White Lies 
James Campbell
- In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Colour Line by George Hutchinson Buy this book
Writing in the New Yorker in April 1986, Calvin Trillin told the story of Susie Guillory, a native of Louisiana who, when applying for a passport, discovered that she was African American. According to the state’s ‘one-drop rule’, Americans with even a 1 in 32 part of Negro blood – or a nameless, faceless great-great-great-grandfather – were classified as ‘Col’, or coloured, on birth certificates. When he learned of the discovery, Guillory’s husband said: ‘Hell, she ain’t a nigger.’ The one-drop rule was phased out soon afterwards, partly as a result of the legal suit brought by Guillory, but it persists in common parlance, in both the US and Britain: your part-Scottish, part-Native American, part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
James Campbell’s biography of James Baldwin, Talking at the Gates, has recently been reissued in the US.
print layout
tell a friend