Evelyn White Reviews Stephen Dorsey’s Haunting Memoir of Racism Faced During Formative Years
Black & White
Stephen Dorsey
Nimbus Publishing
In the first chapter of his debut release, Stephen Dorsey cites 1964 as the year US President John F Kennedy (1917-1963) was assassinated.
Set against the backdrop of stellar recent works such as Out of the Sun by Esi Edugyan, Jude and Diana by Sharon Robart-Johnson and Africanthology, edited by A Gregory Frankson, it’s difficult to countenance the glaring (and wholly preventable) error in Black & White: An Intimate, Multicultural Perspective On “White Advantage”and The Paths to Change. Full disclosure: Frankson’s volume includes my essay on the pioneering African Nova Scotian poet Maxine Tynes (1949-2011).
Some readers are likely to find merit in Dorsey’s narrative about his upbringing as the mixed-race son of a French-Canadian woman whose romantic liaisons proved detrimental to her children.
Dorsey writes: “My mother was married at seventeen to … a white man … and that same year gave birth to my half-brother. … My biological father … was a Black man who moved to Montreal from upstate New York. … They moved in together and … my brother was born. … I was born [shortly] after my brother.”
Dorsey’s mother later married a “white, French-speaking immigrant from Belgium.” The couple had a daughter. Loathe to claim biracial children as his progeny, the author’s stepfather persuaded his mother to tell neighbours they’d “adopted” the Black boys in their household.
This to spare them their fate, in the stepfather’s eyes, as “inferior” children of African descent, pre-destined for disaster.
“My mother and stepfather never actually sat us down to tell us which orphanage we came from, who our birth parents were, or to offer any insights as to our ethnic background,” Dorsey writes. “Nothing.”
Steadily climbing from the abyss of abuse (including being forced to wear a diaper at age nine), Dorsey completed his education and found success in business and as a Toronto-area community activist.
“[My brother] and I faced the harsh realities of racism early in our formative years from inside our own home, within our own family,” Dorsey writes in the haunting volume.
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