World’s oldest living woman is biracial
CVK
The Detroit Free Press profiles Arbelia Wood, possibly the world’s oldest woman at age 119. Wood is biracial, and has a familiar, but still sad family history:
According to family lore, in the mid-1880s in Mississippi a white farmer gave an ultimatum to a sharecropper and daughter of former slaves: Sleep with him or leave. Muggie Greer gave birth to Arbelia Wood on April 6, 1885, in Caledonia, Miss., her family said…
Although she is biracial, relatives said her light skin could have passed as white during racially tense times in the South. But Wood refused, saying that doing so would be the equivalent of denying her family.
Stephanie wrote:
I didn’t know that the world’s oldest person is multiracial. She, too, is living proof of past racial mixing that Americans would prefer to deny but cannot. There are just too many of us on this earth for this country to pretend that such things never happen.
Stephanie
Posted 10 Jan 2005 at 12:42 pm ¶