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In our skin: generational biracialism in America
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In our skin: generational biracialism in America
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Content
IN OUR SKIN:
Generational biracialism in America
By
Olivia Kelleher
A Thesis Presented to
FACULTY OF THE USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATIONS AND
JOURNALISM
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree
MASTERS OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)
May 2024
“When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground”
- African Proverb
ii
DEDICATION
To Mom and Dad.
I am who I am because of you.
I’ll never be able to thank you enough for the life and love you have given me.
I love you forever.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my siblings, I hope to make you proud. Your love and support radiates from afar.
To Gabba, working on this with you will forever be some of my most cherished memories.
To Wy, you’re the best part of me.
Thank you all for loving me.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph…………………………………………………………………………………………...ii
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...iii
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….. vi
Prologue …………………………………………………………………………………………. 1
Chapter 1: Foundations ………………………………………………………………………….. 5
Racial Mixing: An Original American Sin ……………………………………………… 9
Justice Under God ……………………………………………………………………… 11
The Model Irish Meets the Model Minority …………………………………………… 19
Interracial Relationships: A Bridge + A Divide ……………………………………….. 22
References ……………………………………………………………………………………… 27
v
ABSTRACT
In Our Skin: Generational biracialism in America is a proposal for a memoir-style book
that explores the multifaceted history of biracial identity in America through the lens of my own
ancestry. This sample chapter represents the culmination of many months spent diving into my
family history, utilizing census records, family artifacts, photographs, birth records and death
notices, journals, and literature. In Our Skin challenges the binary nature of racial history in the
United States by employing critical race theory and weaving in my personal experiences to
dissect the complexities of racial identity. The book highlights the stories of my ancestors, who
have been crossing racial lines for generations, even when it was neither socially acceptable nor
legal to do so. This sample chapter serves as a framework for the book's overall narrative—a
lyrical interplay of history, personal anecdote, and insightful analysis.
vi
PROLOGUE
Like many Americans, I struggle to speak candidly about race. My near-white skin, light
blue eyes, and sandy-blonde 3C curls carry an immense amount of privilege that make it
impossible for me to truly understand the severity of the struggle so many more
darkly-completed Black Americans experience on a daily basis. I fear that people of color
silently scoff at me if I too proudly claim my Blackness. But, being white isn’t something I can
fully claim either. I don’t fit in a racial binary, which was confusing to a child growing up in a
country hellbent on categorizing people by monolithic definitions or race.
My class privilege as the daughter of a doctor and a mother that worked for joy rather
than money adds another level of privilege to my life-experience. I never knew of financial
struggles as a child. We had hot homemade meals on the table each night. We enjoyed yearly
family vacations and a full schedule of after-school activities.
My struggles with belonging as a biracial person could be viewed as trivial to those who
have been dealt much more difficult hands in life. My position of privilege is built upon a
foundation laid by ancestors, both Black and white, who could only dream of the life I have now.
I think they would be proud, not ashamed, of how far we have come. Sharing my story is
honoring them.
Talking about race as a biracial person is precarious. If we speak too loudly of our
struggles, we risk being labeled the tragic mulatto. But, if we stay silent in the face of racial
injustices, we choose the side of the oppressor. Our identity sits in between two warring cultures,
cultures that we light-skinned mixed people are often expected to bridge. I have taken on that
1
role to varying degrees of success throughout my life. Often, I have failed despite my best
intentions.
My hesitance is borne out of decades-long discomfort with my own biraciality, reinforced
by pop culture, politics, and the media almost constantly.
I remember sitting in the halls of my Catholic grade school, watching Obama secure the
Democratic nomination in the 2008 primaries. A man who looked like me, who lived in the same
city as me, who had daughters around the same age as me, was about to become the most
powerful person in our country. I felt proud to be mixed. Even more, I felt proud to be Black.
In my naïveté, I thought that Obama’s election and the rise of a Black first family would
shift our country’s relationship with race. Instead, Obama was callously accused of not being
American due to his skin color and non-White sounding name while simultaneously criticized
for not being “Black enough” because he was biracial. The birther myth was perpetuated by our
future president Donald Trump and the “biracial is not Black” stance was reinforced by Black
media outlets. In the moment, and in retrospect, the phenomenon of Obama’s race only furthered
my confusion about my own relationship to race.
My identity has always been defined in halves — have Black, half white: Black mom,
Irish dad. In many ways, I felt forced to think about race in simplistic terms. The curriculum of
my lower school history classes, the hierarchy of my private Catholic institutions, and the social
stratification of my community reflected that. It wasn’t until I found literature that I began to
uncover how complex racial identity really could be.
Richard Wright’s Black Boy, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Adrienne Riche’s
Split at the Root, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s White Like Me were formative. They taught me
that indulging in deep thought about my own identity wasn’t selfish, it was necessary. I was
2
taken by how these writers understood race so differently, yet so delicately. The simple
discussions of race that marked my education before this paled in comparison to the deeply
nuanced and complex analysis that each writer injected into their narratives.
I’ve continued to find inspiration in the writings of Ta Ha Nehisi Coates, Chinua Achebe,
Michelle Alexander, Toni Morrison, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Isabelle Wilkerson and Afua Hirsch,
to name a few. Their level of understanding, comfort and confidence in writing about race and
identity has helped me to develop language to analyze my own sense of self as a biracial woman.
This book is about finding what makes me whole; an exploration into facets of my family
history and upbringing, politics, entertainment, beauty standards and pop-culture that comprise
my understanding of identity.
As a millennial born in the mid-90s, my discussion of race is underscored by the rise of
the internet, coming to consciousness when 9/11 happened, voting for the first Black president,
the #MeToo movement, the rise of MAGA-style politics, and the birth of influencer culture. It’s
intensely personal and specific to my generation while also being rooted in the deeper
American-condition that has made each pivotal moment so. And, it’s ever-changing.
We are in a political moment where the importance of educating children on the history
of race is being questioned. We’ve already seen these threats via the blocking of Affirmative
Action and the systematic banning of race-related books in classrooms. With the possibility of a
second Trump presidency looming, I’m fearful that identity politics will only deepen racial
divides. I fear that young mixed-race, Black and brown children are growing up in a world even
more confusing than my childhood. I fear that my kids, should I choose to have them, will be
born with less rights than I was.
3
After nearly 30-years of living in this skin, I long for a more solidified relationship to my
race.
I am no remarkable person. I am an American, a woman, a millennial, a journalist, a
creative and a writer. I’m an introvert who thrives in social situations. I chronically overthink and
almost constantly harbor self-conscious thoughts. I’m a daughter, a sister, a partner and a friend.
I’m imperfect, but constantly learning. This book is challenging all of those identifiers, all of my
self-imposed limitations.
This chronicling of my journey with race, religion, class and identity is foundational. For
you, reader, I hope it encourages you to challenge your own unconscious bias. It’s more
important now than ever.
4
Chapter 1: FOUNDATIONS
The morning air is crisp and smells of fresh cut grass. Sleeves of Oreo cookies and boxes
of Kraft mac and cheese fill the pantry for afternoon snacks. Swimsuits are packed into clear
containers and slid under beds, safe until next summer. Gone are the lazy sleep-ins of August
and back are the aromas of mom’s morning coffee and burnt cinnamon raisin bagels rising
through our home in Chicago’s western suburbs.
Each school year started with the same feeling, a feeling that is brought back to me
through kitchen scents and warm fall winds. With each new school year, I inched further away
from my innocence and deeper into complicated thoughts about who I am, what I care about and
who I want to be. This particular year, 2004, marks a seismic shift in my personal journey to
understanding that. For the twenty years that have followed, from my childhood in Chicago to
my time at New York University to now my life and career in Los Angeles, I have been
constantly searching for and redefining my relationship to identity. But it was here, on that crisp
September morning, that I mark the beginning.
My three siblings and I were born across seven years. We attended St. Giles Catholic
School, a small parochial institution a few minutes from our house. We went to church there on
Sunday and school there on Monday. This year was the first and last time we would all be
attending St. Giles together; my oldest sister Brittany in eighth grade and my younger brother
Liam in first. Carly, only 15 months older than myself, was entering fifth grade and I was
entering fourth. After this year of all attending school together, our lives started moving in
different directions and haven’t converged again since apart from holidays, birthdays, weddings
and funerals. With the beginning of our familial split, our relationships with race also began to
5
diverge. As our racial-presentations vary, so do our experiences in the world. I was just old
enough to start understanding this.
We congregate at the end of our brick-paved driveway, each of us in our assigned
uniforms. Liam wears a crisp white polo embroidered with our school’s monogram and a bright
yellow crew neck sweater on top. I wear a plaid jumper layered over a button-down. Carly and
Brittany match in white oxford shirts neatly tucked into pleated plaid skirts and knee-high socks.
Our hair is slicked into place with medium-hold hair gel. We look smart and neat, exactly as our
school hoped. The four of us, hugging so tightly our cheeks touch, pose for photos that are still
pinned to bulletin boards at my parents’ home. Mom in her tennis skirt and dad in his scrubs
bookend their mixed-raced children. This perfect moment, frozen in time.
My childhood in Chicago, a city moored by segregation, violence and systemic racism,
was near-idyllic. I grew up just west of the city in the village of Oak Park and never really felt
the racial strife stereotypical to Chicago. My hometown is defined by Catholicism. Almost
everyone I knew was Catholic. People didn’t ask what religion you were, rather they asked
which parish you belonged to. Religion was the thread that connected me to my classmates
before race, class or ethnicity.
Within the austerity of parochial schools, I molded myself into a perfect student and the
picture of properness. I learned to quiet my individuality in order to better align with the ideals of
my teachers: almost all white, many nuns, brothers or priests. In quieting individuality, I pushed
closer to the ideals of whiteness central to my childhood.
Who I was – a melange of European and African American ancestry – was apparent to
anyone who knew me. Seeing my mom and dad together quickly explained my Biscoff-colored
complexion and bright blonde hair that kinked and coiled in every direction. The “what are you”
6
question was answered by the presence of my parents, who never missed a band concert, dance
competition, or soccer game. While my parents' difference in race was very apparent to others, to
me we were just us.
My siblings and I range in varying degrees of tan, from my mom’s mocha-colored skin to
my dad’s pinkish pale skin. Up until I started to develop self-awareness, I felt no pressure to
identify with one side more than the other. I was both of my mom and of my dad. My identity as
their child came far before anything else.
When you live in a community where everyone knows each other's parents, the question
of race is answered before it's even asked. In this fourth grade year, I started to gain
independence. I spent more time away from my parents at dance classes and competitions, after
school activities, and social events. Without my parents’ presence to explain, I started being
asked questions about my race myself– by teachers, classmates, and strangers. I wasn’t quite sure
what to make of people’s interest in this. Should I be flattered or offended? Did it really matter
that much?
Once I hit puberty, these questions became a near-daily occurrence. Where is your family
from? Where were you born? Can I touch your hair? These were all different forms of the same
fundamental question: I know you’re not fully white… so, how Black are you?
I’ve been answering that question for all of my adult life. “I’m half-Black and
half-white,” I most-often replied. Quick, simple and succinct, even if not entirely true. The asker
was placated and we could move on.
The truth is, my family has been mixing racial lines for generations. My ancestors are
both descended from slaveholders and from slaves; the products of loving interracial marriages
and of rape. Marked Black on birth certificates, and marked white or Mulatto. Beacons for
7
radical inclusivity and perpetrators of racial violence. Some desired to pass as white, others
denied their whiteness completely.
My siblings and I, varied in skin tone and experience, are among the first generation of
biracial Americans allowed to exist — on census forms, school applications, marriage licenses,
and official government documents — outside the monoracial confines of our country’s past, the
same confines my ancestors were forced into.
Perhaps the answers to my questions of identity lie in the connective tissue between
generations of ancestors, gossamer as they may be. There are few remaining family members
past my parent’s generation, and throughout the process of writing this I was re-acquainted with
several of those relatives. Together, we reconstructed my family’s lineage — from old
photographs, funeral pamphlets, census records, year books, and letters.
While this was an act of exploration, it’s also one of preservation. Bruce Taylor, my
newly-acquainted cousin, introduced me to the quote that starts this book: “When an elder dies, a
library burns to the ground.”
The greatest family library I have left is my grandma Myrtle Nelson, a tiny 4’11” woman
with large hazel eyes, wavy hair grayed along the edges, and pillowy skin indented with laugh
lines and crow's feet. Her parents, both biracial, gave her skin that was called “yellow”; they also
provided the best childhood in Chicago they could afford. As we leaf through hundreds of
pictures kept meticulously in envelopes marked with original Malcolm X postage stamps, I
notice that her eyes are cast downward in almost every childhood image. I’ve always known her
as shy, but her well-preserved photographs reveal something more; a contemplative child who
spent more time in the company of adults than children, the black grandchild of an Irish
8
grandma, a light-skinned girl in a sea of dark-skinned classmates, a good Catholic student in a
plaid jumper almost identical to my own. In her, I see me and in me, I see her.
So… what am I? I wonder if I will be asked this question for the rest of my life. While the
short answer – half white, half Black – easily rolls off my tongue, the long answer is a
centuries-long struggle towards acceptance, understanding, and belonging.
Racial Mixing; an Original American Sin
Prejudices against biracial people have long-reaching roots in slavery and continue to
inextricably link race, reproductive rights and marriage equality. Children considered mulatto
revealed a deeper truth about the predilections of white slave masters. The superiority they felt
towards their slaves didn't stop them from desiring, and raping, Black women and children. The
fair-skinned children of Black mothers and white fathers were proof that the race line on
plantations was frequently being crossed.
As the population of mixed-race slaves grew, their complexion – arguably the original
defining factor of race – threatened the binary racial system the colonies were being built upon.
The first record of African slaves arriving in the Americas was 1619. By 1662 the first law
regarding the racial status of biracial children was passed in Virginia, stating the race of children
was passed through the matrilineal line. This meant that any child born of a Black mother was
born into slavery, morphing enslavement into a biological condition.
When The Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves outlawed international slave trade in
1808, the number of enslaved people in America was fixed. The white man’s power over their
slaves' reproductive rights was central to the proliferation of slavery. The illegal importation of
9
slaves from Africa continued well into the 1840s, but the only way to meaningfully grow the
population of slaves was through forced births and slave breeding.
This encouraged the raping of enslaved women by slaveowners, overseers, and slave
drivers. With each successful rape – successful in the fact that it resulted in childbirth – a new
mixed-race child was added to their white father’s stockpile of human resources. Lighter-skinned
slaves were valuable, often selling at a higher cost at auctions.
This effort to prohibit the upward mobility of Black people established a hard floor to
whiteness; if you were any percentage of Black, you were relegated to the underpinnings of
society. For the large mass of people defined as Black, the range of complexions organized itself
into a hierarchy consistent with the newly emerging American ideals; “the closer you were to
white, the better… but you still ain’t white,” as my mother would put it.
The mulatto’s proximity to whiteness, with features more closely aligned to euro-centric
standards of beauty separated many light-skinned slaves from their darker-skinned counterparts.
Mixed-race slaves were often placed in positions in their owner’s home as servants, cooks, and
caretakers. They were taught to speak “proper” and act more “civilized.” This difference in affect
– “acting white” – is a persistent insult slung at biracial people to this day. Distance between
mixed-race slaves and slaves with two Black parents began to form. This distance continues
today through colorism and light-skin privilege.
Biracial slaves’ positions of closeness to white people may have been viewed as
preferable and exclusionary. But, this status came with its own increased risk of sexual violence.
As enslaved people, their masters felt an entitlement to their bodies while their legal blackness
became a means to rape near-white women with impunity. As historian J. C. Furnas asserts, “a
greater likelyhood of being raped is certainly not an indication of favored status.”
10
This unpunishable sexual violence towards Black people continued far after the 13th
Ammendment was passed, into Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, the Civil Rights Movement
and still today. Simultaneously, interracial couples were criticized, abused and prevented from
legally loving across racial lines. The over-policing of consensual interracial relationships in
contrast with the impunity of sexual violence against people of color demonstrates the dichotomy
of how American history has dealt with issues of race, love and sex.
Despite these laws and stereotypes, my ancestors were marrying across racial lines as
early as 1840. The secrecy and social shame that came from these interracial marriages, and
subsequently their biracial children, pushed many of my ancestors even further to the fringes of
society. In that social ostracization, not white nor Black, came the search for a new identity. For
many of my ancestors, they found that in religion and specifically within Catholicism.
Justice Under God
Myrtle Taylor started first grade at St. James’s Catholic School in Chicago’s South Side
in 1945. She tied her soft curls into a neat single braid adorned with a white bow, stretched her
brown socks up to mid-calf, smoothed the sleeves of the Oxford shirt under her sleeveless
jumper and began her daily walk. In the warmer months, her collar would stick to the back of her
neck, moist with Illinois humidity. In the winter months, wind made her eyes tear and when it
was cold enough, those tears could turn to ice.
Myrtle’s neighbor, an eighth grader, would walk her to and from school each day. They
would gossip about this crazy nun or that strict priest and giggle, as young girls do. Only
sometimes would the neighborhood boys, in their too-short ties and haphazardly-tucked dress
11
shirts, spit on Myrtle and call her nigger. When they did, her friend, who was white, would hurry
her along and tell her to pay no mind. Boys know nothing anyway.
My grandma tells me this story from the head chair of her small kitchen table in the
Chicago house my mom grew up in. The sturdy table is “the good kind,” as she puts it, made
from real wood that withstands the test of time. It’s typically covered with steaming bowls of
crab, corn and potatoes, a pot of black eyed peas seasoned with a turkey wing, and Pyrex pans of
slightly burned cornbread. Today, it’s overflowing with envelopes of census papers, old
photographs, and handwritten letters.
Myrtle cups her blue coffee mug, from which I haven’t seen her take a single sip. She’s
on a loop; forgetting about her coffee, microwaving the cup until it’s scalding, setting it aside to
cool, and back again. All the while, she’s chatting excitedly. She mentions street names and
directions like I should know them – “we got off at 26th Street but then had to get back to
Indiana so we ended up walking all the way from Halsted.” It’s a Chicago thing. Where you are
in a city like this matters.
Chicago sits firmly above the Mason-Dixon line, however it is still an incredibly
segregated city. From the beginning of the 20th century, Black migrants fleeing the South
traveled to Chicago via the Illinois Central Railway. As Isabel Wilkerson says in her monumental
book The Warmth of Other Suns, “It carried so many southern Blacks north that Chicago would
go from 1.8 percent Black at the start of the twentieth century to one-third Black by the time the
flow of people finally began to slow in 1970. … racial walls that had been ‘successfully
defended for a generation’. … were facing imminent collapse.”
Neighborhoods change from Black to white abruptly. Poor immigrant communities are
nestled between poor Black communities next to rich white communities. The city is large, but
12
the ethnic communities are varied and small. Tight-knit. If you find yourself in a neighborhood
that isn’t your own, it could mean discomfort or even death. Social-hierarchy isn’t just Black
versus white; it’s every European immigrant community versus each other, versus Black, all
trying to get their piece of the promise of Chicago.
For my grandmother, whose skin is fair and eyes are light, whose nose is wide-set and
hair is dark brown, she didn’t fit neatly. Neither did her mother or her father, both of whom have
both Black and European lineage. That racial mixing goes back five generations in my family,
starting in the mid 1840s, when John Still of Germantown, Pennsylvania and Catherine
Livascott, a freeborn Black woman in Ohio, married. Census records say they wed, but
interracial marriage was illegal in Ohio until 1861. I wasn’t able to find a marriage record, but
they had two mixed race sons and lived together as husband and wife. My ancestors have been a
variety of skin tones and hair textures ever since.
For my grandma and, subsequently, my mom and myself, our relationship to Blackness
started to take shape within the hallowed halls of our Catholic schools where all facets of
identity, including race, were confined to the strict rules and beliefs of the priests and nuns who
taught us.
The Chicago Public Schools system was instituted in the late 1800s. By the 1950s, it was
adjusting to the influx of new Black residents. Redlining, discriminatory banks, and an
unofficially segregated school system widened the divide between white and Black. The city’s
South and West sides, where my grandmother lived both as a child and later in life, were densely
populated with Black migrants who made the great migration from the South. The public schools
in the area became overcrowded, but the city refused to redistribute the overflow of Black
students to less-populated, predominantly white schools. If you were from a Black family with a
13
little bit of extra money, you avoided public schools altogether and attended one of the many
private, religiously-affiliated schools. How and where you were educated could be the defining
factor of your relationship to race.
St. James was run by the Sisters of Mercy, a religious order started in Dublin, Ireland in
the 1830s. While Catholicism as a Christian denomination is known to be strict, the Irish are
known to be the strictest Catholics of all. When Myrtle started her first year at St. James, the
head priest discovered that she wasn’t baptized. He threatened to kick her out of school. James
and Hazel Taylor, Myrtle’s parents, agreed to baptize her and get remarried in the church if they
were allowed to stay. From that point forward, they were devout Catholics.
Many of the new families to the school were Baptists or Episcopalians – Protestant
denominations most common to Southerners. As white families left for the suburbs, the
congregation at St. James began to dwindle. The Church bolstered its numbers by requiring all
incoming students to be baptized as Catholic in order to attend the school. As middle-class Black
families sought out private education, the Black congregation exploded. Chicago became home
to the second largest Black Catholic community in the country, growing from a few hundred
people at the beginning of the century to over 80,000 members by 1975.
“The nuns were very very particular about how we spoke,” my grandma recalls. Slang
was prohibited and good grammar was paramount. She remembers Black Southern dialect being
beaten out of children with rulers on knuckles. “From the way the nuns would talk to us or our
parents, you could tell they were prejudiced. It was like they looked down on us and it always
had to do something with us being Black,” she recalls matter-of-factly.
“School starts at 8 a.m., and I don’t mean CPT,” was the nuns’ way of telling their
students “don’t be late.” According to my grandma, CPT – colored-people’s time – is a
14
stereotype of Black people that labeled them as not just perpetually tardy, but lazy, unreliable, or
unemployable. The phrase puzzled young Myrtle, as she only knew adults in her neighborhood
to be hardworking people who used their extra income to send their kids to the very school that
housed and employed those nuns.
Although Myrtle was an only child, paying for private school was still a stretch for her
parents. James worked for the post office, which paid decent wages. Hazel worked at the school
to help make ends meet. She cleaned the sacristy and laundered the linens. Myrtle went to work
with her on Saturdays before church services. She would play priest in the pulpit while Hazel
dusted the altar.
The Irish Catholic ideals of morality defined Myrtle’s childhood. “It was like the nuns
wanted us to be Irish. Irish heritage was forced on us. We watched every Irish movie there ever
was, we listened to Irish music. They taught us traditional Irish values,” Myrtle recalls as she
flips through an old church pamphlet filled with images of families in their Sunday best. She
learned more about the legend of Saint Patrick and the potato famine than she did of slavery and
Black history.
Even so, the pamphlets are keepsakes and she thumbs affectionately at the worn pages.
Women of the Rosary Society, with fasteners perched atop their curled hair and matching skirts
and jackets, stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Men in three-piece suits draped generously over their
slender bodies pose for the Altar Society photo. The Catholic community became Myrtle's home,
and the teachings of the Irish nuns and priests became her barometer for right and wrong.
The Taylors immersed themselves in their new community and embraced life as
Catholics. It added a new layer to their identity and, as my grandma would describe, allowed her
to “not look at someone based on their color, but instead just look at how they were as a person.”
15
Moral judgment came before racial judgment, so much so that race became a non-issue. “We
didn’t think about it… that’s just how it was,” was Myrtle’s perspective on her race – resolute.
My grandma and I attended Catholic grammar school 15 miles and 55 years apart. The
racial color blindness she learned at St. James closely resembles how race was handled at St.
Giles and subsequently at Fenwick High School. In our schooling, we both learned the principles
of Catholicism through parable and scripture. We read of concubines and harlots, lepers and
paralytics, gentiles and Jews. We learned that temptation was the original sin and joy came
second to piety. We knelt on pews that left our knees bruised and saw holy incense make
churchgoers faint. After pain comes happiness, or so said our priests.
From first to twelfth grade, all of my schooling was shaped by religion. Every rule in
school was somehow connected to morality; the length of my plaid skirt, the distance between
myself and the boy I liked at a school dance (leave room for the Holy Spirit!), the humility I was
begged to have, the neatness of my unruly curls, the properness of my speech. The Bible,
Vatican, and my head priest had the final say on right versus wrong. Any resistance to their word
resulted in Justice Under God, or JUG, – my high school's sanctified version of detention.
According to the teachings of the church, pain, suffering and punishment are germane to
life, deserved even – justified. But it made me wonder: If God was omnipotent as the Church
taught us, why had our Black ancestors endured so much violence? Were the plights of Black
Americans a part of God’s will? Could our racial disparity be mended by being “twice as nice,”
accepting discrimination graciously and committing to our faith? Was faith synonymous with
assimilation? Was assimilation synonymous with whiteness?
My grandma has kept her faith for 84 years, through her husband’s two bouts of cancer
and eventual premature death, her own fight with cancer, the pains of family dissonance, the
16
death of many friends, and the perpetual violence and disenfranchisement of the Black
community. The questions I ask myself about God’s role in racial realities in America never
seemed to occur to her.
Her understanding is simple and poetic; God gave us free will. It’s the oldest story in the
Bible, starting with Adam and Eve. God didn’t do this to us, people did and people aren’t perfect.
You just have to find the good people, stick with them, love them through their differences.
The Church gave her those “good people” – the fellow choir singers and carpool moms
and Eucharistic ministers that judged people by their moral merit before their melanin levels. To
this day, her idea of a perfect weekend is attending a Saturday-evening service with her friends
followed by dinner at Blueberry Hill cafe. For her, it’s bliss.
Despite the condemnation of nuns or suppression of individualism, the Catholic Church
offered millions of Black, Brown and mixed-race people like her a community where their
primary identifier was no longer the hue of their skin.
For the generations of my ancestors before Myrtle who chose to embrace people of all
races, live in integrated communities, and marry across racial lines far before it was socially
acceptable, a post-racial society was a dream.
Living life unburdened by the weight of racism is an unspoken ideal passed through my
family lineage almost biologically. It’s not a rejection of race, but a hopeful prayer for
acceptance, prosperity and love despite the stereotypes, customs, and laws that were built to keep
the Black side of my family away from the white.
Myrtle’s paternal grandmother, Minie Cahill, was an Irish immigrant. She met her
husband, Arthur Taylor, while they both worked as hired help for a family in Virginia. He was a
chef, she was a maid. When Minie fell in love with Arthur, her previous life in Galway ceased to
17
exist. According to my grandma’s memory, Minie’s family effectively disowned her and were
appalled by her choice to marry a Black man; he was the son of slaves, the only group of
Americans lower status than she.
Minie left her faith in Ireland – no one was Catholic in the South anyway – and agreed to
marry Arthur. They left Virginia for Ohio to escape anti-miscegenation laws and went on to have
six children.
Minie’s life in Ireland wasn’t something she spoke of often. In fact, my grandma had
almost no knowledge of Minie’s life before she emigrated. Minie tried to distance herself from
Irish identity, starting when she lived in the South. Irish immigrants weren’t welcome. Their
accent was thick and gruff and their religion was deviant from the Protestant standard. Being
involved with a Black man was sacrilegious.
When they moved to Ohio, her treatment was possibly even worse. Irish immigrants fled
to the United States in search of work after the potato famine ravished their country. They were
now competing for the same jobs as Italian, Polish, Russian and other European immigrants. The
Irish were the last ethnic group to come over in droves and thus treated terribly by the other,
more established, immigrant groups. They were considered lowly, second only to Black people,
called “white niggers” and “insideout negros.”
Minie felt incessant prejudice – from her own family and from other white people. She
couldn’t hide her accent or the fact that she was Irish. Her relationship with her husband and her
six mixed-race children pushed her even further from her white counterparts. The Black
community embraced her. The white immigrant community did not.
Minie and Arthur’s union started a generation’s long partnership between Irish and Black
people in my family. When the Sister of Mercy nuns welcomed Myrtle and her parents into the
18
Church, both sides of Myrtle's heritage converged. She started to learn what it meant to be of
both Black and Irish descent – she started to develop a sense of identity. The Irish Catholic
Community gave her and her parents stabilizing roots. Those roots are the foundation of my
family.
The Model Irish Meets the Model Minority
My dad’s childhood was emblematic of Irish Catholic culture. He was the eighth of ten
children; his mom, my grandma Dee, used to joke that she was “pregnant for seventeen years
straight.” A strict Catholic opposition to birth control and an ingrained belief that a woman’s role
in marriage was to have kids until she no longer could meant that Dee’s life was never again her
own. According to my dad, she was always tired, always chasing down one child or another,
always pregnant.
Her husband, my grandpa Ray, assumed a very traditional husband role. He worked for
the Sears corporation, grinding it out from suburb to city each week in order to support his
ever-expanding family. He’d leave each morning, briefcase in tow, and return each evening to a
glass (or three) of Scotch, neat.
They lived in a nice western suburb of Chicago that pipelined children from public high
school to midwestern college, to a steady job, marriage and kids. Life was laid out, and if you
followed the path, you could end up right back where you started, which wasn’t altogether a bad
thing. Family, a middle class neighborhood, homeownership; it was a rosy existence, albeit
homogenous and devoid of diversity.
For Irish Catholics, especially in the Midwest, sending your child to Notre Dame
University was the penultimate point of parental pride. It was, and still is, one of the premier
19
Catholic universities in the country, ranking in the top 10% of all American universities. This is
where my parents met in 1981.
For my dad, Matt, who was an all-star high school athlete and at the top of his class,
Notre Dame was a tangible dream. When he arrived in 1980, he immediately fit in, the exact type
of student they’d hope to admit. Bright and ambitious, of Irish Catholic descent, enthusiastic
football fan, aspiring doctor, future Mr. Illinois.
When my mom, Kathy, arrived on campus in 1981, her acceptance wasn’t as immediate.
My mom was one of a few Black women on campus, which wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. Being
the odd Black-girl-out was the status-quo for my mom, who spent her childhood at
predominately white Catholic institutions. But, like myself, when she left the familiar confines of
childhood, her complexion, hair texture and poor upbringing connotated stereotypes and untruths
about her character. She too had to start answering the “what are you” question for herself.
