Mixed Race Studies

New book ‘A Chosen Exile’

WREG-TV
Memphis, Tennessee
2015-12-17

For nearly 200 years, countless African-Americans chose to leave their families, friends and communities to live in exile.

Allyson Hobbs reveals this piece of history and how it affected race relations in her new book “A Chosen Exile.”

Watch the interview here.

Rachel Dolezal: ‘I wasn’t identifying as black to upset people. I was being me’

The Guardian
2015-12-13

Chris McGreal, Senior Writer
Guardian US

Rachel Dolezal at her home in Spokane. Photograph: Annie Kuster for the Guardian

She became a global hate figure this year when she was outed as a ‘race faker’. Here, she talks about her puritanical Christian upbringing, the backlash that left her surviving on food stamps – and why she would still do the same again

Anyone looking for clues to the real Rachel Dolezal would do well to begin with her birth certificate. In the bottom right-hand corner, under the names of the parents who brought her world crashing down by outing her as a white woman masquerading as black, is a box for the identity of the medic who delivered her as a baby. In it is written “Jesus Christ”…

Read the entire interview here.

Ghost Stories: Allyson Hobbs uncovers the fascinating history of racial passing in the United States

Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers & passersby
2015-12-11

Aram Goudsouzian, Professor of History
University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee

In A Chosen Exile, Allyson Hobbs analyzes how and why black people passed as white throughout American history. An assistant professor of history at Stanford University, Hobbs’s extensive research yields the stories of runaway slaves, Reconstruction-era politicians and their wives, esteemed intellectuals, and ordinary people who made fateful decisions about how they defined themselves—finding new opportunities as whites, but losing their old identities as blacks. The Organization of American Historians awarded A Chosen Exile both the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, for the best first book on the subject of American history, and the Lawrence Levine Prize, for the best book on American cultural history.

Prior to her upcoming appearance at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Hobbs answered questions via email from Chapter 16:

Chapter 16: One might assume that writing a history of racial passing is nearly impossible, given that those who crossed the color line kept their actions hidden, out of the historical record. How did you come to believe this was a viable project, and what sources were available to you as a historian?

Allyson Hobbs: When I was in my first year of graduate school, my aunt told me a story about our family that was so compelling, but also so tragic, that I simply could not stop thinking about it. A distant cousin of ours grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and attended Wendell Phillips High School, the first predominantly African-American high school in Chicago. But after she graduated from high school, her life took a radically different turn. She was very light-skinned—she looked white—and in the hopes of improving my cousin’s life, her mother insisted that she move to California and assume the life of a white woman. My cousin pleaded that she did not want to leave her family, her friends, and the only life she had ever known. But her mother was determined, and the matter had been decided.

Years later, after my cousin had married a white man and raised white children who knew nothing of their mother’s past, she received an inconvenient telephone call. Her mother was calling to tell her that her father was dying and she must come home immediately. Despite these dire circumstances, my cousin never returned to Chicago’s South Side. She was a white woman now, and there was simply no turning back…

…Conventional wisdom tells us that a history of passing cannot be written: those who passed left no trace in the historical record, and only novelists, playwrights, and poets could write about this clandestine practice. But I believed that the sources were out there, just waiting to be discovered. So I went into the archives looking for ghosts, hoping to tell their stories.

To find these ghosts, I had to seek out unconventional stories that varied at different historical moments. I started with literature. There was an explosion of literature on passing during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, so I began by reading the correspondence of the authors who wrote about passing. Some of these novelists and poets had passed themselves, while others were fascinated by the topic because they had friends and family members who were passing. Luckily for me, they wrote about passing in their letters. “Guess who I saw? John. And he is passing!” This was a familiar refrain in much of the correspondence that I read in the archives.

I also looked at runaway-slave advertisements, diary entries, newspaper accounts of sensational cases, the papers of eugenicists who crafted laws designed to police the “one drop rule,” students’ records at colleges and universities who passed as white, and articles in popular magazines. At first I worried that I wouldn’t find anything. But soon I realized that the sources on passing are abundant. It was an embarrassment of riches…

Read the entire interview here.

Book Talk – A Chosen Exile: The History of Racial Passing

National Civil Rights Museum: At the Lorraine Motel
450 Mulberry Street
Memphis, Tennesee 38103
2015-12-17, 18:00-20:00 CST (Local Time)

Allyson Hobbs, a professor of History at Stanford University, has written a remarkable book entitled [A] Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in America. This title has many key links to the museum’s history ranging from the era of Jim Crow to the most recent scandals. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root named A Chosen Exile as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.”

Hobbs is a contributor to the New Yorker.com and the BBC World Service. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. Hobbs teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history and culture. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award…

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Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora by Bénédicte Boisseron (review)

The Americas
Volume 72, Number 4, October 2015
pages 661-664

John Patrick Walsh, Assistant Professor of French
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

In this outstanding book, Bénédicte Boisseron challenges received ideas on Caribbean literature and critical paradigms that have sedimented around them. Organized around individual trajectories and texts of “second-generation” Caribbean diasporic writers, the book argues that these authors resist the cultural obligation to Caribbeanness that enjoined an earlier generation to “write back” to the metropolitan center from the peripheral spaces of empire. Boisseron eschews this historical binarism in order to call attention to writers who have pulled up stakes from a “home” that has become a “new center” (p. 7). The oppositional stance they adopt is marked by less by political engagement, Boisseron contends, than by the desire to explore personal stories. The rejection of prescribed identities makes them “renegades.”

Boisseron anchors her use of “renegade” in C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, the study of Melville that calls attention to Ahab’s crew of isolatoes, or those “living on a separate continent of [their] own” (p. 8). Throughout, Boisseron moves between textual analysis and biography to frame the renegade as one who questions allegiance to the Caribbean. As the book unfolds, “renegade” shifts meaning according to the writer’s particular form of defection. Therefore, it becomes an umbrella term that encompasses the itineraries in question.

By arguing that local spaces of the Caribbean have developed their own centripetal power, Boisseron suggests that the so-called global turn of literary studies still has a way to go to break free of the colonial legacy of center and periphery. Boisseron draws on numerous schools of thought, from diaspora studies and postcolonial theory, to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and her ability to distill a range of ideas is evidence that European theoretical models take on new life in the location of their translation. The book thus performs the very “decentering” of authority that it underscores as the hallmark of second-generation Caribbean writers.

The five chapters make for an engaging read. The clarity and consistency of Boisseron’s prose, and the balance it achieves between historical overview and close reading, make it suitable for both experts in the field and students new to these texts. The first chapter, “Anatole Broyard: Racial Betrayal and the Art of Being Creole,” explores the phenomenon of racial passing as an exemplary act of being Creole. In contrast to the book’s generally extensive use of primary written sources, this chapter is largely a study of the life of the long-time literary critic, including the biography penned by his daughter, Bliss Broyard, and the posthumous “outing” of Broyard by Henry Louis Gates Jr. For Boisseron, “the incompleteness of kinship is what makes the Creole, just like the passing subject, a born renegade” (p. 51).

Chapter 2, “Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale: Coming Out in the French Caribbean,” foregrounds Condé’s refusal to adhere to the critical norms of Postcolonial Studies. “Because she resists, while seemingly adopting, the postcolonial trend,” Boisseron writes, “Condé is strictly speaking a postcolonial renegade, or a ‘postcolonial antipostcolonial’” (p. 58). Condé’s most significant betrayal of Caribbean sensibilities is her portrayal of the macoumé, or the Creole term that refers to an unsayable homosexuality through its association with “the source of gossip (commère)” (p. 68). The trope of “coming out,” Boisseron concludes, “revealing the covert presence of Creole homosexuality, allows Condé to break open the walls of sedentariness in the French Antilles” (p. 85). Given the enormous critical attention to Condé, the originality of Boisseron’s reading is a rare feat.

Chapter 3, “Parasitic and Remittance Diaspora’” turns to two writers of the Haitian dyaspora, Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière. The conflict between the perception of resident writers and those on the outside is a complicated issue that owes to a rigid idea of geographic and affective borders. In an arguably cynical approach, Boisseron describes the texts of Danticat and Laferrière as “an uncertain mixture of opportunism . . . and remittance,” or a kind of cultural repayment that the expatriate makes to the native country (p. 128). Yet her close readings betray a more nuanced way of thinking about the texts of these immigrant artists.

Chapter 4, “V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid: Rhetoric…

Third film festival

La Voz News: The voice of De Anza College since 1967
Cupertino, California
2015-10-22

Bojana Cvijic, Staff Writer

De Anza students saw the Lacey Schwartz’s film “Little White Lie” and had a discussion about race and identity issues during the Third Film Festival on Oct. 15 at Euphrat Museum.

Members of the Black Leadership Collective chose the film, discussion questions and overall theme for the festival.

“This is all the students work,” said Julie Lewis, Department Chair of African American Studies, advisor to the Black Leadership Collective, and coordinator for the festival.

The framework for the festival correlated with the Euphrat museum’s ongoing exhibition “Endangered” which also touches on social justice issues.

“Some of the themes that they’ll be talking about is identity, what does it mean to be of a particular identity, who makes those rules, in particular around race, which is a socially constructed concept yet has very real world and lasting implications,” Lewis said before the event….

Read the entire article here.

In Rachel Dolezal’s Skin

Broadly
VICE’s Women’s Interest Channel
2015-12-07

Mitchell Sunderland, Managing Editor

Photos by Amy Lombard

In an exclusive interview, Rachel Dolezal discusses growing up on a Christian homestead, painting her face different colors as a child, and why she’s naming her new baby after Langston Hughes.

On a gloomy Saturday night in Spokane, WA, roughly a dozen people gather in the penthouse suite of the Davenport Grand Hotel for Rachel Dolezal’s baby shower. Hip-hop and jazz play on a flat-screen TV, and paper yellow duckies hang on the silver walls. While Rachel’s 21-year-old adopted son Izaiah pops a bottle of champagne, Rachel’s friends—her ex-boyfriend Charles Miller and several women—eat croissant sandwiches on disposable plastic plates. The women vary in age and race (there’s nearly an equal number of black and white guests), but when I ask them how they know Rachel, most give the same answer: “She does my hair.”

Rachel does her own hair, too. Today, she wears a black weave. “In the winter I like to have [a weave] because you don’t have to wear a hat,” she explains. “In the summer I like to wear braids and dreads—that’s just me.” The women’s conversations, though, aren’t about hair and instead revolve around the baby. An hour into the party, Rachel’s friend passes out pieces of paper for a “baby pool.” She asks the partygoers to predict the baby’s “weight, birthday, and gender.” There’s not an option for race. It’s undoubtedly a sensitive topic in this room, but no less a loaded one. After all, much of Rachel’s story is hinged on the concept that, like gender, race is a social construct…

Read the entire interview here.

Leaving to learn

Columbia Daily Spectator
2015-12-02

Claire Liebmann

Courtesy of Karl Jacoby

Several years ago while browsing newspaper clippings online, Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Columbia, came across the story of William Ellis—a Texan slave who built a million dollar fortune while posing as a Mexican millionaire in New York, essentially hacking the system of American expansionism and oppression.

Tracking Ellis as he took on different names and personas was difficult: Ellis deliberately introduced falsehoods into the historical record to ensure that his racial passing was accepted by the broader society, but Jacoby stuck with it. Years later, this chance encounter with Ellis’ story would come to drive his personal historical research. Undertaking a yearlong leave of absence, he pursued his interest in reclaiming untold narratives, working on his book The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.

Jacoby’s academic career is driven by his interest in complicating comfortable historical narratives. This process of reinvention and rediscovery depends on another kind of separation from the establishment: Jacoby’s reliance on his leave of absence as a means of promoting academic innovation…

Read the entire article here.

National Affairs: Who Would Be King

Time
1923-10-08

Word came to the U. S. that William Henry Ellis, who preferred to style himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, died in Mexico City. Mr. Ellis was one of the most remarkable men who ever acted as agent for the State Department. He was known chiefly for the famous incident in which he delivered a commercial Treaty from this country to King Menelik of Abyssinia. But his unusual history began much earlier.

He was born in Victoria, Tex., in 1864 and claimed to be of Cuban parentage, on account of which he used the Spanish form of…

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Keep It Simple at TEDxIndianapolis

The Indianapolis Star
2015-10-21

Leslie Bailey

“When asked how he created his masterpiece, Michelangelo said, ‘It was easy. You just chip away that which does not look like David.’ What if our lives are our masterpiece? What if we chipped away all that was unnecessary, all the clutter and the busyness, and focused on that which really mattered — our passions and our relationships.”

This is the “big idea” Maura Malloy will share when she takes the stage at TEDxIndianapolis on Tuesday. Malloy, 36, is among approximately 20 speakers who will present their ideas at the conference with the theme of “Keep It Simple.” Other speakers include a homeless advocate, an origami artist, a musician and a handful of professors…

…In her talk, Malloy will share her journey to a minimalist lifestyle, as well as tools on how everyone can create their own “masterpiece” life. For Malloy, the spark ignited during a semester studying in India during her sophomore year at the University of Notre Dame. She was allowed one 40-pound bag of belongings for the semester. “It opened my eyes to how little you need to be joyful, especially when it comes to children,” said Malloy, who is expecting her first child in November…

…Malloy, who grew up in South Bend, moved to New York City when she was 25 to pursue a career in acting. She ultimately turned to screenwriting, which she continued doing after moving back to Indiana with her husband, Rory Collins, 2012.

She currently has two projects in development with actress Tessa Thompson attached to both films. The first, “An Illuminated Life” [See: An Illuminated Life: Bella da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege] is a biopic about Belle da Costa Greene, an African-American woman who lived as a white woman while working as J.P. Morgan’s right-hand woman at the turn of the century. The other project, “Our Rebels,” is a smaller, independent film Malloy describes as a “platonic love story.”…

Read the entire article here.