Mixed Race Studies

‘Mislaid,’ by Nell Zink

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2015-06-04

Walter Kirn

Agata Nowicka

Zink, Nell, Mislaid: A Novel (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015). 242 pages.

Toward the middle of Nell Zink’s “Mislaid,” a screwball comic novel of identity, Karen, a Southern white girl whose lesbian mother has raised her as black for complicated reasons, innocently asks a new friend, as though she were inquiring about her major: “What minority are you?”

“Hispanic,” her friend replies. “We’ve never done the genealogy, but you can tell by my name.”

In context, this is a laugh line, since the book has already answered, in a hundred ways, the question of what exactly is in a name: Nothing. Names mean nothing. They are labels stamped on mysteries, absurdly reductive and misleading. The same goes for racial and gender designations, which, in the book, are infallibly irrelevant to the highly individual business of living and loving according to our instincts rather than larger, social expectations. In “Mislaid” everyone is a minority — of one…

…When Peggy finally leaves her husband, afraid that he’ll commit her to a psych ward for various acts of dramatic exasperation (including driving their car into the lake), she takes their daughter but leaves their son behind, setting the stage for a latter-day fairy tale thick with misunderstandings and coincidences, concealments and revelations. Rigging up the machinery of this plot consumes a lot of narrative energy and asks us to suspend our disbelief to greater and greater degrees, changing the book from a comedy of manners into an outright comedy of errors. Peggy moves into an abandoned house in a historically black rural settlement and gets her hands on a dead child’s birth certificate, which she uses to conceal her daughter’s past. She renames herself Meg and her daughter becomes “Karen,” who, per the stolen certificate, is black. “Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people,” the helpful narrator chimes in by way of quieting readers’ skepticism. “Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: If one of your ancestors was black — ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham — so were you.”…

Read the entire review here.

Mislaid: A Novel

Ecco/HarperCollins
2015-05-19
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062364777
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780062364784
E-book ISBN: 9780062364791
Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 0.89 in (d)

Nell Zink

A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice—the author of the acclaimed The Wallcreeper—about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.

Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start—she’s a lesbian, he’s gay—but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.

Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee’s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his father’s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother’s lies—she knows neither her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family.

Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.

Allyson Hobbs

Morris Educational Foundation
Morristown, New Jersey
2015-05-04

Each issue, we are pleased to circle back with one of our Morristown High School esteemed alumni and catch up.

This spring we caught up with Allyson Hobbs, MHS Class of ’93…

Allyson Hobbs, MHS Class of 1993, Author & Assistant Professor at Stanford University

After graduating Morristown High School in 1993, Allyson attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in 1997. After that, she worked at an advertising agency in New York City for a few years. However, in search of finding her professional passion, she decided to apply to graduate school and attended University of Chicago where she received a Ph.D. with distinction. It was through her experience there that she determined she wanted to pursue her book and a teaching. 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. At Stanford, Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She gave a TEDx talk at Stanford, she has appeared on C-SPAN and National Public Radio, and her work has been featured on CNN.com and Slate.com.

Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile has been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, the Tavis Smiley Show on Public Radio International, and the Madison Show on SiriusXM.

On a visit back to the East Coast, we visited Allyson and caught up…

…MEF: “Tell us more about your book?”

AH: “Writing the book has been an incredible experience. My book is about racial passing where light-skinned African Americans pass as white during the late 18th century to present. The inspiration for the book was a story about a relative of mine that my aunt had told me about. During the 1920’s and 30’s I had a female cousin who grew up in the Southside of Chicago. She attended a predominately black high school living in a historic African-American neighborhood. After graduating from high school, her mom decided she wanted her to move to California and live life as a white woman.   Since she was light-skinned, her mother believed this was the best thing she could do for her daughter giving her more opportunity and better life experiences. Her cousin did not want to go and pleaded with her mom not wanting to leave the life she known, her community, and her friends. However, her mom insisted so she moved to LA, married a white man, had children (who had no idea about her past).   Ten years later she receives a call from her mom to come back immediately because father is dying. She said she couldn’t come back as she is a white woman now, a life you forced me to have. That story inspired my book and really made me want to explore the history of passing.   We think of passing as a story about individualism and a way to get ahead. We don’t think about people who were so impacted, the story of all the people around them, families, friends, people who have to be accomplices, people who have to keep secret. I also felt that we often look at what is to gain by passing, I thought what would the story would look like with what is lost by passing.”…

Read the entire interview here.

