The Light, Bright and Almost White in Black America

W.F. Twyman, Jr & J.D. Richmond

Dear Reader,

Ever since the publication of “Black and Blue and Blond” by Thomas Chatterton Williams in the Virginia Quarterly Review, we have thought about the delicate question of skin color in the black American experience. Blackness is less than skin color and more than skin color. Writer Thomas Williams grappled with this question in all of its nuance and complexity. And, in the end, he came to terms with the risk of permanently killing off the culture, “blackness,” as the black father of a blond, blue-eyed baby girl named Marlow. There was a place until recently in the culture for Marlow in American blackness, Williams wrote, but not so much Paris where Williams lives with his French wife, Valentine, and two blue-eyed, blond children.

We began this correspondence because we questioned whether there is a place reserved for light, bright and almost white blacks today in America. A review of U.S. history reveals a time and a place where blacks with the physical appearance of Marlow were accepted and embraced and warmly seen as part of the culture. The first black lawyer in Ohio, John Mercer Langston, was so fair-skinned that he was urged to pass himself off as a Spaniard or Frenchman as a condition for law school admission in the 1850s. Langston refused to deny his…