I don’t particularly care if Broyard is white, black, pink, or green. You see, I’m a science fiction fan, so I tend to believe in only one “race”. We’re called human. As for the book, it’s the story of a person’s search for their ancestors. As a genealogist, I find that interesting. If your Ethiopian, Swedish, or Korean and you’re writing about searching for your roots, I’ll be interested even though your ancestry is vastly different than mine.

Everyone wants to be part Indian precisely because Indians do not try to claim everyone who has “Indian blood.” Hypodescent yields contempt. Unfortunately, elite American blacks like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (the one who first denounced Anatole Broyard as a lighter kind of “black” too inferior for the honor of calling himself white) actively mislead people of good will by promoting and demanding obedience to the lie that whites “tainted” with Negro blood have no right to be “white.” If that were true, Hispanics and Arabs would be “black” since nearly all of them have some “black blood.”