Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Mrs. Obama grew up with only a vague sense of her ancestry, aides and relatives said. During the presidential campaign, the family learned about one paternal great-great-grandfather, a former slave from South Carolina, but the rest of Mrs. Obama's roots were a mystery.
Now the more complete map of Mrs. Obama's ancestors -- including the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields -- for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency.
I'm not sure why this is news. Still, there is one advantage here. People who think Barack Obama "isn't really black," are now free to extend that logic to Michelle. One day they'll realize that, by their lights, no one is. Or not.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Mrs. Obama's family tree says so much about the history of African Americans. What fascinated me is the unfinished story of her mothers grandfather. He disappears without a trace from all records in 1917 at the age of 32. He could have been lynched. He could have lied about his age and signed up to fight in World War I and been killed. But considering his parentage, there is a chance that he simply walked away and passed for white. The really interesting story here would be if someone found out what happened to him and if he started another family. Somewhere there could be white Americans who are the direct descendants of Mrs. Obama's great-grandfather.
My great-grandmother chose not to pass for white, though she easily could have. Several of her siblings made a different choice. I hope to have the resources someday to hire a genealogist to help me find every branch on my family tree -- black and white.
Years ago, I read this wonderful magazine story-- I think it might have been in Ebony, but I don't remember-- about a black family who tracked down a branch of the family that 'passed' many generations earlier. She called the living relatives she found and told them that they had a common ancestor who'd been a slave.
There was a little pause, and then the woman asked, "A black slave?" She wasn't a bigot, but her great-grandfather (or whoever it was) had done it so successfully no one in the family had known or suspected.
I think a lot of American history is encapsulated in that pause.
But considering his parentage, there is a chance that he simply walked away and passed for white.
This kind of thing happened a lot more than most people (especially white people) think. About ten years ago I was shocked to find out that my Great-Grandfather, who was apparently very light, had a brother who went to California and was never heard from again. The prevailing assumption is that he moved away and started "passing" but no one knows for sure.
I remember actually meeting a person who was "passing." I was at another college and sometime during the course of the evening this dude said something that made it clear to me that he was actually black. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized that I knew what was up. Our eyes locked and he gave me a pleading look that begged me to keep his secret. I was so stunned and confused by the bizarre situation that I didn't say anything.
I will confess to being ignorant to the prevalence of this. It just seems like it would be something that would be very difficult to fool people on. Even light-skinned black people often times have black features. Maybe the fact that I don't know any examples of this personally proves that 'passing' is easier than I imagine. Was this guy you met in college the first time you had experienced it?
Check this out:
http://www.amazon.com/Passing-Penguin-Classics-Nella-Larsen/dp/0142437271
It was written in 1929.
Yes. But when I was out in Fargo last year I met a lot of people who looked "a little funny 'round the mouth."
Ahh, Hill Rat. I was so going to bring up Bob Barr.
Not only do people do this intentionally, but there's quite a lot of people who "pass" unintentionally on a day to day basis, because they look white, so people assume they are. I call this passing-by-default.
I noticed, recently, how many people in my social group are mixed-race people who pass-by-default. Only one (that I know of) is black, but I know LOTS of passing-by-default Hispanic/Latin@s and Asian-Americans, and a few Native Americans (including a blonde, blue-eyed, half-white/half-Inuit woman from Florida).
As far as intentional passing goes, Walter White, the head of the NAACP in the early '30s, was (by his own description) 5/32 black, and the rest white. He was blond and blue-eyed and didn't have stereotypically black features, for the most part. He used his passing ability to investigate dozens of lynchings and several race riots. Mat Johnson, a multiracial black author who passes-by-default, recently wrote a novel, Incognegro, whose protagonist's exploits were based on White's.
Writer Anatole Broyard, who was multiracial, passed so successfully that his own daughter never realized that he was part-black until after he died. She wrote a memoir of her finding out and her subsequent explorations of her black heritage.
There's a book that I read, I can't remember the name, that is the autobiography of a black slave who escaped to freedom with his able-to-pass wife, by having her pass as a disabled rich white man traveling north with his slave/personal assistant.
The Melungeons of the Southern Appalachians, who are a mix of a variety of races and ethnicities (white, black, Native American, South Asian, Middle Eastern) aggressively tried to pass, often marrying whites or lighter-skinned Melungeons, to the point where by the mid-20th century, they had almost passed themselves out of existence. There's some evidence that Elvis was actually of Melungeon heritage, though he may not have known it. In the late 20th century, there was a sort of Melungeon pride movement, with people embracing their heritage and some newly discovering it.
My mother grew up with a cousin who decided to pass for white when she became an adult (this was back in the late 40s). With her coloring, she was able to pass off Italian ancestry. She had "keen" features and naturally wavy (not kinky) hair.
In order to pass, she moved from the West Coast to Chicago and basically started her life over.
My mom said she would occasionally come back home to visit family, but people were discouraged from coming to see her in Chicago. Supposedly her husband (a White man) was aware of the truth; they did not have any children - don't know if the reason was the concern that the "Black" might show up in their children.
I don't know where I encountered this figure, but I recall reading about a study that found 30% of white Americans, who trace their US ancestry to Civil War or earlier, have black ancestors. So a good chunk of folks must have been able to "pass." (This may or may not be the same study referenced in the Wikipedia article on the One-Drop Rule, which projected that 30% of all white Americans have some black ancestry.)
If we look at the most famous black-ancestor-of-white-people, Sally Hemings, if I am remembering her ancestry correctly I believe her children had 1 black great-grandparent and 7 white great-grandparents. I doubt their case was unique.
Thanks for the insight, everyone. Pretty sad, yet fascinating stuff.
LMAO about the comments about Bob Barr.
Barr is so ' FAMILY'.
Man has more 'NEGROID' features than half my BLACK family.
I don't know about the current generation, but Black folks were taught, as I was...
you don't bust those that are ' passing', because in order for them to make that choice, they've already given up so much of their soul, why add to their misery?
why do you think that our parents let us stay up past out bedtimes to watch Imitation of Life and Pinky?
I have been dabbling in my own geneaology lately, and have traced parts of my family back to the 1400's. When I first saw this story on-line, and saw the "unknowns" and, in reality, dead ends in Mrs. Obama's history, I simply became very sad.
I have 'dead ends,' too, all of them-- to my knowledge-- Native American. People rightfully tease posers who claim they had a great-great ancestor they think was a "Cherokee Princess," but the sad truth is that a lot of that history was just erased, and all we have is rumor and memory.
Heh, this (the poser comment) reminds me of one of my college history profs (who's a great scholar, but we loved to mock him). We had a seminar on miscegenation & the american experience, and at some point in the class he let drop that under the one-drop rule, he would've been considered black. I think he thought we'd all be shocked, us middle-class white children--but nobody even batted an eye. I think we disappointed him...
In a nation like America, where so many of its people were immigrants from one "elsewhere" or another, genealogical "dead ends" aren't that uncommon: my own family history is only accurately traceable as far back as Ellis Island c. 1904: before that, one generation vaguely remembered from the "old country", before that: nada.
Man I got so many dead ends in my own genealogy.
To paraphrase the Greek from THE WIRE (S2)--"My name...is not my name." My g-g-grandfather changed it to a very common American last name after fleeing South Carolina for Florida. I'll have to settle for him (and those before him) being with us in spirit, I suppose. And Im ok with that.
Give me a fucking break. Why not just come out and say this young black teenager was raped, as white men and slave masters did commonly to black women in that time?
This pathetic whitewashing of what (in all likelihood) actually happened will continue to be a sore spot until it is confronted honestly and head-on.
Amen.
Well said. Fucking absurd.
They don't say it because they don't know it. The article says later:
Yeah, I actually agree with Schloss. We don't know the circumstances. All of these dalliances weren't rape. That isn't to take away from the real history sexual exploitation and legacy of rape. But we should careful with the broad brush.
Especially as she may have continued having kids with the father after she was liberated. She may have felt she had no choice, but it's impossible to say. Probably the reality was even more tangled than this week's Mad Men.
Check out Annette Gordon-Reed's excellent, nuanced consideration of one of the most of these relationships, _The Hemingses of Monticello_. She points out that automatically assuming the relationship was rape takes away all the personality and choices that the slave woman had. Many of the situations were rape, but sometimes women used this as a way to free their children. Hemings successfully freed her children, yet we don't consider her a resister in the way that we would the leader of a revolt. I think it's very interesting to read the book and ponder this question of what is resistance and who should we applaud and for what.
As to why this is news, I think that whites really don't understand the prevalence of this. Granted, I grew up in Arizona, but I remember a black history class where the prof was incredulous that whites would be surprised when they married and had a child with dark skin and the father assumed the mother had had an affair. I remember thinking I would be pretty surprised (not unhappily like that couple) to have a black child b/c there is no spoken-of history that would indicate I could. (lots of Scandinavian and German ancestors...we don't talk so much about the ones who've been in the States for a long time).
Kate Chopin had a really good short story about a woman who was orphaned and who had a 'black'-looking child.
Hmm... So if I had sex with a 13 year old girl who was my student in 2009 US, even after she begged me to have sex with her, this would still be considered rape, yes?
This is probably because I, as a grown man in a position of authority would have a significant advantage over a 13 year old girl under my care. Ditto for an owned slave?
I'd say the slave had less options than the present day 13year old. Even if the girl had decided to take advantage of me and my sexual weakness to get a better grade, It's rape by default, Rape by law. By statute. The slave is an owned female human and the sex is most definitely not on equal terms.
That's Rape.
But zinjanthropus, for most of human history sex has not been on equal terms by 21st Century standards. It has only been very recently, and not everywhere in the world yet. That a woman is free to choose her sexual and matrimonial partners is a very modern, mostly Western concept. For centuries women were bartered by parents and had their marriages, and subsequently their sexual partners, arranged for them when they were still children. In fact, I would say, if considered historically, most women have been "un-free" in this regard to some degree.
The hesitancy to call this rape is not a hesitancy to recognize that this was an exploitative and coercive relationship, but a hesitancy to over simplify a very complex social and historical phenomenon. Using an emotional label like "rape" (or I would argue "evil" or "genocide") inexactly has a tendency to shut down discussion and inquiry, inquiry into the many motivations of the agents, their choices, the consequences of choice, their fears, expectations, and circumstances.
It's not that you are wrong, necessarily, but how much do we learn or understand about this period in history or the people involved if we affix a quick and easy label. We owe all of our ancestors the dignity of considering them in as much historical context as possible.
Bingo.
Rape is not an emotional term to me, it's a technical term.
Yes Adolphus, there's the entire history of men dominating women. And your post is probably more closer to the actual truth than mine is. Thank you. But I still look askance whenever I hear the phrase historical context. Sometimes it seems awfully convenient to use.
We Americans like to broadcast to the world the idea of our moral superiority, both then and now. With this in mind, I like to ask myself, was there at that time, A complete and total expectation that every master must/should have his female slave or was there a significant amount of the culture which held sex with slaves to be unthinkable? Enough rationale and moral expectation and to behave differently at that time? If the answer is yes then this must also become part of historical context.
Historical context tells us that these men like Thomas Jefferson had plenty of opportunity to behave differently but didn't, and that they may have been great politicians/leaders but they were fallible men. Just like Kennedy, and Clinton, King and Cosby.
Of course there was,as evidenced by the secrecy and shame surrounding the millions of mulatto children and the Black mistresses. We would have known much more about Sally Hemmings if it weren't a scandalous, shameful affair meant to be kept secret.
Had we always been taught that Washington and others owned slaves, and that Jefferson and others had sex with their slaves, then perhaps we wouldn't have all the founding father/diety bullshit. Perhaps we would actually have a deeper reality from which to view ourselves.
History telling us that thousands of "great" men throughout our history owned people and often had sex with them would certainly have put Clinton and his silly little grunting in a different perspective.
No these weren't super men full of honor and Christ-like virtues, They were men who were good at their jobs.. just like Dennis Rodman and Mike Vick. Historical context tells us that Mike Tyson was right to have expected that silly beauty queen to have given it up that night after all, he was world famous and rich, but it also tells us that he raped that girl. Both at the same time.
And yes, if i owned slaves i would have screwed every pretty one and half the ugly ones too.
So I guess this means that she would be less likely to have been caught on tape railing against "whitey?"
I guess I feel like this is what it means to have black people in the White House. I think some of us saw this coming from the moment she hit the scene. It's just kind of assumed that very few of us are pure.
yeah i had been making the same assumption.
Except the majority of white people either never learned or choose to forget how much inter-racial sex went on back in the day.
It's news for the same reason Neda was news in Iran. We all assumed that there were horrible examples of young, innocent Iranians being killed from the first days of the revolution, but to see it and personalize it the way Neda did made a huge difference.
In a more muted but no less profound way, that's what's happening here. We have a real, normal, black first family, and all that goes with that. So now that part of our history has a face, too.
It's not really the same. I say that as someone who makes his living trying to figure out what is, and isn't a story. What happened in Iran was an event that literally just happened. And so a person allowed us to get a more human take on it.
The idea of black people not being pure is literally a century old, and something that any other black person would have known was possible about Michelle Obama from the moment she entered the scene.
The story itself--black person has white ancestors--is old. That she's the first lady doesn't make it any newer. It's like writing a story saying that Michelle Obama likes Earth Wind & Fire or enjoys Harold's chicken. Well yeah, a lot of black people do, and yeah, a lot of black people from Chicago do.
But isn't it clear that a lot of Americans AREN'T aware of how typical this is? Outside of the fact that this shouldn't be news to Americans, what is it that bothers you about it? It almost seems like you are holding something back. I know that Americans being ignorant about our past isn't news to you either.
I'm not holding back anything at all. Put bluntly, I thought most Americans knew. But even conceding that, a story isn't defined by the borders of what most people know. If we found, for instance, that one of Michelle Obama's ancestors served in the Civil War, I doubt that'd be much of a story--even though it's something most of us didn't know.
Ignorance doesn't make a story, the counter-intuitive does. If you spend ten minutes with a book on slavery, this story, much like a story about Obam's ancestor serving in the Civil War, isn't counter-intuitive. If anything, it's been widely written about.
This thread is probably winding down, sorry I'm late to come back and check on it.
I think the fact that she's the first lady makes all the difference. Because what makes this interesting, and therefore news, is the "from slave to the White House in N generations" narrative. Michelle Obama's personal history is the apotheosis of a story Americans love: the rags-to-riches, in-America-anything-is-possible story (think: "The Godfather").
That's why it's her ancestry that people are fascinated by, moreso even than the President's. The white ancestor is an interesting detail in that larger narrative because, as others have suggested, it's a detail that many non-blacks will find mildly surprising. But it's her story that's the driving force here, because it personalizes the historical arc of blacks in this country in a way that no one else's story can.
I agree that the fact that Michelle is first lady doesn't make her story any newer, but it does make her story news.
"It's just kind of assumed that very few of us are pure."
I think this is a fact about us that most non-black folks either don't know, or never thought about, much.
This brings up an interesting note of the time during Skip Gates' documentary 2 years ago when he asked Oprah to guess how much white blood she had and she instantly said none. I, also, just assume that close to 100% of African Americans have at least some white blood, but she didn't even hesitate to say none. When Skip reported the results of her geneology test it turned out she was totally correct. I think that's an exception that proves the general rule.
Yes, but this isn't benign. The reason they don't know is, in my opinion, a willful ignorance and whitewashing of the culture of rape and exploitation among white slave owners against black women. I'm sure a small minority of those relationships were consensual---at least as consensual as any relationship could be with someone who has the power of life and death over you, your family and everyone you care about and has stripped you of all knowledge of your former culture and language. But many, many black people get their white ancestry as a result of the raping of slave girls---it's that simple.
This should be common knowledge---and it can be. The information is out there. It should be taught in every American history class, the same way German children learn every horrific detail of what was done to the Jews in Germany in the the 1930s and 40s. But the difference is that too many people in this country just don't want to know. So they're shocked---shocked!---to see article like this.
I hate to admit it, but you're all spot on about non-blacks being generally ignorant about this stuff. I really had no clue how prevalent master on slave rape was until relatively recently (Gates' African American Lives was very enlightening). I'm still not completely sure either (is it really the case that nearly all black Americans have some white ancestor?)
Of course we learned in school some of the evils of slavery, but somehow sexual assault was generally left out. When slave masters father children with their slaves was brought to light, it was generally white-washed, sometimes almost into a love story, which is pretty sick come to think of it.
I agree with dragnet that this needs to be taught better in schools, so that it is common knowledge for everyone.
I would not say "nearly all" black people have a white ancestor. A better way to think about is that it's very common for black people to have white ancestors.
African-Americans are a mulatto people. Unlike a lot of other societies we've never had a "buffer" mulatto group. The one-drop rule meant that you'd have black people of all hues mixing together. The result is that, within us, there just isn't much purity.
It's not even just rape--though a lot of it is. Some of these people actually loved each other.
I agree with dragnet that this needs to be taught better in schools, so that it is common knowledge for everyone.
I was taught about this in tenth grade American History, but I think it was only because our teacher got his Master's degree by focusing on the issue so he was quite knowledgable on the subject.
It was an uncomfortable subject for a room full of white kids, so much so that one kid went home and told his parents his teacher gave a racist lecture.
I don't want to turn this into a bashing the South thing and brag about how great us liberal North westerners are, but my data point is myself:
I'm 43 years old so I graduated from High School in 1984. In Seattle we learned about this stuff, as well as Japanese internment, how the Indians were treated and so on.
Now that I think about it maybe in the 70s and early 80s things were more liberal in school and starting in the Reagan era the big conservative backlash started and schools stopped talking about stuff because they were afraid of some loud parents complaining.
Applies to other things as well, we had sex ed and no one seemed to complain, no one was protesting about them teaching us evolution and trying to get intelligent design into the curriculum, and so on. The Culture war didn't seem to exists the way it does now.
Don't the details make the story? It might not be counter-intuitive, but there aren't any other former slaves whose descendents became First Lady of the United States. There's one. The path from Melvinia to Michelle is unique in American history. There have been other First Ladies who had ancestors serve in the civil war. That would not have been unique, but this story is. And yes, it was not at all surprising the the first black First Lady of the U.S. is descended from slaves, but this was the story explaining, for the first time, who that former slave actually was, and where Michelle Obama came from.
The Obamas aren't really black. He's not really American. They're not really patriots, or Christians, or that smart, or blah blah blah.
Coherence is overrated. All that really matters is that you have a talking point you can use to attack the Obama Adminsitration - and him personally. If someone thinks attacking his wife on the issue of her heritage will do it, so be it.
Of course, this blind anger may be one reason why his approval ratings will never dip too far. People recognize rageoholics when they see them.
George Herriman, (cartoonist who created Krazy Kat) passed for white.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman
"In later life, many of Herriman's newspaper colleagues were under the impression that Herriman's ancestry was Greek, and Herriman did nothing to dissuade them of this notion. According to close friends of Herriman, he wore a hat at all times in order to hide his "kinky" hair. He was listed on his death certificate as "Caucasian"."
Another well-know passing story: Anatole Broyard, who was once the editor of the New York Times Book Review (I think).
Broyard's story, by Skip Gates, is linked here: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/english/NEH/GATES1.HTM
It has been argued that Phillip Roth's The Human Stain is loosely based on Broyard's life.
