Actor who didn’t know he was black tells story of discovery

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In 1992, the impending divorce of Michael Fosberg’s mother — a brunette of Armenian descent — and his stepfather — a blonde of Swedish descent — threw the 32-year-old Chicago actor into an emotional tailspin.

“I was deeply saddened and I guess I got really angry with my mother,” says the author of a stunning new memoir released just in time for Black History Month, “Incognito, An American Odyssey of Race and Self-Discovery.”

The story about the jarring discovery by Fosberg, then living as a white man, of his black history — he had no idea his father was a light-skinned black man — is currently stirring vibrant debate about race and identity, white privilege, and the sensitivity of blacks about light vs. dark skin.

Making its way across syndicated black radio and cable TV, it’s a dialogue Fosberg has devoted his life to since 2000, when he began telling his story in a one-man play, Incognito, which continues to tour theaters, schools, colleges and other venues nationwide.

“The woman I was living with at the time said that much anger wasn’t really about my mother. It was misplaced anger that probably had more to do with the fact I never knew my biological father, and felt like now I was losing my Dad, the man who raised me,” Fosberg says of the event that triggered a search for his biological father. “She was absolutely right.”

Fosberg’s mother, whose parents emigrated from Armenia, was 20 when she met his biological father at Boston University in 1957. She got pregnant, and was immediately disowned by her parents. The couple married, struggled for two years, the Fosberg’s mother told her to come home with the child.

She did. When Fosberg was five, she married his stepfather, never telling her son her secret. And raised in a then all white, working-class north suburb, Fosberg never had reason to question his heritage.

But he always felt different. His two siblings had straight hair. His, coarse and kinky. Teenage queries about his biological father had elicited from his mother little information beyond a name and a lie.

“After bugging my mother many times about it, she told me he was of Cherokee Indian descent,” he said.

But in 1992, he knew it was time. Recalling his mother had said his biological father lived somewhere in the Detroit area, he found six listings for John Sidney Woods, called the first one and bingo.

“When I asked, ‘Did you live in the Boston area in 1957?’‚ he said he did. I said, ‘Were you married to an Adrienne Pilbosian?’ He paused for what seemed an hour, then said, ‘Yes, I was,’” Fosberg says.

“My God, son, how are you?’ ” he said. “‘Where are you?’ When he said the word son, I just melted. We talked. Then he said, ‘There’s a couple of things you should know which I’m sure your mother never told you...I’ve always loved you, always thought of you...I‚m African-American.’”

Fosberg describes having to reach out and steady himself, unable to respond, and “catching my reflection in the mirror across the room as if looking to see if I had just changed from white to black.”

“‘Are you alright?’” the voice on the other end asked. “I said, ‘Yeah. You’re right. She never mentioned that.’” Thus began his odyssey.

Fosberg’s world was turned upside down, as he questioned everything he’d known for certain. Along the way, there was another set of loving grandparents to meet — a grandmother who called up soon after, and in a southern drawl, said, “Sugar, where you been? I’ve been expecting you.”

There was the emotional reunion with his father, his spitting image, and discovery of a rich African-American heritage. His grandfather, Dr. Roy A. Woods, was a renowned scientist for whom a Norfolk State University science building is named. His great-grandfather, Charles “Lefty” Robinson, was an all-star pitcher in the Negro Baseball Leagues. A great-great-grandfather was a member of the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, portrayed in the movie, “Glory.” “It’s one thing to find out you’re black, but that you’re black and have this amazing family,” Fosberg says.

“My grandparents have since passed, but I got to spend 10 years with them. My father was an only child, but my grandmother had a lot of siblings, so I had uncles, aunts and second cousins all over the place.”

Fosberg’s biological father had no other kids, though he’d remarried. He has since divorced, but his wife, a black woman, was at least one person who didn’t see cause for celebration.

“She couldn’t handle the fact that I was raised white, and I was deemed with white privilege. She did not approve of me. She told me in a letter,” Fosberg says.

“I’ve got this skin. That’s the way I was born. But through this experience, I’ve just learned so much about race in this country,” he says. “We have a man of color in the White House, and I say man of color because the media and everyone else seems to call him black, but he’s biracial. We have a very difficult time in this country giving people more than two choices. You’re either black or you’re white. You’re Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, whatever. You get two choices.

“But we know there are lots of things in between those two choices, beautiful things that we talk about and acknowledge all the time,” he says. “Yet we still try to get people to choose one or the other. I guess I’m just trying to get people to choose outside of the two boxes. It’s a lot more nuanced and detailed, and we do ourselves a disservice by not having that dialogue. It’s important to embrace all of who you are.”

Fosberg is grateful racism had no place in the home he grew up in, and believes his rare experience straddling both worlds gives him a unifying perspective he tries to share during his 70 to 80 performances each year.

Of course, some make light of that perspective. It’s raised comic relief specters such as comedian Dave Chappelle’s famous satire about the blind white supremacist who is unaware he’s actually a black man, or comedian Eddy Murphy’s Saturday Night Live skit where he transforms into a white man to experience inequalities between white and black Americans. But that doesn’t phase Fosberg.

“I have white privilege, yes. But you know what? There’s nothing I can do about it,” he asserts.

“And while I’ve not been subjected to blatant racism, the way I’ve experienced it — and black people can relate — is not so much what people say but what they don’t say. I’ve been in conversations with people where as soon as I shared about the play or my experience, suddenly, the conversation has stopped, or a look transpired. That’s why I do what I do on a daily basis, engaging people after each show in dialogue about race, identity, stereotypes, all these difficult issues. It allows people to open up in a way that you’ve never seen.”