What I’m reading avidly at the moment, and may even have finished by the time that you read this, is Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A story of Race and Family Secrets. As was widely revealed after his death, former Times book critic Anatole Broyard was an Afro-American man, pure and simple, who managed to pass as white. The “family secrets” angle of the book’s subtitle is especially intriguing, because Ms Broyard and her older brother, Todd, soon discovered that, among people who knew Dad well, it was only his family, or at least his children, who didn’t know. I can stare at the jacket photograph every which way without being able to “make out” Broyard’s “black” features, but they were apparently obvious to other blacks.

Ms Broyard wrestles with a problem the tectonics of which have shifted out of recognition. Once upon a time, despite inheriting many of her mother’s Norwegian features, she would have been deemed black at least by Southern Americans. But as the child of educated (relative) affluence who grew up in one of the tonier precincts of Fairfield County, Ms Broyard’s “blackness” is ruthlessly limited to a genetic inheritance of which she was simply unaware until she was in her mid-twenties.

So far, One Drop has merely convinced me that the idea of race is even more meretricious than I thought it was.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Dangerous Obsession.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Book Review, Reading Matter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.