I’m black and i’m proud!

By Frederick A. Hurst

I just met a White person who opted into the Black race. We had a lengthy, delightful discussion about her recent discovery of her African heritage and about her willingness to divulge it and openly discuss it with anyone willing to listen. I was hesitant to put her on the spot by asking her to be the subject of a Point of View article, but, when asked, she agreed without hesitation. Talking to her was like taking a breath of fresh air.

Having been an active part of the Black consciousness movement, when Black Americans chose to be proud of their African heritage and to cast off derogatory terms such as “Negro” and “colored” and to reject the then commonly held belief that dark skin represented inferiority and white skin superiority, and to trade conkaline hair straightener for bushy afros, I marvel at the number of people still opting out of the Black race and of the many who wish they could or who act like they wish they could.

Who among us Black people cannot point to someone among family and friends who has “crossed over” and chosen to live as a White person? And how many brown-skin people from the Caribbean and South and Central America exist today, whose ancestors can be directly traced back to the same Africa that most Black Americans originated from, who call themselves anything but Black?

Philip Roth just penned a popular novel about a Black man who passed for White, as though passing for White is a novel event. And esteemed syndicated columnist George Will wrote a column in which he applauds the book, “The Human Stain,” and the just-released movie made from it, as being for “persons seeking a more nuanced take on America’s evolving experience with race.” (Boston Globe, November 10, 2003) George Will actually suggests that this Black man, who would run from himself, his culture and his history, is somehow noble, while Black folks know that Roth’s novel is just another “dog bites man story” about an all-too-common cultural copout.

That is why I enjoyed my talk with Attorney Lisa deSousa, who recently discovered that her grandfather, on her father’s side, was Black. She viewed the discovery as simply another legitimate fact of her heritage. She responded by proudly telling all of her friends and by making the insightful observation that, “As a Black woman, I have experienced so little prejudice!” Lisa does what Roth and Will fail to do. She strips the color issue of its pseudo intellectual gravity and makes it the mundane matter-of-fact issue that it ought to be, while at the same time casually but courageously making herself vulnerable to the many who still have a need to make a person’s color a measure of worth.

Lisa was born in Teringham, Massachusetts, an all-White town of 200 just outside of Lee. (She recalls that Teringham residents objected to the presence of the late Nat King Cole’s widow when she purchased an estate there.) She saw her first Black person nine years later, when her family moved to Springfield. She sat next to him at Talmadge elementary school and recalls touching his skin to “see how it felt.”

Lisa’s parents had never made an issue of race and it never really became an issue with Lisa and her three brothers, which may be explained by the fact that her parents descended from such a variety of backgrounds. Her father’s lineage can be traced back to his Portuguese great-grandfather who, the family theorizes, was one of many disgruntled Portuguese sailors who jumped ships anchored in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and--absent Portuguese women--married Black Trinidadian women, who were a mixture of African and native Indian. Lisa’s grandfather on her father’s side was the child of such a union.

At 17 years of age, her Trinidadian grandfather, Martin deSousa, migrated to the United States by way of Ellis Island, the same route taken by so many Europeans, and settled in New York, where he eventually met and married Lisa’s grandmother, who was French and had immigrated to the United States by way of Ireland. Lisa’s blue-collar, Catholic father was their only child. For some reason, they had always considered him to be Welch. His marriage to Lisa’s mother, whose family traced its routes back to the Mayflower, was controversial among some family members who were “horrified when she married down.”

Lisa stirred up the family melting pot by marrying a Jewish man, whose father was a holocaust survivor. All of his relatives had died in concentration camps. It took time for her father-in-law to adjust to his son marrying a Catholic but Lisa always admired her father-in-law for surviving the concentration camps, immigrating all alone to America, marrying and, after losing his young wife to cancer, as a single parent with no formal education, successfully raising three sons.

Recently Lisa’s family was researching the newly released Ellis Island files and discovered the record of her Black grandfather’s arrival from Trinidad on a ship named “Mayaro” on April 30, 1915. Lisa had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it added an interesting fact to her life, but didn’t change anything. On the other hand, it was an opportunity for her to share in a specific cultural identity, something she feels is a shortcoming for families like hers with multicultural backgrounds.

Lisa’s “man bites dog” family history is not so much uncommon as it is untold. It appears from scholarly evidence that mankind originated in Africa. Also, southern Europeans from Portugal, Spain and Italy were mixing blood with Africans long before Columbus discovered America and the current British monarchy descended from at least one African. Here in America, female slaves and slave masters often shared more than just a southern dialect. With all these opportunities to be Black, it would be rare to find an American without African blood. Still, it is even more rare, however, to find a White American who would admit to having African blood and, God forbid, embrace the fact as Lisa has!

Lisa may have identified a solution to America’s elusive race problem. If the silent majority in America follows her example and embraces its Black blood, color and race might play a lesser role and performance and merit might actually come to govern how we treat each other. We welcome Lisa to the Black race and urge others to consider following her refreshing example.n