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Historian in history

A revelatory approach to family history
by
September 2025, no. 479

The Trouble of Color: An American family memoir by Martha S. Jones

Basic Books, US$30 hb, 336 pp

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Historian in history

A revelatory approach to family history
by
September 2025, no. 479


Let no-one say the past is dead. The past is all about us and within.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), 1970

 


W
e are now in a time when the race crimes of the past that shored up colonisation, chattel slavery, and segregation can be more safely unravelled. Those of us whose families have been on the ‘wrong side’ of the colour line can discover the forces shaping our families and ourselves. Only in the past two decades or so have the veils of false respectability and dubious notions of human difference based on race been lifted sufficiently to allow a focus on the history of mixed-race family formations. Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (1998) was a joyous discovery for me, a mixed-race Aboriginal Australian who recognised the same pattern, every generation having both black and white relations in our families.1

The Trouble of Color: An American family memoir

The Trouble of Color: An American family memoir

by Martha S. Jones

Basic Books, US$30 hb, 336 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

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