“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us Page: 11
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had been passing when he was on his deathbed. Anatole Broyard, Bliss's father, was very well
known in the glitterati circle of New York City because he was a literary critic for The New York
Times for 20 years and, as such, made or broke the careers of many writers. He lived in all-white
wealthy Stamford, Connecticut where he belonged to the racially restricted country club and sent
his two children to private schools. His wife was of Norwegian descent. Bliss Broyard thought
she was a white girl until she was 24, and her father told her as he lay dying that his family was
African American -- Creole from New Orleans (Broyard, 2007). Goffman (1973) would say that
her father had calibrated his presentation of self to be accepted as an upper class, intellectual
white man.
Anatole Broyard and other blacks whose skin color and other phenotypical characteristics
allowed them, if they chose, to trade on their looks to become ersatz white people were powerful
examples of the concept of hypo-descent or the one-drop rule at work. Some experts have said
that the U.S. is the only nation, and American black people the only racial group to which a one-
drop rule applies (Tatum, 1999; Omi & Winant, 1986). White-appearing blacks who passed often
went to elaborate lengths to hide their "one drop" of black blood from their white neighbors,
friends and co-workers. Sometimes they withheld the information from their white spouses and
their own children (Haizlip, 1994; Williams, 1996; Broyard, 2007; Piper, 1992; Graham, 1999).
Piper, an African American woman who says that she is often misidentified racially because she
appears white, wrote that because of the phenomenon of passing, a significant %age of white
people in the U.S. have black ancestry, but they don't know it. She wrote that the longer one's
family has been in the U.S., the more likely it is that one has mixed racial ancestry (1992).11
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Smith, Starita. “What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us, dissertation, May 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc115163/m1/18/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .