The Man

Dilman studied the tops of the reporters’ heads encircling him, and then he went on.

“In our family of four, there were two of us who were black-ski

“Now, it is a regrettable fact, or so I believe, that among American Negroes themselves, most of them, the lighter-ski

“Yes, every Negro like myself, especially one who has had a nearly white wife and an almost white daughter, knows a good deal about this subject. I can tell you, with considerable authority to support the statement, that at least three thousand American Negroes with light-colored skin, at least three thousand a year, maybe as many as six thousand a year, take advantage of their appearance, slip away from their Negro homes, communities, family, friends, and cross over and join the white race. I can tell you, also on excellent authority, that of the one million mixed or interracial marriages in the United States at the present time, and there are that many, at least nine hundred thousand are marriages in which the white partner does not know his or her mate is Negro, or of some other color, because that mate is passing as white and has got away with it.

“For the most part, Negro parents do not like it when their fairer-colored children quit their race and surreptitiously join the white classification, the white world, the white census, pretending to be white when they are not. Negro parents will condone the action of one of their children if he passes as white in order to acquire a better education or get a better job that might not otherwise be available to him. This is condoned on the condition that the one passing remembers he or she is Negro, and returns from the school or business world to resume family and social life among his or her Negro brethren. What Negroes resent is permanent passing by one of their number who resigns entirely from his race, attempts to blot out his blackness, pretends to be white in school, in work, and in his social life. Yet, as much as Negroes resent permanent passing, only rarely do they expose or give away to whites the true origin of their defectors. They will guard a passer’s secret because, as black Americans, suffering as a minority group, they can understand how driven one of their kind must be to risk this form of escape into equality.”

Dilman halted. The circle of heads came up. He inspected the faces, nodded, then resumed speaking, and the heads went down to the note-taking.

“Now you have the background explaining my daughter’s defection. She was reared as a Negro, and around her she could see the terrible injustices and inequities that were to be her lot. When she realized that she alone, of the four of us, need not endure the suffering, like a curse on her for the rest of her years, she fled it, she escaped it, she ran over the line and far away, and lost herself in the white world of New York City, where there was no reason for anyone to suspect that she was not white. I will not stand here and say I approved of Mindy Dilman’s action. I will simply say I did not try to stop or dissuade her then, and I would not now, because I understand her and the three to six thousand other Negro girls and boys who a

“I understand Mindy and all like her who pass as white, because I can understand, as many of you around me ca

“And I understand more. I understand the deep rage within Negroes, the deep and helpless rage that defies all reason and sense, against not only their present lives but against lives in their past, rage at the accidents of heredity and of environment that made them as they are, and put them in the wrong place at the wrong time. Do you have the slightest idea of what truly makes one human being black and another white? When you consider how violently a person’s life is affected from birth to death if he is born black rather than white, it is almost impossible to believe that such a slight change within the human body creates this vast and traumatic difference.

“According to the foremost geneticists, blacks and whites possess within them the same pigments, the same skin-coloring elements, exactly the same red blood. Then what creates the difference in their skin shading which so affects their lives? The decisive factor is a particle that ca

“To create a human life, a Mindy, requires two factors-a male sperm so minute that a hundred million sperms can be counted in a single drop of seminal fluid, and a female egg so tiny that it is smaller than a typewritten period on a printed page. Both this liquid drop and this period-sized egg contain something even smaller called chromosomes, and they in turn contain something yet smaller called genes, and these invisible genes are what give each newborn child his hereditary characteristics and control his skin color. If a new-born child has a dominant gene that will cause the production of excessive melanin, a dark pigment, he will be black on the outside. If he possesses a different kind of microscopic gene, he will be brown or yellow on the outside. And if he has an unseeable gene that produces hardly any melanin, he will be some shade of white. And so, what a Negro is comes down to no more than a slight shake and blend of genes, like tiny dice rolling out of the past, and when the shake is done, one goes before the world as a black-ski