Tuesday, March 4, 2008

A lot of Shades from Two

In Bear Maiden's recent post, "You Know What? You Can't 'Check A Box', Either" she mentioned the video on author Bliss Broyard's website where she tells the story of how, when her mother discovered that husband to be was Black she went to a pastor who reassured her that any children they had wouldn't turn out darker than the darkest of either of them. I suppose fortunately she it turned out that way for her. It certainly might not have.

As proof of how wrong that pastor was, I offer up this picture of my grandparents with 12 of their 14 children (13, if you count my father's knee in the bottom right corner of the picture) and their first 3 grandchildren. I'd say that more than half of their kids - while still relatively light - were darker than they were.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amazing how genetics can vary so completely in the exact same family. My family is composed of all shades and though I got tired of hearing how my brother and I couldn't possibly related while we were growing up because of our different skin tones I'm grateful to have learned to appreciate each and every tone in the african american rainbow.

The Bear Maiden said...

I can't begin to tell you how much I love looking at people's family photos. Brown people's in particular, since I love watching the parade of genetics across everyone's faces, yet there are resemblances to each other. I see you, your daughters, your dad in all those faces. (GoddAMN! but that's a lot of damn kids! LOL). Thanks for the picture...

Ros said...

Wish I could add that photo I showed you from the dance at my high school! I had some awesome discussions with my teens yesterday about racial identity, what makes one "Black" or "White". When I wake up more, I'll write about it. And the kid who fussed me out for having a poster of Malcolm X in my office. His lame analogy was, "That would be like me having a poster of Elvis up." Um, no, no it wouldn't.