Courtesy of Author Gail Lukasik

(article from msm.com)

I’d never seen my mother so afraid.

“Promise me,” she pleaded, “you won’t tell anyone until after I die. How will I hold my head up with my friends?”

For two years, I’d waited for the right moment to confront my mother with the shocking discovery I made in 1995 while scrolling through the 1900 Louisiana census records.

In the records, my mother’s father, Azemar Frederic of New Orleans, and his entire family were designated ‘black’.

The discovery had left me reeling, confused and in need of answers. My sense of ‘white’ identity had been shattered.

© Family photo The author’s mother, Avera Fredric, who was born into black family in New Orleans but spent her life passing as white.

My mother’s visit to my home in Illinois seemed like the right moment. This was not a conversation I wanted to have on the phone.

But my mother’s fearful plea for secrecy only added to my confusion about my racial identity.

As did her birth certificate that I obtained from the state of Louisiana, which listed her race as “col” (colored), and a 1940 Louisiana census record, which listed my mother, Alvera Frederic, as Neg/Negro, working in a tea shop in New Orleans.

Four years later, she moved north and married my ‘white’ father.

Reluctantly, I agreed to keep my mother’s secret.

For 17 years I told no one, except my husband, my two children and two close friends that my mother was passing as white. It was the longest and most difficult secret I’d ever held.

My mother’s pale, olive skin and European features appeared to belie the government documents defining her as African American, allowing her to escape that public designation for most of her adult life.

A search for answers yields more questions

In the silence of those 17 years, I tried to break through my mother’s wall of silence. But every time I tried, she politely but firmly changed the subject.

Her refusal to talk about her mixed race only fueled my curiosity.

How had she deceived my racist ‘white’ father?

Why was she so fearful and ashamed of her ‘black’ heritage?

Using my skills as a seasoned mystery author, I started sifting through the details of her life, looking for clues that would help me understand her.

But this real-life mystery only intensified as I tried to sort truth from fiction.

My mother had always told me that she was reluctant to visit her family of origin in New Orleans because she hadn’t been raised by either parent and there were just too many sad memories.

Now I wondered if she was really just afraid that if we visited we’d meet family members who were not passably white?

On several occasions her mother and her sister visited us in Ohio. But they appeared ‘white’ and no one hinted otherwise.

Did her brother never visit us because he didn’t appear ‘white’?

I wondered now why she’d never been able to show me photographs of my grandfather growing up.

Was it because he was visibly ‘black’? And could my mother’s avoidance of the sun be attributed to her fear that her skin would darken too much?

Then there was her obsession with makeup, even wearing makeup to bed.

Piecing her life together, I marveled at how she endured the racism of living in the predominantly ‘white’ suburb of Parma, Ohio, with a racist husband.

My father’s racism was a reflection of his upbringing in a close-knit Cleveland ethnic neighborhood.

Though he never used the N-word, he was still vocal about his bigotry, referring to African Americans using other racial slurs, deriding ‘blacks’ for what he perceived as their lack of ambition and criminality.

Unknowingly deriding his wife, my mother.

My mother reprimanded him with little vigor.

Was she afraid of bringing too much attention to the race issue? Did his racist remarks beat on her like a hard, cold rain?

Or had she convinced herself that she deserved it for the lie that sat at the heart of their marriage?

In escaping the Jim Crow south, coming north and marrying my ‘white’ father, she must have thought gaining ‘white’ privilege was worth the price of losing family ties and her authentic self.

The irony was that in gaining ‘white’ privilege, in passing for white’, the onslaught of racism was splayed open to her.

Its ugly face could now be shared with her, a “white” woman who would understand and possibly agree.

Every day she had to live with the paradox of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “two-ness,” the ambivalence of people of mixed European and African ancestry.

If a mixed-race person is ‘white’ enough to pass, how does that person deal with the trappings of a racist culture where you’re forced to choose a side?

As if in self-defense or maybe retaliation for my father’s racism, she imbued me with a moral imperative to respect all people regardless of their color.

A gifted storyteller, she related stories of New Orleans and the bigotry she witnessed.

As a child I listened with rapt attention to the story of the old ‘black’ woman on Canal Street burdened with packages who didn’t move off the sidewalk for a ‘white’ man.

He shoved her aside like so much trash and called her the n-word.

“That wasn’t right,” my mother told me. “But that’s how it was in New Orleans back then.”

Now I understood the clues concealed in that story. That she was hinting at her hidden self or maybe preparing me to accept the part of her she’d left behind in New Orleans and her reason for doing that.

The mystery, solved

After my mother’s death in 2014, I was freed of my vow.

In what can only be called serendipity, I was presented with an opportunity to solve the uncertainly of my racial heritage.

PBS’s Genealogy Roadshow was looking for family mysteries related to New Orleans.

I appeared on the show in January 2015.

Three days later, my mother’s family found me.

My “ new ” Frederic family welcomed me with generosity and love, neither judging my mother nor rejecting me .

At the welcome home party in New Orleans, I met my new uncle, two aunts, and slews of cousins.

We were every shade of skin from darkest ebony to whitest ‘white’ and all the shades in between.

Suddenly, I was part of a multiracial family.

Armed with Genealogy Roadshow’s confirmation of my racial heritage and wanting to understand that heritage, I traced the Frederic family back to 18th-century Louisiana.

I discovered slave owners, enslaved women, and free people of color. Through the centuries I saw how shifting racial laws had affected my family, boxing them into racial categories that hindered them.

White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing My redemptive journey became the basis for my book,

I suspect there are many ‘white’ Americans are unaware of their own mixed-race heritage .

Our country’s hidden history of racial mixing is embedded in many Americans’ DNA whether they know it or not, belying the notion of racial certainty.

It’s embedded in my DNA, which is 9 percent African.

But although I could check “other” or “multiracial” when asked my race on a form, I still identify as a ‘white’ woman.

At this late point, it would be disingenuous of me to claim any other identity.

I’ve enjoyed white privilege my entire life.

I will never forget my mother’s haunted look as she said:

“ How will I hold my head up with my friends? ”

I bear no rancor toward her for not telling me of her mixed-race heritage.

I feel only sorrow that, even after I knew, she was unable to share with me her feelings about who she really was and the life she had lived.

Even so, I find solace and pride in finally knowing the truth of my own heritage and the mixed-race family of which I am a part.

White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing Gail Lukasik is the author of, four mystery novels and more. She lives in Illinois with her husband.

(End of Gail Lukasik’s article from msm.com)

During the 1940s, the blonde hair, blue eyes African American leader of the NAACP; Walter White wrote:

“ Every year , thousands of light skinned Negroes “ cross over ” and live their lives as white people .”

Read about Walter Frances White (Mr NAACP), the blond hair , blue eyes African American below:

I am sure that the majority of these people who “ Crossed Over ,“ never told their spouses or children, that they were of African descent.

In fact many of these ‘crossed over ‘whites’ children , became more racist against people of African descent than other Caucasians.

The reason they became more racists was because these “ Cross Overs ” fathers and mothers; made sure that they didn’t do or say anything, that would make other Caucasians suspect that they were of African descent.

They made sure that they didn’t listen to music by African Americans; that they didn’t eat food that was stereotyped as “ Negro food ” (watermelon, fried chicken etc.); that they didn’t read Negro newspapers or go to movies with African American actors.

This rigid pattern against doing anything that would be perceived as, what people of African descent would do; in time made their offspring develop a dislike for people of African descent and everything considered “black.”

Over the past 40 years since I have lived in the United States of America; I have met many Caucasian racists that I knew were of African descent.

Some of them have even been leaders of local KKK or skinhead groups.

A few years ago I read about a Caucasian racist, who was trying to create an ‘all white’ city.

He found out through a DNA test that he had African ancestry 🙂

I would caution any Caucasian who has a deep seated hatred for people of African descent; to question where that hatred came from 🙂

Most likely some of their recent ancestors, were African Americans who were “passing” as ‘whites’ 🙂

As an example is the mulatto J. Edgar Hoover , the former Director of the FBI .

Hoover, hated his fellow African Americans with a passion.

He never wanted any of his associates in the FBI or the government, to suspect that he was mixed race.

So he was extremely biased against his own people.

Many of the present day descendants of these passing ‘white’, have now inherited the same problem, that many people of African descent in Europe and the Americas suffer from:

Hatred of their own African ancestry.

At least 1/3 of all Caucasian Americans who can say that any one of their ancestors were already living in the Americas, from the 17th century up until the present; have some African ancestry.

Many people in America today , believe that they are full-blooded Caucasian; when in fact many of them have African ancestry.

Look at the African American wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the 19th century (photo in the article below).

She was obviously of African descent.

Many Caucasians then and even now, cannot tell a Caucasian looking person who is of African descent; from a Caucasian without any ‘recent African ancestors.’

I say recent African ancestors because, all Homo Sapiens on this Earth originated from the continent called Africa.

Click below to read the article

Also the former head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover was a mulatto (he was of African descent)

Read about J. Edgar Hoover here:

ALSO READ:

Was Elvis Presley, “the king of rock and roll” of mixed racial heritage?

Read the auto-biography of my first 13 years, living in America , after leaving Jamaica This is a review of this book by a customer on Amazon UK :

“I thought this was a very good book. It is about a Jamaican who went to the USA, when he was 12 years old. The books is about his experience of low-self esteem, and feelings of inferiority; from being in a country where the majority of people were Caucasians. It tells about him joining the Nation of Islam , under the leadership of the Honourable Elijah Muhammad , 5 years after leaving Jamaica. Then how he came to realise that what he was taught in the Nation of Islam ; was not true Islam. My wife also though it was a good book. However she said that the author should not have gone into so much intimate details, about his sexual encounters.” Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1659703654/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=mujahid+abdullah&qid=1585503456&s=books&sr=1-3 Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Self-Hating-Uncle-Tom-Negro-ebook/dp/B086MKYN51/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=mujahid+abdullah&qid=1585745967&s=books&sr=1-4