Soledad O'Brien: A woman of many backgrounds

'I'm a light-skinned black girl with fuzzy hair who’s got freckles'

Maria de la Soledad Teresa O’Brien’s name is like a bridge across cultures. In Spanish her full name means “The Blessed Virgin Mary of Solitude,” and when she first started working in the media many people quietly suggested she change it.

She refused. Pride in her cross-cultural heritage demanded that she be true to herself. Growing up on the North Shore of Long Island, she had always been Soledad O’Brien, she saw no reason to alter the fact.

“As much as my name is unusual, it aptly describes everything I am,” O’Brien, 42, told the Irish Voice. “I’m a light skinned black girl with fuzzy hair who’s got freckles.

“I think my full name kind of references that all in. I just didn’t want to lose that, and so I really held onto the name.”

Growing up in an all-white neighborhood, O’Brien noticed that none of her friends or neighbors had a problem pronouncing her first name. So people’s own personal biases might be coming through in the suggestions, she felt.

But independence of mind in the face of other people’s sometimes racially tinged suggestions is a characteristic she has inherited from her parents.

When her father, Edward O’Brien -- an Australian of Irish descent -- met her mother Estella, who is Afro Cuban, interracial marriage was still illegal in the state of Maryland, where they were living in 1959, the year they married. But undeterred by other people’s discrimination the young couple travelled to Washington D.C. and over time they produced six children, all of whom graduated from Harvard University.

“I didn’t really learn about my own parents’ story until I was older and asking where they had met and how they had come to find each other,” she said.

“I always knew that my dad’s family all live in Australia and that they all came from Ireland, and that my mom’s family all lived in Cuba and many of them were still stuck there. But the context in which they were married was a mystery until I really started asking questions about it.”

What O’Brien discovered would have shocked anyone. First though, she learned about the sweet natured courtship that began her parents’ love affair.

“As students at John Hopkins in Maryland they used to both go to daily Mass. My father would ask her every day if she would like a ride home, and every day my mother would refuse – you didn’t take a ride from a man you don’t know. But one day she eventually said yes, and that’s how they started dating,” she says.

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Nster.com