I loved learning about the story of Michelle Obama's great-great grandfather, Dolphus Shields, a "mulatto" born two years before Emancipation.
Across the blogosphere, the story has met with a yawn, disdain at dredging up a painful history of black women being raped by slave masters, and irritation. Black in America has always meant mixed, folks say. No argument from me.
But let me just tell you what made it interesting to me: it was a Story! Not just an abstract fact of life that most likely there were interracial relations in a family's past. The New York Times and the genealogist who helped root out the details were able to tell us facts about this man and his life. What we will never know are his thoughts about the circumstance of his birth, about his relation to living life as a black man when he knew that (if the law had recognized it) he was also half white.
