White supremacy shows up in unexpected places

The first White supremacist I ever met was my grandmother.

While many of you can perhaps relate to that experience, it’s a strange sentence for me to type as a Black man. She was Black, too, and at some point in the history of domination—or love or folly, perhaps—her bloodline was mixed with both Chinese and Creole in such a way that she was able to pass, to live her public life as a White woman. She looked White—at least to White racists of the Deep South, who are perpetually foolable—and so she spent her childhood getting along in the Jim Crow South, because Jim Crow is and always will be an ignoramus.

In the South, there are different classes related to passing. There are people who can’t pass but want to, those who can but don’t want to, those who neither can nor want to, and finally those who can and want to and ultimately do. My grandmother was able to pass, and because it made life easier for her family, she did. The ethics of such a decision might make good conversation fodder for you and your own family—she’s dead anyway, so go for it—but know this: “making life easier” was the primary decision-making metric my grandmother had as a young Black girl.