In a 1985 article in Scholastic, Notre Dame’s student-run magazine, one writer, Ted
Kelleher (no relation), describes Notre Dame as having an “embarrassing little secret. … that in
the better than twenty years since the Civil Rights Act, and even under the leadership of one of
the original members of the Civil Rights Commission, Notre Dame still has big problems with
on-campus race relations. While there is no open warfare, things are far from comfortable and
harmonious.”
Kelleher continues to say “while white middle class suburban Americans may have
rejected bigotry as an intellectual proposition, the old misunderstandings are still there; Notre
Dame is no exception to this phenomenon.”
My mom felt this tension – with white students and with other Black students who eyed
her fairer complexion dubiously. When my parents started dating, they both recall being one of a
20
few interracial couples on campus. In their partnership, my mom found a deep sense of comfort
and acceptance. She, being a freshman, fell into my dad’s orbit, which embraced and welcomed
her without question of her skin color.
Not all of her classmates of color were so lucky. Kelleher quotes Lisa Boykin, a
sophomore at the time, saying “I can still remember walking into parties freshman year and
sensing that people were surprised or uncomfortable about my being there. I’ve spent a lot of
time at parties being ignored.” Another student, describes how they “gained immediate notoriety
as ‘that Black kid up on the second floor.’”
Ken McManus, a senior at the time, in speaking to Scholastic poignantly articulates the
underlying tension on campus – “unfamiliarity breeds misunderstanding and thus discomfort.”
When my dad proposed on the night of my mom’s graduation, in the Grotto of Our Lady
of Lourdes, surrounded by sand colored stone and prayer candles, they sealed their connection to
their Alma Mater and thanked it for bringing them together.
They saved money on flowers by getting married two days after Christmas. The long
middle aisle of St. Stanislaus Catholic Church was lined with poinsettias and pine. Pillar candles
flickered throughout the church and the smell of Christmas incense still lingered from the
holiday services. Over 200 guests filled the pews, the bride’s family on one side and the groom’s
on the other. Clutching her bouquet in one hand and her dad’s arm with the other, my mom’s first
thought was “I can’t wait to marry Matt.” Her second thought, “the church is so segregated.”
The groom’s guests were all white and the bride’s were predominantly Black. Their filing
to two opposite sides of the church was a matter of tradition, but it also visually represented the
differences of their upbringing.
21
Guests came from all parts of the country to celebrate their marriage — an act my parents
always viewed as proud displays of support for their interracial marriage. The church may have
divided along racial lines, but the reception was the biggest party of mixed-racial company any
of them had ever been to. Two families, putting aside any underlying prejudice to become one.
Interracial Relationships: A Bridge + A Divide
Leading up to their wedding, my parent’s relationship was both challenged and
celebrated. My dad’s family, particularly my grandpa Ray, had questions: Where will you live?
What will happen to your kids? Is this safe? It was 1986, just 19 years after Loving V Virginia
banned state anti-miscegenation laws and stereotypes of interracial marriage were still common.
Anti-miscegenation laws existed longer in this country than interracial marriage has been
protected by law. Stereotypes against the mixing of Black and white, in both marriage and
procreation, still echo through politics and pop culture today – like the widespread criticism for
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s marriage or the pressure put on Black Bachelor and
Bachelorette contestants to choose partners of the same race.
The stigmas against interracial relationships not only create distance between races, it
creates distance among people of the same race. I know this to be true within my family, both in
the beginning of my parent’s relationship and within my mother’s paternal lineage.
My mother’s father, Nate Nelson, never knew his grandfather. It wasn’t until his mom,
Mary Green, affectionately called Mamma, was in her late-life that she revealed a long-harbored
secret to her daughter-in-law, Myrtle. Mamma was half white and her mother was a victim of
22
rape by their white neighbor. Her brother was also fathered by the same white man, who had
apparently raped Mamma’s mother repeatedly.
In the small Mississippi town where she was born, Mamma would hear whispers of the
man who was her father. His name was Prince Edward Maxwell and he and his family lived
close to Mamma. Yet, his white children had a much different reality than his biracial children;
for one, his acknowledgement. Mary denied her whiteness completely.
There was no talk of Mulatto or mixed. She was Black, through and through. Myrtle, who
met Mamma when she was 18 and first started dating Nate, knew Mamma to be quiet and
guarded. She had five sons and busied herself with raising her boys, always quick to speak about
them before speaking about herself. There was distance between her and her sons, which Myrtle
choked up to gender dynamics. By the time Myrtle and Nate were married, Myrtle became her
confidant and perhaps her first real female friend.
In the later half of Mamma’s life, the shame of being part-white and the prodcut of a rape
was a burden she no longer wished to carry. She never shared the story of her childhood with her
five sons. Myrtle was the first to know. It wasn’t until she revealed the truth of her identity that
the incongruencies of my grandfather’s childhood began to add up. A new layer to Nate’s
identity started to form.
What could have hardened him towards white people instead encouraged my grandfather
to further value radical inclusivity. When my mom brought my dad home for the first time, he
exemplified this in spades and embraced my father like the son he never had.
