Who are "The Dead White Guys"? Let's look at the name:
- THE Dead White Guys: We're not just talking about any old dead white guys, but about the ones whose writings and other output have helped shape the world's cultures. So these are not just some dead white guys, but the dead white guys.
- The DEAD White Guys: For a book or other work to attain classic status, it has to be around for a while. So the authors, artists, musicians, and others discussed in this project have to have been dead, usually for quite a while, to qualify, by the very definition.
- The Dead WHITE Guys: It is a lamentable but true fact: the majority of the Great Minds of the past, the ones who have left us these classics, have been white--at least the ones who "ping" in the cultures that came out of Europe. But in this project you'll find plenty of People of Color, and especially when we consider works of non-Western cultures: Africa, China, India, Japan, and so on.
- The Dead White GUYS: Equally lamentable is that the authors of these works have been overwhelmingly male, in all cultures. That is not to say that women (or People of Color, for that matter) are inferior in any way to men (or to white people), but simply that the conditions in societies before our day (and some in our day) favored men (and white men in the west).
Thankfully these last two conditions are changing, but rather recently. So the odds are still that a classic work will be the product of the melanin-challenged (and estrogen-challenged) population.
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| Clarence King |
About our profile picture:
Yes, that's a dead white guy. But his image was chosen over all other dead white guys because of his amazing story.
Clarence King was an American geologist--in fact he was the first director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). His famous work is the dry-as-dust but oddly entertaining Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. (Despite what astute Californios might deduce, the Kings River, Kings Canyon, Kings County, and Kings Canyon National Park--all in California--do not take their names from Clarence. Note the absence of the apostrophe? The river was named in 1805 by a Spanish expedition, which called it El Rio de los Santo Reyes--River of the Holy Kings--and the rest followed.)
Anyway, back to Clarence. From the Wikipedia article about him:
In 1887 or 1888, he met and fell in love with Ada Copeland, an African-American nursemaid and former slave from Georgia, who had moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. As interracial marriage was strongly discouraged in the nineteenth century, and illegal in many places, King hid his identity from Copeland [and, presumably, her neighbors]. Despite his blue eyes and fair complexion, King convinced Copeland that he was an African-American Pullman porter named James Todd.
The two entered into a common law marriage in 1888. Throughout the marriage, King never revealed his true identity to Ada, pretending to be Todd, a black railroad worker, when at home, and continuing to work as King, a white geologist, when in the field. Their union produced five children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Their two daughters married white men. Their two sons served, classified as black during World War I. King finally revealed his true identity to Copeland in a letter he wrote to her while on his deathbed in Arizona.
Which leaves me with just one question: Why has this guy's life never been made into a movie?!
My own grandfather was a Creole of Color from New Orleans who passed for WHITE so he could play in a band in New York. Passant blanc was not unusual in the days when discrimination was at its worst, and is not unknown today. But passant noir?
Ah, the things we do for love.