“Colored Me.”

A fascinating story that begins with a curious anecdote of family genealogy and leads to a discussion of the history of eugenics and racial classifications in midcentury Virginia.

This [photo] is the mar­riage license of my great-great grand­fa­ther,  born in Ire­land in 1854 and mar­ried to a Vir­ginia native in 1884. His race, you’ll notice, is given as “col­ored.” Since when are Irish­men colored?

My father found this when he started doing fam­ily his­tory after he retired. We mostly laughed, a lot, when he revealed it at a fam­ily Christ­mas party: that year he sent us all Kwanza cards as a joke.

But being a his­to­rian I couldn’t help but be fas­ci­nated…. I thought the “Irish were not white” bit was wildly overstated.

I was clearly wrong, and look­ing into it a lit­tle more resulted in a whole class les­son around the image of the Irish in the 19th cen­tury and the range of anti-Irish nativism. It focused on the mal­leabil­ity of stereo­types, and how what seems “nat­ural” and obvi­ous in one era seems odd in the next.

But still how to explain this doc­u­ment? It was his mar­riage cer­tifi­cate: surely even the green­est Irish immi­grant knew enough to avoid being classed as “colored.”

If you take a close look at it, it gets more and more interesting….

Read the whole thing.  

(h/t commenter HCCarey in this really interesting comment thread on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog about mutual cultural understanding, or the lack thereof, between American Jews and African-Americans.)