The conversation of an interracial relationship was easy on the Black side of my family.
On the white side, things were more tumultuous.
23
My grandfather Ray was a stoic man. He didn’t know how to communicate with my mom
when she first started dating my dad. In fact, he didn’t know how to communicate deep emotions
at all. In their Irish Catholic household, the solution to pain was prayer. Amongst the chaos of
raising ten kids, two of whom died in their youth, the whims of emotions were second to
survival. They kept their emotions in and nothing was high stakes enough to warrant a real
discussion. Until now.
Ray resorted to ignoring my mom. For Kathy, this feeling wasn’t new; she felt it at her
parochial school growing up and she felt it at Notre Dame. Now, in her personal life, she felt it
again. This time, it stung harder and deeper. This was meant to be her future family and they
disapproved of her because of the melanin in her skin? After navigating white spaces her whole
life, it seemed unfathomable that she would marry into a family that didn’t accept her. But, like
the journalist from Notre Dame said back in 1985, “unfamiliarity breeds misunderstanding and
thus discomfort.”
She knew the solution; she continued to be her gracious self and pretended like it didn’t
bother her. He never had to say overtly racist things, “as a Black person, you just know,” my
mom says. She was “twice-as-nice” and tried to win my grandpa over.
For my dad, his father’s prejudice was shameful and angering. My grandfather’s beliefs
were rooted in his traditional views on marriage. Marriage was meant to fit neatly into
predefined roles– the father works to support his family, the mother has as many children as
possible. This is how he and my grandma, and their parents before them, lived. Bringing
opposing races into the sanctity of marriage complicated his simple understanding of family. It
created an ever-growing distance between father and son.
24
Before their wedding, my dad presented an ultimatum: “If you are asking me to choose
between you and Kathy, I choose my wife.”
“Okay,” my grandpa responded, and they never discussed it again.
From that point forward, he evolved to love my mom like a daughter – a shift few would
have been able to make so quickly and so genuinely. It changed the trajectory of all of our lives
and allowed us to move forward as one family, blended across racial lines. The wedding
celebrations to follow mirrored that joy and unity.
Eight years later, my parents had me, a tow-headed baby born into a world as liberal and
inclusive as ever. They bestowed upon me the hope of a new generation; a generation unmoored
by the racial stratification that defined the lives of all the generations before me.
However wishful their thinking may have been, societal change starts at the personal
level. For me, it started long before my birth.
As I listen to and record and write these stories, the lines between me and my mother,
grandmothers, great grandmothers and great great grandmothers blur. While we are all so
drastically different, in appearance, privilege, education and location, we are bonded through
time like gold links on a bracelet with no clasp.
My mother’s familiarity with whiteness – through her upbringing and her mixed racial
lineage – allowed her to overcome discomfort with race. This comfort with race – as a topic of
conversation, an identity, a piece of history – doesn’t eliminate her awareness of whiteness or her
own sense of otherness. Her guiding principle, and a value she instilled in us kids, is to never let
otherness transform into inferiority. Wear it like a badge of honor.
I too am both Black and Irish, with my father’s blue eyes and the Irish last name
“Kelleher.” My dad used to jokingly tell us we were “Irafrican,” a fictitious ethnicity unique to
25
people of mixed Irish and Black heritage. I always thought it was just a silly play on words. But,
perhaps my Dad was onto something.
In our unique identity as “Irafrican,” which was more of a family inside-joke than a
serious attempt at inventing a new race, we were encouraged to celebrate our otherness. In the
overlap of our social stratification, Black people and Irish people formed a unique kinship. From
the center of that overlap, the foundation of my identity, a beacon to evolve, accept and love
radiates. I owe much of that to my cultures’ shared experiences in the church.
In the void lies the ancestors I could not reach; the slaves that weren’t documented as
they were stolen from their homes, the cousins and aunts and uncles whose experiences as Black
people were far more violent than my own, the men and women who felt they needed to pass as
white in order to be desired, the white ancestors who lived a life burdened by hate, the mothers
and fathers who had no opportunity to live for themselves or fell victim to alcoholism and
depression.
As I walk through my family history, it makes me think that perhaps goodness is
biological – that time will kick the darkness so far out that memory becomes one big, undefined,
glowing blob of light. And all I can feel is gratitude – to be alive, to be my parent’s daughter, to
share this beautifully unique experience of being me.
26
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29
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In Our Skin: Generational biracialism in America is a proposal for a memoir-style book that explores the multifaceted history of biracial identity in America through the lens of my own ancestry. This sample chapter represents the culmination of many months spent diving into my family history, utilizing census records, family artifacts, photographs, birth records and death notices, journals, and literature. In Our Skin challenges the binary nature of racial history in the United States by employing critical race theory and weaving in my personal experiences to dissect the complexities of racial identity. The book highlights the stories of my ancestors, who have been crossing racial lines for generations, even when it was neither socially acceptable nor legal to do so. This sample chapter serves as a framework for the book's overall narrative—a lyrical interplay of history, personal anecdote, and insightful analysis.
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Kelleher, Olivia
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In our skin: generational biracialism in America
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2024-05
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05/22/2024
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