If you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, and look like a duck… are you really a duck?

In the wake of the Don Imus of CBS Radio and three Duke lacrosse players had there charges dismissed because of wrongful accusations, The Story from American Public Media talks with Jil who tells Dick Gordon how difficult it is to feel unaccepted in both communities. The story from Jil Williams can be found here, titled Fading Black.

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Jil Williams' Essay

Jil Williams wrote this essay about having a light-skinned black family in a race-conscious society.


I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the late fifties, sixties, and early seventies. There were no drugs, gangs, or poverty in my neighborhood. My father was a doctor and my mother was a housewife. We lived on a quiet tree lined street of brick bungalows. I attended a Catholic grade school and an all girls' high school. I was sheltered, but sheltered from what? You see, I was black and all that I saw with the exception of nuns, priest, and grocery store owners were people black like me. Chemist, teachers, lawyers, doctors, butchers, policemen, the list goes on, were the fabric of our neighborhood. Perhaps I should qualify that by saying that black like me meant, frequently, a person of mixed race appearance. We were the last vestiges of mixed raced descendents of white slave masters. Of course, I was not aware of this at the time. We were not the norm, but we were certainly not an anomaly. I grew up thinking that all black people were middle class, Catholic, and not unusually, mixed looking. When I went away to college, I naturally gravitated to other students of color. Some occasionally teased me about my color and social class, but I never felt completely alienated by other blacks. White people were foreign to me. It was not so much their color, because many of my friends and family looked as white as them, but the sense of distance and aloofness. I was twelve before I realized that both of my next-door neighbors were black. I thought they were white because they acted much like the only whites I had ever encountered. They were decidedly cool, and distant to my siblings and me. I did not judge race by the color of your skin, rather, by a person's attitude or affect.

[con't here]