Did the Pope Pass As White?

Pope Leo XIV appears to have grown up in an all-white Chicago suburb despite being, in part, a Creole of Color.

Boomers, like Pope Leo XIV (b. 1955) are notorious today for being born in a good time and place, but their actual upbringing was rather crowded. There were at least 46 students (not counting absentees) in the Pope’s Class 2B in 1962.

Cardinal Robert “Bob” Prevost, who was born in Chicago and raised in the south-side suburb of Dolton just outside the city line, has been elected Pope Leo XIV.

His upbringing was strikingly similar to my wife’s, who was born in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood just east of suburban Oak Park. Like him, both of her parents worked in school systems. His parents were amateur musicians, while my wife’s father was a professional classical tuba player and musicians’ union leader.

One interesting difference is that the new Pope appears to have a smidgen of sub-Saharan ancestry through his New Orlean Creole of Color ancestors.

From the New York Times news section:

New Pope Has Creole Roots in New Orleans

His ancestry, traced to a historic enclave of Afro-Caribbean culture, links Leo XIV to the rich and sometimes overlooked Black Catholic experience in America.

By Richard Fausset and Robert Chiarito

Richard Fausset grew up in New Orleans and reports on the American South. Robert Chiarito reported from New Lenox, Ill.

May 8, 2025

Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal selected on Thursday as the new pope, is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans.

Creoles of Color are mixed race people in Louisiana whose view of race derives from their French and Spanish ancestors who didn’t believe in a one-drop color line like Anglos do. They tend to believe in a Color Continuum. They generally view themselves as superior to blacks.

When they venture outside of Louisiana, they tend to have a hard time explaining how they self-identify to other Americans, black or white, so sometimes they just give up and let people consider them as more or less white.

This is the backstory behind various notorious cases of “passing” as white, such as primordial jazz great Jelly Roll Morton and literary critic Anatole Broyard. Culturally dominant African-Americans tend to be peeved at Creoles of Color for not subscribing to the One Drop Rule.

The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.

On the other hand, how black the new Pope is can be exaggerated. Here’s his brother, who looks rather like Al Gore’s Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones:

The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother.

The discovery means that Leo XIV, as the pope will be known, is not only breaking ground as the first U.S.-born pontiff. He also comes from a family that reflects the many threads that make up the complicated and rich fabric of the American story.

The pope’s background was unearthed Thursday by a New Orleans genealogist, Jari C. Honora, and confirmed to The New York Times by the pope’s older brother, John Prevost, 71, who lives in the Chicago suburbs. …

Here are a couple of photos of the new Pope with the old Polish Pope.

Paywall here.

I was going to say that the new Pope looks like 1970s acting legend John Cazale, but, now that I think about it, he looks kind of like Paulie Shore.

It’s unclear whether the new pope has ever addressed his Creole ancestry in public, and his brother said that the family did not identify as Black.

The Pope doesn’t look noticeably black. In his second grade picture, he is infinitesimally a shade darker than the other standing boys, but in a classroom presumably full of Sicilians, Poles, and Irish, he doesn’t stand out.

The Pope’s hometown of Dolton, IL was 94% white and 2% black in 1980. Presumably, the Prevosts were assumed to be white by their white neighbors.

By 2010, Dolton was 5% white and 90% black.

Speaking of Creoles of Color, I was a car guy for a year or two as a kid, and the local hero in the San Fernando Valley was funny car great Don “The Snake” Prudhomme. At the time, I never noticed he was kind of black. There were a lot of Mexican guys in the L.A. car scene about that color. Mattel’s Hot Wheels promoted the Snake vs. Tom McEwen’s Mongoose through-out the 1970s.

From Hagerty:

50 years haven’t slowed Don “The Snake” Prudhomme

Elana Scherr

05 August 2018

… Prudhomme is tan-skinned and light-eyed, and in the melting pot of 1950s Los Angeles, he could have passed as white or black, depending on who was looking, but race has never been something Prudhomme would discuss. “I never considered myself black or white,” he says cautiously. “I guess the best I could tell you is that I grew up white. My parents didn’t talk about it.”

Prudhomme’s parents moved to Los Angeles from Natchitoches Parish, a former plantation area of Louisiana that was home to a Creole community made up of descendants of French and Caribbean émigrés, freed African slaves, and a native-born mix of all the above. Prudhomme thinks his folks were tight-lipped about their roots because they moved to Los Angeles to escape the racism of the South.

Gearheads in 1950s-1970s Los Angeles were more interested in how fast you could go than in a sociology lecture. Don Prudhomme could go really fast. He’s the first funny car driver to break the 250 mph barrier.

“It wasn’t until much later, when my sisters and I looked into it, that I met this whole other branch of our family.”

He sighs and rubs his head. “I felt so sad to hear this. When I met my cousins, they said they used to come to the races to watch me. I asked why they didn’t say hi, and they said, ‘Oh, we were told by our parents not to talk to you.’ ” He thinks it was an attempt by the whole family to sidestep any public conversation of race and thus bypass the barriers that being black in motorsports would present at that time. Read any interview with stock car driver Wendell Scott—the first African American to win a race in top-level NASCAR—to get an idea of what Prudhomme might have faced in an alternate life.

Surely as he got older and started traveling, there must have been some moments that made him question who he was. “Yeah, yeah, of course. I knew the guys who said nasty things behind my back, and I kicked their asses on the racetrack,” he says.

He’s excited now to embrace his heritage, offering to lend me a video about Creole history, but he’s also bashful, unsure of his place in it. The official titles of “First African American to win an NHRA National Event” for Top Fuel and Funny Car belong to younger drivers Antron Brown and J.R. Todd, respectively, and Prudhomme believes this is right. “I don’t want to be in a museum. I am happy for Antron.” The subtext is that since he didn’t race while openly enduring the challenges of being black in a majority-white sport, he won’t now claim any celebration for it.

This seems reasonable to me. I’m pretty sympathetic to Creoles of Color who opt out of the American racial system.

Since I discovered this in 2001, I’ve been pointing out that modern genome analysis has been pointing out that the inevitable consequence of the Anglo one-drop rule has been that African-Americans and European-Americans have turned out to be highly divergent in racial ancestry.

The two states with noticeable exceptions, as discovered by Harvard DNA superstar David Reich in 2014 working from 23andMe data, are, no surprise, Louisiana and, bigger surprise, South Carolina, the most fire-breathing Confederate state during the Civil War. A lot of the rich founders of South Carolina were Latin (and therefore not all white) refugees from Barbados.

So, why shouldn’t Louisianans like the new Pope opt out of the American One Drop Rule?