According to the New York Times, “The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records,” lived in a part of New Orleans, Louisiana’s biggest city, “that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European.” Records from the 1900 census, the New York Times reports, show that the man who gave birth to the pope’s mother, identified as Joseph Martinez, described his race as “Black” and his birthplace as “Hayti,” the older English spelling for Haiti.
Haitians trace ancestral descent from six major West African ethnic groups: Fon and Ewe from what is now Benin Republic and Togo; Yoruba from what is now Nigeria and Benin Republic; Igbo and Kongo from what is now Nigeria and Central Africa respectively; and Akan from present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. That means there is a high likelihood that the pope has distant cousins from Nigeria. That won’t be surprising because, as I pointed out in my February 13, 2021, column titled “Surprising American Cousins Through My Mother’s Ancestry,” my own AncestryDNA record, which I initiated with my mother when she visited me from Nigeria between 2017 and 2018, matched us with several phenotypically white distant American cousins.
“As we went through the photos of hundreds of distant cousins that AncestryDNA’s matches showed, [my mother] was struck with astonishment to find lily white people as her eight cousins,” I wrote. “She asked how that was possible. I explained to her that in the American South, where most Black people were enslaved, many slavers sexually exploited the enslaved, the consequence of which DNA results are now revealing.” The new pope’s story is another possible explanation.
It should be noted that the pope’s maternal grandfather obviously also had European, possibly French and Spanish, ancestry in addition to his African ancestry. He was probably so light-skinned that he could pass for a white man outside the United States. He probably chose to identify as Black only because of America’s strange “one-drop rule” which held that a person with even the faintest scintilla of Black African blood in his/her pedigree is Black.
As Madison Grant wrote in his unbearably racist book titled The Passing of the Great Race, “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” In other words, whiteness symbolizes purity, and any other color line that touches it inevitably soils it. So, the American notion of Blackness conceives of it as an inerasable genetic stain on whiteness, so that the remotest ancestral connection with Black Africa defines one as Black.
That is why the legendary three-time heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali whose great-grandfather was an Irishman is celebrated as a Black American. That’s why former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is probably just about 15 percent Black in his gene pool, is celebrated as a Black American success story. It is why Mariah Carey, who would be called “bature” or “oyinbo” in Nigeria, or “muzungu” in eastern Africa, is accepted by Black America as a Black woman. And that is why it is only in America that a white woman can have Black children, but a Black woman cannot have white children.
This preposterous logic, this scandalously hidebound, hopelessly essentialist notion of Blackness would make most Europeans “Black” since recent DNA evidence suggests that about 75 percent of Western and Southern Europeans have vestiges of African blood in them.
In the eighteenth century, a German physician and anthropologist by the name of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, on the basis of his flawed analysis of human skulls, taxonomized the human family into five races: Caucasian or white race, Mongolian or yellow race, Malayan or brown race, Negroid or black race, and American or red race. This arbitrary division of the human family is often fingered as the foundation for scientific racism. It was used by eighteenth-century American judges as the intellectual and moral basis for the promulgation of so-called anti-miscegenation laws (laws that forbade interracial marriage or interracial sex) in a misguided bid to police racial boundaries.
One of the reasons interracial marriages were frowned upon by advocates of racial purism was that mixed-raced children disrupted the easy certainties of Blumenbach’s simplistic racial taxonomy. As Yale University professor of history Glenda Gilmore once noted, interracial liaisons “resulted in mixed race progeny who slipped back and forth across the color line and defied social control.”
The pope’s maternal grandmother was Creole, who are descendants of the racial alchemy between French, Spanish, and African ancestors but who are nonetheless categorized as “Black” in the United States because of the (il)logic of the one-drop rule. Famous American musicians with Louisiana Creole heritage are Beyonce (through her mother) and Prince.
Creoles can be so light-skinned that they can pass for white. Throughout the nearly two years I lived in Louisiana, I often had difficulty telling a white person from a Black person. People I considered unambiguously white took offense when I identified them as such; they would tell me they were “Black.” On other occasions, however, people I thought would self-identify as “Black” based on my previous encounters with seemingly white “Creoles” would take offense when I called them Black. Before I left Louisiana, I stopped guessing or discussing people’s racial identity. Yes, racial identification is that tenuous, that fluid, and that notoriously unstable in southwest Louisiana!
It was unsurprising that the pope’s mother, Mildred Martinez, identified as white. With a light-skinned Black Haitian father and a probably even more light-skinned Creole mother from New Orleans, she most certainly would look phenotypically white. She chose to escape the chains that Blackness imposed on her and embraced whiteness. In America’s racial terminology, she would be described as having performed “passing.”
Passing is defined as a phenomenon when a phenotypically white but legally Black person (because of traces of African ancestry in them) intentionally present themselves as white to evade racial discrimination and gain access to social, economic, or legal advantages in a racially stratified society where white people occupy the upper end of the totem pole. During the Jim Crow era in southern United States, when segregation and anti-Black laws were codified in the law books, “passing” was often a survival strategy for light-skinned Black people who could physically blend into white society. I have no doubt that that was what happened with the pope’s mother.
John Joseph Prevost, the pope’s brother, told the New York Times that they don’t discuss their mother’s Black heritage. “It was never an issue,” he said. In fact, USA Today and many American newspapers describe the pope’s mother’s heritage as “Spanish.” The African part of her rich racial tapestry is elided. The New York Times reported on the pope’s maternal African heritage only because a Black New Orleans genealogist by the name of Jari C. Honora unearthed it with powerfully compelling documentary evidence and shared it with the paper.
Well, going by America’s peculiar logic of racial classification, the pope is “Black” because his whiteness is mediated by the invisible, imperceptible, maybe even genetically negligible, but nonetheless undeniable Black African blood coursing through his papal veins.
