Now in his mid-50s, Mark Whitaker has had an impressive journalistic career. Fresh out of Harvard in the late 1970s, he went to work at Newsweek and rose steadily through various assignments, eventually becoming its editor. In 2006 he moved to NBC, at first as “the number two executive in the news division,” then as chief of its Washington bureau. Now he is executive vice president and managing editor of CNN Worldwide, an immensely influential position given that CNN reaches into almost every nook and cranny of the world.
All of which makes for quite a resume, but it also makes for the least interesting part of “My Long Trip Home,” Whitaker’s memoir. It’s worth reading because it’s a thoughtful account of growing up bi-racial at a point in this country’s history when racial identities are in flux and when people of mixed race are ever more common. Whitaker describes attending a debate on ethnicity at Harvard and rising to ask a question of Michael Walzer, a professor who “wanted to defend ethnicity as a positive force in his own life”:
“So Professor Walzer, what would you tell someone who didn’t have a clear ethnic identity? For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn’t have a specific place to call home? And not to be coy about it, I’m talking about myself.”
Caught off guard, Walzer answered rather clumsily, “I guess I would say that that’s too bad, and that in the future I hope we don’t have too many more people like you.” Rather than take offense, Whitaker replied, “Look, I think I understand what you’re saying. But I guess I would say that it’s not a matter of choice: The world is going to have a lot more people like me.”
Whitaker was right, of course, as, in the nearly three-and-a-half decades since that encounter, intermarriage between people of almost every imaginable racial and/or ethnic identity has become commonplace. No doubt the offspring of such unions still confront the questions of racial identitythat troubled Whitaker as a teenager, but as white Americans fade into a minority, the urgency of these questions surely will diminish. Born in 1957, schooled in the 1960s and ’70s, Whitaker was something of a pioneer — and has continued to be one, having been the first black in just about every position he’s occupied — but as he understood even as a youth, he was the future.
His father, born in Pittsburgh in 1935, was christened Cleophaus Sylvester Whitaker Jr., a name he so passionately detested — he thought, correctly, that it smacked of slavery — that he insisted on being called Syl, the nickname he kept throughout his life. His mother, born in Cameroon in 1926, was named Jeanne Alice Theis; her French parents were in Africa because her father was a missionary. They met at Swarthmore College in the mid-1950s; she was a teacher of French and he, nine years her junior, was a student. They fell in love and married in France, two months after his graduation in the summer of 1956. Later their son writes:
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