A Secret Father, a Black Literary Treasure and an Old Woman
The New York Times
June 28, 2004
By BRENT STAPLES
Gladys Watt and Lydia Turnage Connolly had been friends for roughly 30 years – a decade of that as next-door neighbors in Greenwich, Conn. – by the time Mrs. Connolly died in 1984 at the venerable age of 99. Mrs. Connolly seemed to have no family; she relied on Mrs. Watt to take her grocery
shopping and regularly ate Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at her best friend’s home.“I never saw a single visitor to her house. Not one,” Mrs. Watt told me recently, adding that her friend had been tight-lipped about her origins. When she alluded to her family at all, it was only to say that her father had been “a wonderful man.”
Mrs. Watt thought that she knew her friend pretty well. She then stumbled upon a startling secret. Mrs. Connolly had once let the secret slip to strangers but, for most of her life, she had apparently seemed intent on carrying it to the grave.
Black columnist Brent Staples has apparently been hired by The York Times for the sole purpose of teaching whites to revere the “one drop” myth. That’s all the lying hypocrite ever writes about.
The New York Times appears to have a policy of NEVER printing letters in opposition to Staples and the “one drop” myth. Whites of mixed ancestry are always denounced by Staples as “black,” while no one is permitted, for example, to point out the obvious black ancestry in Hispanics and Arabs as a defense. If Mrs. Connolly is “black” or “African American,” why aren’t they? The truth is that Mrs. Connolly was a European American of mixed racial ancestry – a concept that Staples has no trouble understanding if the “black” ancestry is changed to American Indian.
Did it ever occur to Staples that American Indians are never denounced as biologically inferior by “Bell Curve” racists precisely because their ancestry is acknowledged as compatible with a “white” identity? In his determination to drag others into the “black” fold, he only degrades the “race” he claims to champion.
(As for this curley/kinky hair obsession, I’ve met many so-called “pure whites” with frizzy, nearly kinky hair. Are they therefore “black”?)