Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920

Rating:
Summary: Irish American - NOT African American
Review: Michael Morris Healy, an Irish immigrant, arrives in the United States around 1815 and establishes a plantation near Macon, Georgia. Healy and his mulatto common-law wife, Eliza Clark Healy, have 10 children. All of the children are sent North to be educated, baptized as Catholics, and leave any social disabilities of Georgia behind them. The children achieve great success as Irish-Americans:

James Augustine Healy became Bishop of Portland, Maine

Patrick Francis Healy became the rector then President of Georgetown University (1873-1881).

Michael Morris Healy, Jr. joined the United States Revenue Cutter Service, becoming a celebrated sea captain, the sole representative of the U.S. government in the vast reaches of Alaska.

Alexander Sherwood Healy also became a priest, director of the seminary in Troy, New York and rector of the Cathedral in Boston

Three sisters became nuns, one a Mother Superior.

It must be emphasized that the Healy offspring were accepted as Irish American and "white" (whatever that means). The positions they obtained could not have been theirs if they had been black or even dark-skinned. Many other "white" people who knew about the Healys' mixed-race origins accepted them as Irish-Americans. Are the Healys therefore entitled to be counted among the ranks of Irish-Americans and included in Irish-American history? YES! The family was IRISH-AMERICAN, not "African American." There was nothing "African" about them.

The Healy family's achievements do not show what "blacks" could do in the 19th century because they were NOT BLACK.

O'Toole's racist devotion to the "one drop" myth blinds him to racial reality in the 19th century. He assumes that the "one drop" myth was law and universally accepted by "whites." It wasn't. Any research into racial classification laws in the 19th century would have shown him that various degrees of "negro blood" were accepted into the "white race," even in the Deep South. Also, the combination of a person's looks and the reputation he had established were all taken into consideration in determining whether one was "white" or not. It is obvious that the Healy family siblings succeeded in establishing themselves as second-generation Irish Americans. O'Toole cannot bear this and insists that the Healy siblings were really "African Americans." He also calls their mother, Eliza, an "African American" even though her ancestry was at least half European.

O'Toole assumes that all "whites" believed in "mulatto inferiority" or the doctrine that mixed-race people are biologically inferior to BOTH or ALL "pure" parental groups. He is too ignorant to understand that this doctrine was created as a defense of slavery by pro-slavery intellectuals who wanted to counter the Northern anti-slavery argument that, if slavery is justified on the basis of "race," then "white" slaves should be automatically free because the negro racial "taint" had been effectively bred out of the line. Lawrence Tenzer explains the origins of this doctrine very well in his book The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue. O'Toole would do well to sit at Tenzer's feet and learn something. O'Toole follows the usual liberal excuse of claiming that "society" defined the Healy family as "black," but expresses wonderment at the fact that "whites" who knew about the Healys' mixed ancestry still treated them as "white." O'Toole is amazed that establishing a "white" identity was so easy for the Healys. Could it be because they WERE white, despite their "drop" of "black blood"?

Captain Healy married Mary Ann Roach, herself the daughter of Irish immigrants. One of the sisters who married and produced a large family also married a fellow Irish-American. The Healys were practicing endogamy, not "interracial" marriage:

Captain Michael Healy repeatedly referred to white settlers [in Alaska] as "our people.". His teenage son Fred, who accompanied his father on a voyage in 1883, scratched his name into a rock on a remote island above the Arctic Circle, proudly telling his diary that he was the first "white boy" to do so.

The Healy family saga belongs with the history of IRISH-AMERICANS.

Rating:
Summary: The Survival of Bigotry
Review: The large, extremely intelligent, and admirable Healy family is treated badly by an author who doubts the sincerity of vocations and religion in general. Far from "passing for white," the Healy brothers suffered double persecution; by birth they were despised as both Irish and African, and by religion they were despised as Catholic in a virulantly anti-Catholic America. They were illegitimate according to American laws, though they were legitimate in a Europe that accepted the interracial marriage of their parents. Patrick Healy became a Jesuit not to "pass for white," but out of love. He became President of Georgetown University. James and Sherwood Healy became secular priests, and James died Bishop of Portland, Maine. This author is as narrow-minded as 19th c. "Know Nothing" Nativists in his attitude towards truly good people.

Rating:
Summary: So That's Where These Ideas are Coming From!
Review: This book opened my eyes to what's been going on even in the 21st century in this country. I've been experiencing something of a struggle like that family's my entire life, but it took reading about it during that particular period in history to understand where today's societal attitudes are coming from. Nothing has changed. Blacks still treat you like you're trying to "pass for white" just by becoming a nun or a monk. And that explains all the racial problems, tensions, and attempted violence that goes with it; black society's resistance to the religious orders has taken even more of a nasty turn in the last century than in the one before it.