One Drop Quotes

“These boxes held only ashes of answers, and all their presence meant was more mysteries, and a worry that someday something else might explode.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“The minute you let other people label you, you let them take away your power.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“All parents must reconcile their fantasies for their children with the choices their kids actually make.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“The close election results demonstrated the ability of black voters to decide a race when whites were divided.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“Pinchback later explained himself: “I have learned to look at things as they are and not as I would have them....This country, at least so far as the South is concerned, is a white man’s country....What I wish to impress upon my people, is that no change is likely to take place in our day and in general that will reverse this order of things.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“Writing in 1453 Portuguese royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara called upon the “Curse of Ham” story in Genesis to justify his countrymen’s enslavement of Africans, the race cursed “to be subject to all the other races of the world.” Slavery had been going on since the ancient civilizations, but Zurara’s explanation marked the first time that enslavement was seen as a matter of biological inheritance rather than a conditional state brought about by war or an economic transaction. The notion that servitude was passed down through blood became particularly expedient as the plantation societies in the New World required more and more labor. Not only could the workforce continually regenerate itself through reproduction, but a seemingly infinite supply of new slaves were available for purchase on the Dark Continent. While African states had long been selling war prisoners to their Muslim neighbors, the Europeans, armed with their quasi-religious, then quasi-scientific rationale, elevated the practice into an international institution.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“In 1876 Louisiana produced conflicting election returns yet again—this time throwing the outcome of the presidential race into question. Neither the Democratic presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, nor the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, had a majority of electoral votes without the results from Louisiana or the two other contested Southern states, South Carolina and Florida. In Congress, Democrats kept blocking attempts to resolve the dispute, and when President Grant reached his last week in office, still no successor had been named. There was talk of another civil war if Tilden wasn’t declared the victor.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“P.B.S. Pinchback, a black politician originally from Mississippi and a supporter of Governor Warmoth’s, put it more bluntly: “It is wholesale falsehood to say that we wish to force ourselves upon white people.” In his view blacks “could get no rights the whites did not see fit to give them.” But the colored Creoles couldn’t reconcile this attitude with their urgent desire “to be respected and treated”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“Equal rights before the law, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, all of these things were...trampled underfoot and spat upon.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“But in that lightning moment that exposed the country’s deep racial divide, there was something about O.J.’s going free that, to my surprise, made me inexplicably happy.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“The historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall spent fifteen years studying microfilmed records throughout Louisiana and in Spain, France, and Texas to create a database containing the largest collection of individual slave records ever assembled. An article about her achievement that appeared on the front page of the New York Times noted that Hall nearly lost her sight in the”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“dying should be like a birthday party to end all birthday parties.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“You know, Blissy, just because you share blood with someone doesn’t mean you have to like them,”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“It’s said that the hearing is the last sense to go when someone is dying.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“Years later I’d understand that a mark of adulthood is the ability to live with uncertainty.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“the Democrats’ tactics of intimidation, bribery, and fraud gave the party control of elective offices across the state. In”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“Along the way my loyalties had shifted without my even realizing it.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“Years later I’d understand that a mark of adulthood is the ability to live with uncertainty. But back then I wanted to figure everything out, myself most of all.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

“Dating across the color line was just another way of bucking convention. But since my father neither looked nor identified as black, there wasn't much risk of public censure. The women could be daring and modern without being truly radical.”
― Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets