The Big Black Elephant In The Room

This is positively psychotic and either this family was in total denial or totally stupid (except for the cunning woman who invented the lie). I had a co-worker who had a sister who "claimed" to have been raped by a black man and became pregnant. She kept the son and raised him in some rural Ohio town as well. The child wasn't told he had a skin disease, though but I cannot say that growing up believing you were a product of rape would do much for your self-worth either. I just find this story, however, down right disgusting.

"So despite his dark skin, Myers grew up in white, middle-class neighborhoods in Ohio and New York believing he was white.

'For many years I thought I was white. I thought like a white kid. There was a feeling in me that I didn't want to be associated with blacks. I wanted the story to be true,' says Myers, a 45-year-old Orlando tennis teacher.

The secret shrouded in a lie lasted 26 years. Keeping it hidden all those years would turn Judy Myers into a hard, angry, unhappy woman, her family says. It made Dave Myers a defiant, rebellious, hostile child who would grow estranged from his parents, sisters and brother.

Learning the truth would send Myers on a search for identity. And it would convince him that his story is the story of America -- a white America that has been lied to, a black America oppressed and discriminated against, and a society unable or unwilling to discuss race.

When Judy Hartmann told Bill Myers that she was pregnant, he believed it was his.

These days, Maury Povich would be all over this with a DNA test.

And when the baby was born on Feb. 28, 1960 -- five months after their marriage -- he thought his son's skin color was jaundice. And then he thought there might have been a mix-up at the hospital.

And when his wife told him the doctors said it was a skin disease that had turned their boy's skin dark, he thought she was telling the truth. No questions asked.

Scratch to deadpan glare! WHAT ABOUT HIS HAIR STUPID!?

Because that is the kind of man Bill Myers is. He is soft and gentle and pliable, his children say. He accepts life as it comes, assumes the responsibilities of a man, a husband, a father.

As far as he was concerned, Dave Myers was as much his child as the three daughters and son who followed.

If Judy said it was a skin disease, that was the end of the discussion.

'He never said a word,' says Judy Myers, 67, who now lives with Bill in the Villages.

That attitude -- ignoring the obvious, believing the improbable -- filtered down to David and the other children. And in a family where everyone pretended that David was a darker shade of white, race was a taboo subject.

[...]

When a young Dave Myers asked his mother why police in Alabama were spraying black civil-rights protesters with fire hoses, she told him it was because they were hot.

Rolling my eyes! Heffa, I got your "hot!"

Everything Myers saw growing up in Ohio and then the small town of Olean in western New York, convinced him it was better to be a white boy with a skin disease than a black kid."

I feel for the guy. The mother sounds positively treacherous and the father is a pathetic mope!