‘The Inscrutable Alexander Fitten’ |
‘The Inscrutable Alexander Fitten’
The Atlanta Journal Constitution
2017-11-03
An excerpt from ‘We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America.’ By Marc Fitten
My full legal name is Marc Jeffrie Fitten, but I have always disliked it. It’s like the skin tag hanging from my neck that I keep promising myself I will do something about.
Since I was 6, I have never been comfortable with hearing it spoken or saying it out loud. I have never identified with it. Ever since I was a child, everything in my DNA rejected this name. Probably because I instinctively knew it was a fake.
My real name is lost to my family and me. Lost for many reasons, but especially because along the way an ancestor realized his name gave away an ethnicity that was more trouble than it was worth. So he changed it. Twice. A shoemaker and a migrant who traveled around the Caribbean taking odd jobs, my half-Chinese great grandfather managed to hide his identity from the people around him and from his descendants for 100 years…
 Marc Fitten looks at a recently discovered photo of his great grandfather, who Marc learned was part Chinese after his 2-year-old nephew was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, an illness prone to Asians. HYOSUB SHIN / HSHIN@AJC.COM |
…The twist is intriguing as well. While mixed-race African-Americans were passing as white in the United States, in the Caribbean, a Chinese Jamaican wanted to hide his name and ethnicity and for his children to pass as colored.
My great-grandfather — forever after known as Mr. Fitten — even had the good sense to die early, and so he took his secrets with him…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Alexander Fitten, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marc Fitten, Marc Jeffrie Fitten, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution