Is the Pope Black?
If you are majority white genetically but also a little bit black, do you have to identify as black even if you don't want to?
The New York Times runs yet another shocking article about a Louisiana Creole of Color who long ago “passed” as what he mostly was genetically, white, with zero sympathy, sophistication, or nuance about how a largely Latin New Orleans culture thought about race:
One fateful decision 100 years ago created parallel lives. How does a family broken by the bizarre rules of racism heal itself after three generations apart?
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By Susan Saulny
A former national correspondent at The Times, Susan spent the past year excavating her family’s history and reaching out to previously unknown relatives.
Published May 15, 2026
A French-speaking man immigrated from Savoy to New Orleans before the Civil War and became a success there, soon owning a mansion and some slaves. He loved the South and was one of the first to enlist in the Confederacy, rising to the rank of colonel.
By the way, the NYT writer uses six times the fake new definition of “enslave,” “enslaved,” or “enslaving:”
For a man with Alpine roots, he assimilated quickly to the Southern way of life, I’ve been revolted to learn, enslaving women and children within years of his arrival.
A notary’s record of sale from 1840 for “a certain negress slave named Magdelaine, aged about 30 years,” for $550 was for me an intimate, first-time revelation of enslaving among the DeGranges.
According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of the verb “enslave” is “to force into or as if into slavery” — i.e., to reduce a free person to the condition of a slave.
In reality, her ancestor didn’t go to Africa, risk malaria, and enslave free Africans. Virtually every slave in New Orleans had personally been or had ancestors who had been enslaved in Africa, almost always by other black Africans. It’s all very embarrassing African Americans. It would be much more convenient if whites had roved around the African bush enslaving blacks, like in Roots.
This fad for calling white slaveowners “enslavers” is a tedious Blame YT Not Blacks ploy of the Racial Reckoning mania:
Isn’t it about time we dropped this racist trope, just like it’s past due to stop capitalizing “Black” and lowercasing “white” like the NYT has shamefully done since the crazed summer of 2020?
The immigrant’s son fell in love with a part black Creole of Color woman of pre-civil war property-holding freedman ancestry (i.e., her father was likely a plantation owner’s son) and had some children with her. When the mother died, the father, not getting any help from his disapproving father, sent them to an orphanage. (It wasn’t that uncommon at the time: e.g., Babe Ruth’s parents despaired of controlling their giant son, so they put him in a quasi-orphanage under the command of 6’6” 250 pound Brother Mathias, who taught the Babe baseball.)
As young men, the two brothers decided to split up, with the French-looking one (left) moving to Chicago and living, more or less, as a white man (more on that later), with the more part black-looking one (right) staying in New Orleans’ Creole of Color community.
White-passing great-uncle Edward. He was not someone I had spent much time thinking about until one day last year, when a stunning headline jolted me (and almost everyone I knew back home in southeast Louisiana): “New Pope Has Creole Roots in New Orleans.” Leo XIV’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or “mulatto” in historical records, lived in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, a historic center of Creole culture, before assuming the profile of a white family in Chicago.
My best guess is that the Pope’s genes are about …
Paywall here.
