances, helps explain some of the historical animosity that has grown up within the black community. Broyard does explain some of this ambivalence, but she relates it as something unique to the Creole community, when it is actually part of the much-larger over all African-American experience.

In fact, Broyard loses much of her voice when she addresses African-American issues, perhaps because she approaches them like a neophyte with no personal experience. For example, her descriptions of Creole New Orleans pale in comparison to descriptions by other authors. Even Anne Rice's well-researched piece of historical fiction, a Feast of All Saints, gives greater insight into the world of the free colored people in antebellum New Orleans than Broyard's sidestep into history does. Part of the problem is that she does not tell any first-hand stories of the time. She was unable to locate an ancestress or ancestor that took place in New Orleans' famous quadroon or octoroon balls, or relate any of their stories. Therefore, her descriptions of the practice come off as dry and academic, when their actual circumstances- colored mothers and white fathers setting up their daughters as concubines, to assure them some measure of financial and physical security in an incredibly racist society- are anything but dry. The stories behind that are very emotions, and Broyard simply fails to convey any of that underlying emotion. Given that the underlying emotion is what really helps explain even modern attitudes about race, the fact that Broyard misses that emotion is a tremendous drawback to her book.