Oh...Huey Fairchild. Aside from being the most protagonist of names I done ever heard, it’s also the name of a 15 year old boy living in New York City in 1969, 7 years after having to escape his hometown of Akersberg, Georgia. They Come in All Colors is essentially a memoir of young Huey’s life, a tale following his simplistic childhood exploration in the South, his connection to his parents’, Pea and Buck Fairchild’s, interracial relationship, and, almost ominously in the background, his experience of the violent cultural shift that the Civil Rights Movement facilitated. Huey is a biracial child who can occasionally pass as white, but is ultimately seen as Black living in a town that is increasingly less willing to accept him and his family for who they are, which leads to a number of internal racial identity conflicts for our young protagonist. We know that Huey current-day lives in New York City with his mother, Pea, and attends a prestigious school known as Claremont Prep with the book chronicling how he got there and the many struggles that both preceded and exist in tandem with his current life.
Many of us already know the story of the Civil Rights Movement and the myriad stories of those who lived through it, but what They Come in All Colors uniquely offers is a critique on the socialization of whiteness, “colorblind” racial lenses, and, ultimately, the fallacy of race and racism. Huey Fairchild is far from a reliable narrator and, throughout the book (both in New York City and Akersberg) works to desperately assimilate and mold into a culture of whiteness that refuses to accept him. We see Huey throughout the book adopt anti-black worldviews in order to distance himself from the truth of his own identity, a truth that his parents relentlessly hide from him as they work to convince him that his dad’s whiteness is enough for Huey himself to be white. This deception only exacerbates the myriad forms of racialized trauma that Huey experiences in the book and forces the reader to analyze how simultaneously dominating and fragile the United States racial framework is. How so much of whiteness is predicated on the subjugation of a racial “other”, how children gradually learn racist ideologies to then become racist adults, and how racism is ultimately a culture, a choice, a sinister process that forces the indoctrination into a specific ideology. They Come in All Colors reveals how racism is anything but a default lens and how its enforcement requires constant maintenance, labor, and attention.
Huey does a lot of things wrong in this book, but that ironically only makes his story more compelling. His innocent, childish lens on the world-at-large helps us to see through the miasma of racialized subjugation for what it is. They Come In All Colors is a painful, hilarious, gritty, and illuminating tale that forces a mirror to the face of our society. The trauma experienced in this book is detailed and fairly consistent, which is something we would obviously caution readers to know in advance and mentally prepare for. Additionally, Huey’s actions will sometimes make you laugh just as much as they will make you want to throw this book out of the nearest window. However, despite all of that, I can still only recommend this book to readers interested in exploring issues of interracial relationships, white-passing politics, and a transition into the Civil Rights Movement. There is much to unpack in this tale and if you would like to learn more, please do check out our episodes going into more detail of the book as well as our interview with the book’s author, Malcolm Hansen.