It seems that everyone wants a piece of the new pope, even people who are not Catholic or don’t give a whit for religion. And, sadly, the competition to define him as one of their own kind has unleashed a slew of racial tropes and historical inaccuracies.
Like a lot of folks, I joined in the fun wondering if President Trump would retract his high praise for the selection of U.S.-born and globally-molded Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as the 267th pope if he learned that Leo XIV might be part-Black. A story in the Black Catholic Messenger about Pope Leo XIV’s heritage had people buzzing all over the Internet that he was “a brotha”.
In our humorous moments, some of us harken to the days of the journalist-historian J.A. Rogers who wrote extensively about who was Negro – the term most often used in his day – based on a U.S. racial formula that a drop of identifiable Black blood made one Black and subject to all the restrictions and burdens the law and society could impose. Rogers even published a pamphlet called “The Five Negro Presidents,” that followed the so-called “one-drop” rule. Under that rule, based on statutory law and tradition, Barack Obama was the first president to identify as Black, but not the first Black president.
In my kidding, I was envisioning Trump squirming a bit after he rather effusively congratulated the new pope. After all, the 47th president has made it an obsession in his first few months in office to demean, diminish, denigrate, remove, remake, eliminate, and erase anything that shares the truth about Black people in these United States. Anyone who represents a threat to Trump’s approved narrative is berated or stripped of public posts, like Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Librarian of Congress.
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From what has been published in Catholic publications and other media, the new pope has more than a drop of blackness coursing through his veins. But my laughter stopped when I saw social media denunciations of Pope Leo for “passing” as white.
From Europe, he has Spanish, French and Italian roots. In addition, the New York Times reported that “His ancestry, traced to a historic enclave of Afro-Caribbean culture, links Leo XIV to the rich and sometimes overlooked Black Catholic experience in America.” According to the Black Catholic Messenger, which cited an expert in Louisiana Creole history, the pope’s mother, the late Mildred Martinez, was the mixed-race daughter of Black property owners: the Haitian-born Joseph Martinez and New Orleans native Louise Baquié, a Creole.
Based on what is known, it is wrong to saddle the new pope with that loaded term that describes someone who deliberately denies being Black, is so fair-skinned that they can easily “pass” for white and live their life as such. It is unknowable how many such people existed – or exist – in the United States. But examples periodically emerge, like the story of the New York Times literary critic and editor Anatole Broyard. When his family moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn, New York, during the Depression, they began passing. His children did not learn his secret — or their Black heritage — until he was on his deathbed in 1990.
Very late in life the entertainer Carol Channing revealed that her father was identified in an early census as “colored” as was his mother, but he chose to pass and raised her as white. She later said her mother told her this story in 1937 when she was 16. As Lisa Page, the director of creative writing at George Washington University, wrote some years later, reflecting on the career Channing had carved out on stage, film, and television: “No Black woman would have been cast as Lorelei Lee in ’Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ in the 1940s, let alone the role of Dolly Levi in ’Hello, Dolly!’ She wouldn’t have worn those Bob Mackie dresses on the Great White Way or been the subject of Al Hirschfeld cartoons, or made all those guest appearances on ’Password’ and ’I’ve Got A Secret’ and ’What’s My Line.’ ”
Some notable people who identified as Black, including the powerful late congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was also pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City’s Harlem, and Walter White, who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1929 to 1955, let people assume they were white for convenience. While a student at Colgate College in the 1920s, Powell sometimes passed. More nobly, White time and again risked his life in the Deep South investigating lynchings and other injustices that he later revealed through news articles and the NAACP’s social justice campaigns.
Pope Leo XIV’s particular mixed-up heritage points to how ridiculous it is – and how unfair – to try to force people to choose a side, as it were. His life story seems to present him as a man of the world. Granted, he’s freer to be that because he does appear to be “white” or, to resurrect another term from the past, “mulatto”.
It is equally a fallacy to see him as “American” in the way that those joyous Americans in St. Peter’s Square in Rome chanted “USA! USA!” when he emerged on the balcony as the new pope. He is of the Americas, not solely the United States of America. He was born in Chicago, but his life has been shaped by the many years he spent in Peru, where he also holds citizenship, and by his connections to the global Catholic Church as head of the worldwide Augustinian priesthood and most recently in the Vatican post that gave him a role in selecting and supervising bishops.
Ignorance about history is also evident in the conversations we’re having and in the news stories we are seeing. I saw an MSN piece that began, “A prominent Catholic newspaper is among those suggesting Pope Leo XIV may be the first Black pontiff in the Catholic Church’s history.” MSN, like the newspaper it referenced, the National Catholic Reporter, and too many of the rest of us who are having our say, is oversimplifying. What the National Catholic Reporter said was that a prominent Louisiana genealogist, Jari Honora, has determined that Leo was “a pope with African-Creole ancestry.” That genetic gumbo might be a first, but the Catholic Church has previously had popes from Africa. So, what the National Catholic Reporter went on to say is not necessarily true: “As such, Leo XIV could be considered the first Black pope in the history of the Catholic Church….”
Three early popes were African: the 14th pope, Victor I; the 32d pope, Miltiades; and the 49th pope, Gelasius I.
As for Leo, I haven’t seen anyone speak with any kind of authority about how he has identified himself when it comes to race. But Honora, the genealogist, makes a point worth noting: “I think that a person can be of Black ancestry or have Black roots, but to identify as Black, I think, is all about the lived experience.”
Consider all those fractions that make up our genetic profiles in the DNA tests that have grown in popularity as more people engage in genealogy. My experience has been that of an 88% African-descended Black American. I can joke about those other parts, (Germanic Europe, 8%; Ireland, 2%; Wales, 1%; and Scotland, 1%), but they are not my lived experience (Irish breakfasts in Irish pubs on St. Patrick’s Day and Guinness Stout in my drinking days, notwithstanding).
I would argue that Pope Leo XIV is not the American pope, the brotha passing as white, or “the DEI pope” being disparaged by narrow-minded MAGA hardliners. He is truly a global pope. What better way to be a global pope: reflecting four continents that have made him who he is, denouncing nothing, embracing all?
