Mother, son, Holder, daughter, daughter, wife. From Steve Sailer: Holder grew up in one of those "race-protected cocoons in a middle class "West Indian enclave" where he was kept away from African-American culture.
Here's is the Attorney-General's mother's description of his upbringing:
His mother traces the origins of those characteristics to his upbringing, his life growing up in Queens.
"He grew up, I guess you could say, in a West Indian home, and education was quite important," she said. "They knew they had to perform the way we wanted them to. Perhaps, I was a bit harder than I should have been. Education is always important.
"As Barbadians, you know that education has always been at the top of the list of their priorities, and that was the same in our home."
Religion was another key factor in their sons' moulding, worshipping at the Episcopal Church, a few blocks from their home in Queens. The two sons served as acolytes, attended Sunday School and were active in the church's youth group.
"The church was always very important to us," Ms Holder recalled.
In the home, the emphasis too was on the family and when it came time to sit around the table for a meal, typical West Indian dishes were on the menu.
So, how'd all that cocooning work out for Holder?
Pretty good, it appears.
Further, anybody familiar with the racial structure of the West Indies -- if you're not, Malcolm Gladwell's chapter in Outliers on his mother's family in Jamaica is a good introduction -- would recognize that Holder is from Barbado's mulatto middle class, rather than from its black agricultural masses. As Gladwell points out, West Indians who look like Holder (or Gladwell's mom) didn't get that way by accident. Generations of careful breeding requiring a fair degree of social segregation have typically have gone into keeping the mulatto elites of the West Indies from slipping into the black masses.
Mrs. Holder -- the lady on the right who looks rather like Meryl Streep -- is not a Bajan. She's a Harvard graduate obstetrician. Her older sister, Vivian Malone, was one of the two black students whom Alabama Gov. George Wallace notoriously "stood in the schoolroom door" to (unsuccessfully) prevent from integrating the U. of Alabama in 1963.
Judging from their three kids' looks, I wouldn't be surprised if careful breeding, involving "paper bag tests" and the like, went into Mrs. Holder's racial makeup as well.