4th Annual “What Are You?” with Lacey Schwartz’s “Little White Lie”

Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Monday, 2015-06-08, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

A BHS “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations” program.

Top: Lacey Schwartz, photo by Michael Hill; Bottom: Lise Funderburg, photo by Tigist Tsegie

On the week of Loving Day 2015, filmmaker Lacey Schwartz comes to BHS to presents her provocative documentary about being a biracial woman who grew up believing she was white, Little White Lie, as part of our 4th Annual What Are You? program looking at mixed heritage and identity.

Lise Funderburg, the author of the ground-breaking book on multiracial identity, Black, White, Other leads Schwartz in a post-screening talkback.

For more information and to reserve a free ticket, click here.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
2002

Richard Wormser, Series producer, Co-writer

Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, “Jim Crow” came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.

In June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the “White” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy could easily pass for white but under Louisiana law, he was considered black despite his light complexion and therefore required to sit in the “Colored” car. He was a Creole of Color, a term used to refer to black persons in New Orleans who traced some of their ancestors to the French, Spanish, and Caribbean settlers of Louisiana before it became part of the United States. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Plessy’s lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and held the Louisiana segregation statute…

Read the entire article here.

The Gains and Losses of Passing for White – Ernest Torregano

Creolegen
2015-05-31

Jari Honora, Founder and Consultant

In 1912, Ernest Joseph Torregano, a thirty-year old New Orleans native, was a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. For about three years, Torregano had worked the run from New Orleans to San Francisco. After each successful run, he would return home to his wife, Viola Perrett Torregano, and his only child, Gladys Marguerite, who had been born on 7 February 1904. Like so many other Southerners of color, Ernest Torregano found moving to California to be a golden opportunity to better himself. In his case however, it came at a drastic cost – the loss of his wife and child. He was able to use what was undoubtedly his God-given intelligence and aptitude, but to do so, he passed for white. In his early adult years, Ernest had worked as a singer and handyman for a traveling minstrel troupe. It was while with the troupe, that he met one of it’s pretty stars, a guitar-playing young lady named Viola Perrett. They were married and soon had their daughter Gladys, after which they quit the show so that he could sign-on with the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Concurrent with his employment on the railroad, Ernest completed his high school studies and through independent study courses and classes at the Saint Ignatius College of Law, he was able to pass the California bar examination on 7 April 1913. During all of this time, he maintained a foot in both worlds – telling friends and relatives in New Orleans that he was working as a warehouseman in San Francisco, even having relatives to visit, while all the way he kept up a separate white identity for the sake of his schooling and his intended profession. He regularly went back to New Orleans, spending time with his wife and daughter who lived in the home of his mother, Mrs. Louise Johnson Torregano…

Read the entire article here.

Crossed lines

The University of Chicago Magazine
May-June 2015

Lydiayle Gibson

Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09. (Photography by Jennifer Pottheiser)

A secret in her own family led Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09, to uncover the hidden history of racial passing.

“You know, we have that in our own family too.” That was the bombshell, the offhand remark that plunged historian Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09, into a 12-year odyssey to understand racial passing in America—the triumphs and possibilities, secrets and sorrows, of African Americans who crossed the color line and lived as white. As a first-year graduate student at the University of Chicago, Hobbs happened to mention to her aunt the subject of passing, a casual curiosity sparked by the Harlem Renaissance writers she was reading in school. Her aunt responded by telling her the story of a distant cousin from the South Side of Chicago who disappeared into the white world and never returned.

That story opens Hobbs’s book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014), a lyrical, searching, and studious account of the phenomenon from the mid-19th century to the 1950s. Hobbs’s cousin was 18 when she was sent by her mother to live in Los Angeles and pass as a white woman in the late 1930s. “And our cousin—and this was the part of the story that my aunt really underscored—was that our cousin absolutely did not want to do this,” Hobbs says. “She wanted to stay in Chicago; she didn’t want to give up all her friends and the only life she’d ever known.” But her mother was resolved. And so the matter was decided.

Ten or 15 years later, her cousin got what Hobbs calls an “inconvenient phone call.” Her father was dying. And her mother wanted her to come home right away. “And she says to her mother, ‘I can’t come home. I’m a white woman now.’” She was married to a white man; she had white children. “So she never goes back,” Hobbs says.

