Some nights, when medication and meditation have failed to put me to sleep, I think of the relatives who abandoned my family to become white people.
Several generations ago, in midsized Ohio cities during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, some of my father’s ancestors walked away from their families, their homes, and their neighborhoods and stepped into the life-altering fiction that they were white. Most, though not all, of these relatives were female.
It’s a common story in America. Once upon a time, there was a group of Black people whose skin color was light enough to fool the rest of the world into thinking they were white. Their light skin was inherited mostly from enslaved ancestors who’d been raped by their owners. But the decision to circumvent the unjust rules of the sadistically organized society in which they lived — that was all their own. The risks they shouldered were enormous. Had their real backgrounds been discovered, they could have lost their marriages, their businesses, even their lives. Success came with its own cost: the desertion of every person and place they’d once loved.
