Michael O’Malley’s highly engaging book opens with his father’s discovery, on searching ancestral records, that his emigrant great-grandfather, Patrick O’Malley, from Glenties, Co Donegal, was classified as “coloured” on his marriage certificate in Virginia in 1884, as was his American wife, Hester Holland.
The Color of Family is that rarity, an academic page-turner, as O’Malley attempts to track his forebears and other cases to make sense of the egregious administrative racism which, under the guise of scientific biology, informs much of the arbitrariness of “racecraft” found in family records in the US.
The mistaken designation of the emigrant Patrick O’Malley may have been due to his association with the originally Donegal-based Molly Maguire agitation in Pennsylvania coalfields in the 1870s, which found literary expression in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear (1915). As if embarking on his own Sherlock Holmes of Donegal, O’Malley discovers his ancestor was indeed adept at passing, changing his name, shifting states and reinventing himself as a Protestant for what was, in fact, a bigamous marriage in 1884.
By the time the certificate was updated and reiterated under the watchful eye of the Virginia state registrar, the eugenicist Dr Walter Plecker, in 1940, “one drop” of coloured blood going back generations was enough under racist laws to disqualify “coloureds” from marriage to whites, college entry or risking other serious offences drawing one to two years in the penitentiary. Culturally coded by official prejudice, patrilineage, intermarriage and mixed marriages, illegitimacy, and migration, sightlines and bloodlines consisted of no more in the end than lines on a page. Racecraft derived its ultimate authority from statecraft, not from biology.
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Bloodlines have now gone online. In the final chapters of the book, O’Malley directs a pointed critique at the ancestry industry today, as the state allows its public archives to be privatised by Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and, not least, the Mormon memory bank of the Church of Latter Day Saints. The scientific status of DNA is attached to clearly non-biological categories of “Hindu” or “9 per cent Irish”, and O’Malley shows how online searches in different databases, sometimes for substantial fees, yields totally different results. Genes do not come with labels readily attached: place is not race.
The extractive logic of capitalism has travelled a long way from the “bogs of Donegal” and the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania: it is now communal memory and family histories that have become the “natural” resources of Big Data.
Luke Gibbons has taught as professor of Irish atudies at Maynooth University and the University of Notre Dame
