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I am in the middle of Ms. Broyard's book and am enjoying it immensely. Aside from being exhaustively researched and well-written, the book tells a story that many of us who are 'too white to be black and two black to be white' can really identify with. I have met cousins for the first time as an adult (one of whom turned me on to the book) because their parents were living 'on the other side' and didn't want them to get to know the rest of the family.

In my experience, growing up as I did in the 70's, it was blacks who always enforced the ODR (so I don't completely understand some of the criticisms noted above). No matter how light you were, self-identifying as anything other than black was severely frowned upon and earned you and 'oreo' label or worse.

Only the Jim Crow era's "One-Drop Rule" tarbrushes a white person black. Anatole Broyard made his non-blackness plain. If he rejected the ODR, then he was not black; and the "passing" recriminations against this deceased white man are false. Only U.S. Americans conjure up the ODR "different races" essentialism -- the notion someone can "pass for white" yet "be" invisibly "black." Moreover, our U.S.A.'s lunatic ODR essentialism has only been around the last 100 years or so. (The ODR followed abolition of slavery -- in the South, decades after. 1st ODR statute in the nation was Tenn., 1910.) Our country's "different races" craziness gets worse by the year. But look critically at who insists on the ODR, and at who passes for "black." Ask why are the Hispanic, Arabic, and North Africans exempted from the ODR? If ethnic culture supposedly trumps "black race" essentialism, then why doesn't it exempt Louisiana Creoles and the Broyard family? Ask finally how on earth enforcing the ODR as unwanted taint on white people's "blood" helps ordinary black Americans?

Bliss is like MOST of us French Creoles whom have been forced to uncover our "Tangled Roots" following the Louisiana Purchase. In time, she WILL achieve re-balance.

Anatole Broyard spent most of his life in a city with far more mulattoes and "tarbrushed" whites than New Orleans. It's called New York City, and most of the people in it with partial "black blood" are Hispanics (Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, etc.) No one demands that these Latinos surrender their identity to blacks or call themselves black. Why then should "tarbrushed" whites and light mulattoes of Creole or Anglo heritage do it?

Bliss Broyard is a deluded white liberal who met a few black-identified distant relatives and converted to their "one drop" belief in forced hypodescent (for Anglos and Creoles only; the Hispanic rejection of any identification with blacks is treated with great respect by both blacks and liberals). The "one drop" myth is based on the assumption of black genetic inferiority. By denouncing her mixed-white Creole father as "black," Bliss is proclaiming the inferiority of the race she claims to champion.

Hopefully these incidents will become rare or nonexistant with the next generation. My optimism is fueled by the fact that my own son (WASP) has married, openly, an African American girl and seems to be on his way to "happily ever after" after 10 years. A colleague of mine's daughter has married a WASP and are hopefully onto to their new lives.

It breaks my heart to hear of the pain and angst caused by little melanin cells.

Thanks for a great show.

Your father's writing was the first I recall having read with the conscious recognition that it was a model for me, something to use as a benchmark for what fine constituted fine writing.

And, speaking of brilliant writing, your story makes me think immediately of the novel "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth.