Hot New Memoir: 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew'
Hot New Memoir: 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew'
John Blake of CNN with a MUST-READ story of identity, faith, and healing
Fam:
Imagine growing up in a Black community that’s since been immortalized in a hit TV series. You know your Black father, but little about your absent white mother. You hide being Mixed because you don’t know that side of your family and have nothing to relate to a swirled identity. Still, you grow up to become an acclaimed journalist and write a great book about the whole experience.
It is my deep pleasure to introduce you to my former colleague / sometime nemesis John Blake, whose hot new memoir MORE THAN I IMAGINED: WHAT A BLACK MAN DISCOVERED ABOUT THE WHITE MOTHER HE NEVER KNEW, shares a moving Mixed identity journey that battles racial pessimism with a sense of possibility.
Backstory: I met John in the early 1990s when I was the Director of Public Relations at Spelman College, a women’s HBCU in Atlanta. Back before the internet and digital age, John became a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to pierce the armor I’d erected and maintained to shield Spelman’s students, campus, and reputation from negative media coverage.
I suspected that the AJC hired John, a handsome young brothah, straight outta Howard University who knew HBCU culture and visually fit in with the students in and around the Atlanta University Center, to uncover the stories I was suspected of keeping from the press.
I took John to lunch to school him on my strict media protocols. He listened graciously with a bemused expression, then politely informed me that he would be doing his job. While journalists and PR folks have famously adversarial agendas, John demonstrated an uncommon intelligence and integrity that made working with him a pleasure.
We’ll get to John’s fab book in a minute but first, peep his bio:
Over the decades, I delighted in seeing John become an award-winning journalist at CNN.com, the online site for CNN and an author. He has been honored by the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Academy of Religion, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Religion Communicators Council and with the GLAAD Media Award. He recently won the 2019 Sigma Delta Chi award for Excellence in Journalism for his online columns on race and politics.
John’s 2020 essay, “There’s One Epidemic We May Never Find a Cure For: Fear of Black Men in Public Spaces,” was recently selected by Bustle Digital Group as one of the 11 best essays on racism and police violence. The other authors on that list included Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and Roxane Gay. John’s book, Children of the Movement, was a finalist for the 2005 NAACP Image Awards in the Outstanding Literary Work Non-Fiction category and a finalist for the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards. He has spoken at high schools, colleges, symposiums and in documentaries about topics such as race, religion, and politics.
Okay! Now, let’s talk about this must-read memoir…
John grew up in the Baltimore neighborhood that became the setting for the HBO series “The Wire.” In that Black environment, he became a self-described “closeted Biracial person,” hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother’s race—a woman who left him shortly after his birth—and whose family rejected John because he wasn’t white.
At 17, John learned a family secret that launched him on a quest to reconcile with his white relatives, searching for both his mother and a sense of belonging. MORE THAN I IMAGINED is the riveting story about how he discovered both with the help of an interracial church, a loving caregiver’s sacrifice, and an inexplicable childhood encounter that taught him the importance of forgiveness.
After covering some of America’s biggest stories about race for 25 years, John realized that “facts don’t change people, relationships do,” crediting the “radical integration” that helped him and his family move forward.
I had the pleasure of reading John’s marvelous memoir, and I highly recommend that you read it, too!
And in a fun role reversal from previous roles, John graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions:
Q: You’ve been an acclaimed storyteller for a long time through your journalism, and earlier books. What led you to write MORE THAN I IMAGINED?
A: I wrote the book for personal and professional reasons. When I was assigned by CNN to cover violent racial protests that erupted in my hometown of West Baltimore in 2015 after a young Black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody, I saw my neighborhood go up in flames because of racism.
But at the same time, the White and Black members of my family were coming together despite being divided by decades of racism. I wanted to figure out why my family was able to bridge these racial divisions when the country was, and still is, so divided about race.
I’ve heard stories from Biracial people who recount how their White family members were slow to accept them or, say, their Biracial grandchildren but eventually relented. My story is different. For the first 17 years of my life, my White relatives had nothing to do with me because my father was Black.
I was born in in the mid-1960s when interracial marriage was illegal, and my mother disappeared from my life not long after birth without anyone explaining to me why. All I was told was: Your mother’s name is Shirley, she’s White and her family hates Black family people. I heard stories later on that my mother’s family believed that Blacks and Whites should live apart, called me and my younger brother “Zebra children,” and called my father “that N*****.” So I never envisioned developing a relationship with them for much of my life.
And yet it happened.
The professional reason is a little more abstract. I’ve been writing about race and politics for 25 years, and I’ve never encountered so much pessimism about the future in this country as I’m seeing now. So many people feel like pervasive racism is a permanent feature of American life, that, as one White man told me, “Racism is embedded in our DNA.” My family’s story challenges that, and so do other experiences I’ve had.
I also thought it was important to tell a story about race that, while depicting the painful costs of racism in a unblinking way, also acknowledges the possibility of change, and even mor importantly, shows how that change occurs in people who seemed like they would never abandon their racism.
Q: Were there challenges in telling your own very personal story for public consumption? If so, what were those challenges, and how did you face them?