Many threads weave through A Chosen Exile, released last fall to glowing reviews: the meaning of identity, the elusive concept of race, ever-shifting color lines and cultural borderlands. But by far the book’s most potent thread is about loss. “The core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for,” Hobbs writes in the prologue, “but losing what you pass away from.” Historians have tended to focus on the privileges and opportunities available to those with white identities. Hobbs reckons with the trauma, alienation, and scars—not only for those who passed, but also for those they left behind. In letters, unpublished family histories, personal papers, sociological journals, court cases, anthropological archives, literature, and film, she finds “a coherent and enduring narrative of loss.”…

Read the entire article here.

Two Takes on ‘Imitation of Life’: Exploitation in Eastmancolor

The New York Times
2015-05-14

J. Hoberman

“I would have made the picture just for the title,” Douglas Sirk said of his last Hollywood production, “Imitation of Life” (1959). But, newly released on Blu-ray by Universal, along with its original version, directed in 1934 by John M. Stahl, the movie is far more than an evocative turn of phrase.

This tale of two single mothers, one black and the other white — and of maternal love, exploitation and crossing the color line — is a magnificent social symptom. Both versions were taken from the 1933 best seller by Fannie Hurst, a generally maligned popular writer if one whose novels, the historian Ann Douglas notes in “Terrible Honesty,” her study of Jazz Age culture, constitute “a neglected source on the emergence of modern feminine sexuality.”

Mr. Stahl’s “Imitation of Life” movie was certainly the “shameless tear-jerker” that the New York Times reviewer Andre Sennwald called it, as well as a prime example of the melodramatic mode known in the Yiddish theater as “mama-drama.” But it was not without progressive intent and, released during the second year of the New Deal, addressed issues of race, class and gender almost head-on.

The white protagonist, Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), is a not-quite-self-made businesswoman; the most complex and sympathetic character, Peola Johnson (Fredi Washington), is a casualty of American racism, both institutionalized and internalized. Behind both is the self-effacing powerhouse known as Aunt Delilah (Louise Beavers), who is the light-skinned Peola’s black mother and the source of the secret recipe on which Bea founds her pancake empire — not to mention its smiling trademark.

Happily ripped off by her white partner for the rest of her life, Beavers embodies exploited African-American labor, something the movie acknowledges by giving her a funeral on the level of a state occasion. The real martyr, however, is Washington’s Peola. The film historian Donald Bogle called her “a character in search of a movie” — but the tragic mulatto is the only part Hollywood would allow this accomplished and politically aware actress to play. In effect, she dramatizes her own segregated condition on screen…

Read the entire article here.

The Blue Eyes of a Black Nationalist

Meduim
The Secret History of America: Writings and Revelations from an American Studies Seminar at UC Berkeley
2015-05-06

Maliq Hunsberger

When I was four years old, I came home from preschool and said to my mother, “they think I’m one of the white kids.” To their credit, I have always looked like one of the white kids. Unfortunately for those not interested in giving evidence to the proverb about books and their covers, my appearance is phenotypically misleading.

My mother is white and my father is Black. My older brother Miles looks, as he describes it, “ambiguously brown.” I on the other hand look unambiguously white. And not just in the way you tell your lightskinned friend he looks white. But invisible to the police, pre-Tiger Woods golf course, Applebee’s in the suburbs white.

The way I look has allowed me to occupy a space of “accessible Blackness” to many of my white peers. In other words, I have Black blood but not Black skin, meaning I can be seen as interesting but not scary. This has also functioned as my greatest tool of influence. I often find myself in discussions around race that I know my father, brother, or anyone visibly non-white are not included in. This is because I evoke much of the white fascination directed toward Black communities without donning the Black skin that the white world has been taught to fear so strongly. In this space I am able to “be a part of” genuine conversations about cultural appropriation, white privilege, racial common sense, etc. within white spaces because I pass so easily. These conversations have become taboo in multiracial spaces for fear of upsetting the colorblind “politically correct” balance that has pushed both straightforward racism and productive conversation underground. Unfortunately I have also become the acceptable target of much of that pent up racism that can no longer be expressed explicitly to those identifiably Black. It is this constant grappling of placement, membership, and authenticity that have provided my greatest privileges and contributed to my strongest feelings of isolation.

It is an odd feeling to be one race at the beginning of a conversation and another by the end…

Read the entire article here.

“A Chosen Exile” by History Professor Allyson Hobbs, has won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians

Stanford University Department of History
Palo Alto, California

2015-04-20

“A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life” by History Professor Allyson Hobbs has won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.