AFTER WE BECAME WHITE

Klimas reflects on race, identity, and American history in this debut memoir.

When the author’s grandfather Benner Turner died in the 1980s, the New England coroner who signed his death certificate listed him as white. This was, writes Klimas, “the same man who was born Black in the Jim Crow South,” suffered under systemic segregation and discrimination, and served from 1950 to 1967 as president of the historically Black South Carolina State College. As a light-skinned Black man, Turner “passed for white without ever trying,” as does the author, who movingly reflects on her own struggles with identity. Klimas notes that, because of the legacy of transatlantic slavery, she too doesn’t know her ancestors, who were “the progeny of rape, children sold away from their parents.” Compounding the author’s difficulties reconciling her racial identity with her skin tone was a perpetually absent father and childhood spent partially raised by her grandparents. Sharing her personal experiences, the author offers poignant reflections on often unexplored aspects of colorism in the post–World War II era. Klimas also seeks to reclaim her grandfather’s ambiguous legacy; a prominent Southern educator, Turner is often treated unfavorably in modern historical narratives due to criticisms of his presidency following the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, in which police brutally beat and killed South Carolina State College student protestors. While the author does not dispute characterizations of her grandfather’s more traditionalist leadership style, she points out that he was forced to navigate South Carolina’s segregationist system by forming relationships with white politicians and offers a convincing defense of his leadership in transforming “a run-down school…[into] an accredited university” with distinguished faculty. This history is backed by scholarly research and a short bibliography. Written in an intimate style that does not prevaricate about Klimas’ adolescent mistakes or her family’s foibles, this is a thoughtful work that blends family history into a larger narrative of race and color in America. The text includes a collection of full-color family photographs going back multiple generations.

A thought-provoking, personal exploration of colorism in America.