Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
The only tribe I’d ever identified with was the punk rock scene. The few kids up north I had punk rock in common with also happened to be white, and soon I was the half-white kid who hung out with the whites. I’d been mistaken for Italian in New York and New Jersey before, and I’d always corrected whoever said it. I had read about Creoles, who must have looked like me, and I thought about how nice it must have been to live somewhere where everyone around you wouldn’t question what you are, because you’re all the same thing. Here, in prison, I was accepted as white, and as time went on, I seemed unable or unwilling to correct anyone on it, thinking it would complicate things. I was tired of the ambiguities my appearance presented and decided I wouldn’t tell anyone anymore about “my dark side.” If W.E.B. Du Bois could call himself black, then I could be white. Fuck it.
In Fanny Hurst’s novel, Delilah’s daughter dreams of working in white restaurants, achieves her dream of passing and marries a white man before escaping America and her identity. In the 1934 movie as well as Sirk’s version Delilah/Annie’s daughter doesn’t get away so cleanly.
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When Douglas Sirk left Hollywood he was at the zenith of his career, twenty years after he’d arrived there as a refugee from Nazi Germany, unsure if he’d ever make another movie. He had just made his most successful picture, based on what was probably the most controversial topic in America at the time. Maybe he understood that it’s always best to leave when you’re at the top, or maybe he was just tired.
Based on a novel by Fanny Hurst, the original film directed by John M. Stahl had Colbert’s Bea create a culinary empire based on a pancake recipe passed down through the family of Delilah (Beavers), her African-American maid. Both women prosper, but Bea’s happiness is threatened when her daughter falls in love with the man she wants to marry. James M. Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce – later made into a movie with Joan Crawford and a miniseries starring Kate Winslet – is basically a hardboiled rewrite of Hurst’s story, excising the crucial secondary plot involving Delilah and her daughter, a young woman striving to pass for white…