Professor Michael O’Malley’s most recent book, The Color of Family: History, Race, and the Politics of Ancestry, has been published by The University of Chicago Press. The book uses the personal history of O’Malley’s own family to examine the changing definitions of race in America. Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Sterling Professor of American Studies and at Yale University, calls the book “a compelling glimpse of major themes in U.S. history through the tangled branches of one family tree. O’Malley writes beautifully in that zone where street-level, lived experience intersects with broader structures of society, ideology, and governance. This is historical writing at its best.”
From the publisher’s website:
“A zealous eugenicist ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in the first half of the twentieth century, misusing his position to reclassify people he suspected of hiding their “true” race. But in addition to being blinded by his prejudices, he and his predecessors were operating more by instinct than by science. Their whole dubious enterprise was subject not just to changing concepts of race but outright error, propagated across generations.
This is how Michael O’Malley, a descendant of a Philadelphia Irish American family, came to have “colored” ancestors in Virginia. In The Color of Family, O’Malley teases out the various changes made to citizens’ names and relationships over the years, and how they affected families as they navigated what it meant to be “white,” “colored,” “mixed race,” and more. In the process, he delves into the interplay of genealogy and history, exploring how the documents that establish identity came about, and how private companies like Ancestry.com increasingly supplant state and federal authorities—and not for the better.
Combining the history of O’Malley’s own family with the broader history of racial classification, The Color of Family is an accessible and lively look at the ever-shifting and often poisoned racial dynamics of the United States.”
November 04, 2024