A couple years ago I found out that a friend of mine, who I'd known for a couple of years, was black. He looked as white as many whites I know. He wasn't trying to pass for white, his race just never came up.
I've assumed for many years that I might have black ancestry, and probably have black relatives. Some parts of the family tree just disappear 5 or 6 generations back (Great Grandma was, apparently, a bastard, and I may be 1/8th Jewish). I had an ancestor in Virginia in the 1700's who was a slaveowner and, given what went on on the plantations, I wouldn't be at all surprised to have black relatives.
Not news. Not a story. Not a revelation. What is the point of this fact? It is almost a certainty that a black American would have some European ancestry. Estimates range from 20 to 50% of black americans having some European in their family tree, no more than 3 generations distant. If you are willing to go further, the estimates rise to as much as 80%. To not recognize this is to be willfully blind to the practices of slavery in the U.S. and how that sexual exploitation persisted until the not that recent, past (see: Thurmond, Strom - doing the maid). Unless you are pointing to THAT specific aspect, this doesn't rise this to the level of anything. It's like pointing out that black people are not uniform in color or height. Next...
What's clear from passing is the influence of immigration patterns on the phenomenon.
I mean, it's a helluva lot more difficult for a mulatto to pass as white when white folks themselves all look like Conan O'Brien and Emma Thompson. One you have immigration from Italy, Greece, Lebanon, etc. and white folks begin to broaden their self-image as Caucasians to include olive skin, curly black hair, etc. then the door is opened for blacks to pass without the level of questioning about their appearance that would have happened decades earlier. It was a simple matter for Herriman's colleagues in 1920 to assume he was Greek; in 1875 it's highly likely they wouldn't have known any Greeks.
Exactly. That's what happens in Cuba, with the difference that, there, everyone knows that almost everyone has at least a "drop".
Excellent post, I never considered that but yes, absolutely.
If only Barack and Michelle could have won the White House in 2000. But that is hindsight.
The slave era of our history as a nation is behind us in terms of what we desire and look forward to. But like any nightmare that is over, some memories linger.
I hope the next black First Family is given a more fair chance than the one given to Barack and Michelle. I hope the next black First Family inherits a budget surplus and peace in the world like Bush II did.
Life in these United States keeps on being unfair to minorities in about every imaginable way.
Nevertheless, the future before us is so absolutely large that it is bigger by far than all of our past put together.
I wasn't shocked by this story, but I was interested. I think it's worthy as a news story just because a lot of people are ignorant - willfully or not - of this country's past.
The only thing that is surprising here to me about this is how silly these things can get. So now Michelle Obama isn't all "Black"??? What? Does this work in reverse? If I have an ancestor at that level who was black, does that make me black now? Or one that might have been native american or Indian or Chinese--does that make me any one of those ancestries?
We're all mutts the farther you go back..
This Link: http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/1072 talks about a product that points this reality out..
Sorry if this seems ranty--not meant to be..
I didn't see the newsworthiness in this either. I thought this was common knowledge but clearly, it's not. Back in Minneapolis, I was listening to a popular radio talk show host going on about Radical Islam and using the Koran to justify terrorism. I called in to compare this with Christian slave owners using the Bible to justify slavery. The host had never heard of such a thing. I was totally shocked that this man, with all his education, was ignorant of this fact. Blew me away...
This story about Michelle's white ancestor brought something else to mind that really blows me. "Everyone keeps talking about the first BLACK president, but he's HALF WHITE. Stop denying his white heritage!" I have repeatedly heard, and read, this sentiment among some white people and it pisses me off every time. If Barack was on the corner slanging crack, you wouldn't be trumpeting his white heritage! Now you want to claim him because he's the president...
I agree. I say it differently.
I say we are all Americans.
Most all of us came from somewhere else. We mix it all up in the "melting pot".
It is the strength of our country.
With apologies to Native Americans.
But even the natives how now mixed in with the rest of us mutts...er, Americans.
My people insofar as I have been told are Jewish in all sides and all directions. The immediate generation that came to America came from Russia and/or Poland. Semitic people genetically do not have blue eyes, yet there it is--my sister and I, just about everyone on my father's side of the family. What's more though my mother had black eyes, blue eyes require a recessive gene in both parents. Someone in my heritage back in the old country was definitely not Jewish.
Tons of Ashkenazi Jews have blue eyes (and fair hair). And there's no such thing as a "genetic" "Semitic person." Semitic is a language family (which Ashkenazi Jews, btw, do not historically speak - Yiddish is a Germanic language with a lot of Semitic loan words). Presumably the relative prevalence of blue eyes and fair hair among Ashkenazi Jews indicates that there was some mixing with northern Europeans at some point in the distant past, but an individual Ashkenazim having blue eyes doesn't indicate that their grandmother was raped by a Cossack, or whatever.
I'm not shocked - and I'm white. I'm also a student of the Civil War and slavery so I probably know more than your average white citizen.
But history always becomes more alive when it is personal and when we can see the results. I thought I understood the Holocaust-again I am a reader of history and of the Holocaust. But, standing in a synagogue on Yom HaShoah and seeing the people who you talk to after every Friday night service walk to the bimah as survivors of the Holocaust, makes it all so much more alive. These are not six million people, these are Oscar and Margaret and the other 10 survivors still living in my community.
In the same way, we see Michelle Obama, a smart successful woman. A mother of beautiful small children. And now, we see a child, just younger than hers, ripped away from all that she knows and moved deeper south. In a few short years, when she is just older than the Obama children, she will have a child of her own. And, say what you will, a 14 year old slave was probably not in control of that situation whatever it was, and so, I am content in calling it rape unless the father of her child was a 14 year old lower class kid unrelated to the people who owned her.
There are very few years between that life and these lives in front of us.
It doesn't shock me, I'm sure it doesn't shock the Obama's but it brings the past to the present in a very real and sorrowful way. It makes our inhumanity real and present. It's important for that, if for no other reason.
Jackie
I'm a little late to this thread and don't have much of substance to add except how cool that name is "Dolphus."
Just sayin'.
Citing the book "The Hemmings of Monticello" up thread, Rosessupposes notes the "choices" that slave women had. Um, given the nature of the relationship--and here, context is all--any "choices" the slave woman had were granted by her master--hence no choice at all. And if one of her choices was to have sex with said master to free her children or live with the distinct possibility that she or they would sold away, live a life in bondage or be beaten, violated or killed--all at the whim or "choice" of the master, well that sounds like a "Sophie's Choice" to me."
It may well be true that some sort of "love" grew out of these relationships, though I think it was more on the order of "Stockholm Syndrome," but in a slave/master context, that love would always be "fruit of the poisoned tree."
There's a comment up thread that addresses this. Basically, through much of human history, a very similar power imbalance existed. What do we make of those relationships? In many societies women were effectively property. Was all of that sex coerced? Perhaps. I just want to broaden the debate a bit.
TNC, I'm all for broadening the debate (that's why I am a devoted reader of your blog and of your comments section) as long as the context is always present.
And yes, the male/female power imbalance is nearly universal in the course of human history. But slavery is a very specific power imbalance. In this country and others, when slavery wasn't the specific context, woman often had families, societal mores and however imperfect, laws to protect and/or avenge them.
Even in these cases, sexual coercion was often implicit. It is only relatively recently here in the US that the rape of a woman by her husband became even possible in the eyes of society, much less illegal. Was love in arranged marriages, for example, impossible? No, but a woman's right to choose her own marital destiny was.
I just want to broaden the debate a bit. Yeah i gotcha, maybe i got a little carried away. But doesn't not speaking on it actually narrow the debate? One last swipe...But just because something has always been done doesn't mean we shouldn't examine it does it?
the thought that anything in that article was a ' surprise ' to a thinking person is bewildering to me. the story of the First Lady is the story of Blacks in America.