Anatole Broyard - Disclosure

Disclosure

In 1996, six years after Broyard's death, Henry Louis Gates criticized Broyard for concealing his African-American ancestry in a profile entitled "White Like Me" in The New Yorker. He expanded on this in "The Passing of Anatole Broyard", an essay published the next year in his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997). Gates felt that Broyard had deceived friends and family by "passing" as white, but also understood his literary ambition. He wrote,

"When those of mixed ancestry—and the majority of blacks are of mixed ancestry— disappear into the white majority, they are traditionally accused of running from their "blackness." Yet why isn't the alternative a matter of running to their "whiteness"?"

(In his mini-series, African American Lives 2 (2008), Gates learned by DNA analysis and genealogical studies that he himself was more than half white by ancestry.)

In 2007, Broyard's daughter Bliss published a memoir, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets. (The title related to the "one-drop rule" adopted into law in some Southern states that classified people with any black ancestry as black.) It was about her psychological and physical journeys of exploring her father's family in New York, New Orleans and the West Coast, and their meaning for her own identity and life.