A: The chief challenge for me was, well, suffering public humiliation, or something even worse: being totally ignored. In my memoir, I revealed some very personal details about my life: the shocking place where I first had an unexpected meeting with my mom, growing up as a “closeted Biracial person” in an all-Black inner-city neighborhood where everyone seemed to hate White people while being ashamed of my mother’s race and trying to hide that she was White.
I also talked about a very painful experience, a terrifying encounter with a White relative that, well, can only be described as paranormal. I was worried that people would dismiss my memoir as too wild to believe, or worse, terribly written.
Q: How has your racial identity evolved throughout your life and how did writing this book impact that process?
A: My racial identity has gone full circle. I was ashamed of having a White mother up until I was a young man. Keep in mind, when I grew up in the 1970s and early 80s, there were no Biracial role models in the public eye like Obama, Kamala Harris, or Jordan Peele. I became open about my mother’s race after meeting her and reconnecting with my White relatives.
My racial identity is, in some ways, what I call “racially fluid.” I sometimes call myself “Black,” or sometimes “Biracial.” I still think it’s important for young Biracial people to see Biracial people in popular culture, so they won’t feel isolated. I can’t say the book impacted the formation of my racial identity because my racial identity had been formed long before I shared my story.
Q: Religion and faith play a big role in your story. Please describe their impact on your growth and sense of identity.
A: My faith was indispensable to connecting with my White relatives. I know many people have painful experiences with organized religion and I’m sympathetic to their distrust of religion. I share those suspicions. But for me faith was vital for two reasons. I joined a church in college that just happened to be interracial just as I was struggling to accept White family members who were, frankly, in denial about their racism. Yet attending a church, seeing White, Black and brown people hug one another, call each other sister and brother, become friends, get married—that was the first time I saw people of different races interact that way.
It gave me hope that I could do with my White relatives. It also gave me and my White relatives the spiritual tools to overcome our mutual distrust. My mother and her family were devout Roman Catholics. The language of race, hope and forgiveness was hardwired into them. That mutual faith became a common ground where we could meet.
Q: Are there any Mixed-race public figures whose journeys and identities have impacted your own—for good or bad?
A: Only one. President Obama. This should not come as a surprise. Seeing this man talk so eloquently about his Mixed identity and connecting it to the larger story of what it means to be an American made me proud to be Biracial in a way I had never been before.
Kamala Harris was a classmate of mine at Howard University and seeing her in such a role is great, too. I’m so happy that so many Biracial children will never experience the isolation and physical attacks that I endured as a child, and which I describe in the book. America has long forced Biracial people to squeeze themselves into the racial binary—you’re either Black or White, nothing in-between. People like Obama shattered that binary.
Q: Who is your audience for this book?
A: There are multiple people I tried to reach in the book. I think there are women and mothers who might not be interested in race but would be drawn to the story of how I forged this unexpected relationship with my mom after I knew nothing of her.
I think there are deeply spiritual or religious who I want to reach to show how faith can serve as vehicle for healing, not exclusion. I would have never bridged the gap with my White relatives if we didn’t share a faith.
And then there are people I want to reach who just like reading a good story of perseverance, of a kid who seemed to have so much going against him but found a way to be something with the love of a few people.
But mostly I wanted to reach people who are exhausted by the political and racial divisions in the country. I wanted to write a compelling, gritty and gripping story about race that’s not framed by despair, but hope.
Q: What do you hope your audience takes away from reading your memoir?
A: To believe that people can change for the better, and so can our country. That sounds so simple, but I don’t know if many people believe that. My family was split by the same racial and political divisions that now divide the country, and we changed in ways I never expected. If we can heal, so can others. I hope people walk away from my story feeling uplifted. So many readers from all types of backgrounds have already told me that they have. That means so much to me.
Q: What do you want the world to know about being Mixed race?
A: I think every interracial couple and Biracial person today is living proof that ordinary people can remake America. Consider this: When my parents met during the mid-1960s, polls showed that over 90 % of Americans opposed interracial marriage. Now, 94% approval, and that approval cuts across racial and political lines.
In a lifetime, we went from a world where a Black man like my father endured violence and others were killed just for walking with a White woman in public to where it’s so commonplace where few think twice of it. How did that happen?
It happened because of the courage of people like my parents. They were part of a vanguard of people in an earlier era who didn’t wait for the Supreme Court or politicians to decide whether interracial marriage should be constitutional or widely accepted. They saw the absurdity of those anti-miscegenation laws and knew that there was only one race, the human race. They loved someone regardless of skin color.
And when enough of them did that, it created a ripple effect so that the courts and politicians had to follow.
My mom was a poor, White Irish Catholic woman who suffered tremendously in her life, but she
and my father could imagine another America and another future when they met. We live today in the world that they and others created.
Q: What kind of feedback are you getting from readers?
A: I’ve received a lot of feedback from readers now, and one of the most common responses I hear is that my book was “riveting,” or people read it in one or two settings.
It was very important for me to write the type of story I wanted to read: fast-moving with unexpected twists, a sense of place, something unlike any story we’ve read about interracial couples and Biracial children.
I believe those who want to see a future where people aren’t divided by race have to tell stories that show how it’s done. I think I’ve done that, and I hope readers continue to agree.
John’s interviews about MORE THAN I IMAGINED;
With NPR
John’s WEBSITE
Connect with John on FACEBOOK & TWITTER