Mixed Race Studies

‘A Chosen Exile’: Black People Passing In White America

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2014-10-07

Karen Grigsby Bates, Correspondent
Culver City, California

Dr. Albert Johnston passed in order to practice medicine. After living as leading citizens in Keene, N.H., the Johnstons revealed their true racial identity, and became national news. (Historical Society of Cheshire County)

Several years ago, Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs was talking with a favorite aunt, who was also the family storyteller. Hobbs learned that she had a distant cousin whom she’d never met nor heard of.

Which is exactly the way the cousin wanted it.

Hobbs’ cousin had been living as white, far away in California, since she’d graduated from high school. This was at the insistence of her mother.

“She was black, but she looked white,” Hobbs said. “And her mother decided it was in her best interest to move far away from Chicago, to Los Angeles, and to assume the life of a white woman.”…

…Hobbs began writing about passing for her doctoral dissertation, and was encouraged to turn it into a book. The dissertation became A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in America. It’s a history of passing told through the lens of personal stories…

…Then there’s the sad tale of Elsie Roxborough, a beauty from a distinguished Detroit family who became the first black girl to live in a dorm at the University of Michigan. She tried acting in California, then moved to New York to live as a white woman. When her disapproving father refused to support her, Roxborough — then known as Mona Manet — committed suicide. Her grieving and equally pale sister passed as a white woman to claim the body, so Roxborough’s secret wouldn’t be given away. Her death certificate declared she was white….

Read the article here. Listen to the story (00:04:58) here. Download the story here.

‘Everything I Never Told You’ Exposed In Biracial Family’s Loss

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-06-28

Arun Rath
All Things Considered

It’s May, 1977, in small-town Ohio, and the Lee family is sitting down at breakfast. James is Chinese-American and Marilyn is white, and they have three children — two girls and a boy. But on this day, their middle child Lydia, who is also their favorite, is nowhere to be found.

That’s how Celeste Ng’s new novel, Everything I Never Told You, begins.

It’s soon discovered that Lydia has drowned in a nearby lake, in what looks like a suicide. The incident pulls the family into an emotional vortex and reveals deep cracks in their relationships with each other.

This all takes place an era when interracial marriages are only recently legal (the Supreme Court struck down interracial marriage bans in 1967). Lydia’s death forces members of the Lee family to confront their individual insecurities and grapple with their identity as a biracial family in the Midwest.

But would it be very different for them today? Ng answered that question for NPR’s Arun Rath, host of All Things Considered.

Ng, who is a first-generation Asian-American Midwesterner, also spoke about her own experiences growing up and about the state of the American conversation on race…

Read the article here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

‘Show Boat’ Steams On, Eternally American

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2013-05-07

Nina Totenberg, Legal Affairs Correspondent

It’s been more than eight decades since Show Boat — the seminal masterpiece of the American musical theater — premiered on a stage in Washington, D.C. Now the sprawling classic is back, in a lush production put on by the Washington National Opera.

Based on Edna Ferber’s epic best-selling novel, Show Boat was nothing like the frothy musicals and scantily clad Broadway revues of its time. Sure, the story is about a traveling showboat that plays to audiences along the Mississippi River, but the plot focuses on serious subjects: racial injustice, alcoholism, abandonment.

Panoramic in scale, the show spans 40 years, from 1885 in the South — not long after the Civil War — to the Roaring ’20s in Chicago. And displayed in all their glory are some of the most beautiful love songs of the 20th century: “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Make Believe,” “Bill.”

Show Boat made musical-theater history, pioneering the merging of music and plot, integrating them for the first time to provide a seamless transition from scene to song. Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, just 31 years old, worked closely with composer Jerome Kern to replicate Ferber’s sweeping narrative. In a 1958 interview released on vinyl by MGM Records, he explained how he used the Mississippi itself as the thread that would hold all the plot elements together.

“I thought that we lacked something to make it cohesive,” Hammerstein told interviewer Arnold Michaelis. “I wanted to keep the spirit of Edna’s book, and the one focal influence I could find was the river, because she had quite consciously brought the river into every important turn in the story. The Mississippi. So I decided to write a theme — a river theme.”

That theme, of course, became “Ol’ Man River,” one of the most primal American melodies ever sung.

‘Misery’ Restored, And Threaded Throughout The Show

Director Francesca Zambello, who pushed and prodded to get the current revival staged at the Kennedy Center, says she was drawn to the show because of the timeless issues it dramatizes — not least that key underlying theme of race, embodied in the show by Julie, the showboat’s star performer.

“Julie is the fulcrum of the show, because she brings the dramatic issue that changes everything,” Zambello says.

Secretly biracial, but “passing” — living publicly as a white woman — Julie has married a white man. That makes their relationship a crime in Mississippi, and in much of the rest of the country besides.

No surprise, then, that even before Julie is found out and forced to leave the showboat, the company’s mother figure, who’s in on her secret, senses trouble. “Misery’s comin’ around,” sings Queenie, the showboat’s cook, in a gorgeously melancholy melody that was cut from the original production for time.

“The theme of ‘Misery’ you hear not only with Queenie and all the women working, but it also weaves its way underneath the dialogue every time Julie speaks after that,” Zambello points out. “It becomes her sadness, and her secret.”

There are no U.S. laws against interracial marriage anymore; they were struck down in 1967 by the Supreme Court’s . But as Show Boat plays at the Kennedy Center this month, the court — just a couple of miles away — is considering questions of same-sex marriage, affirmative action and voting rights, while Congress focuses on how we as a nation treat immigrants.

“To do this kind of work that has such deep social underpinnings to it, and really speaks about social change, is I think rare in music theater,” Zambello says. “If you wrote this musical today, I’m not sure that it would get on.”…

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the story here.  Download the audio here.

A White Face With A Forgotten African Family

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2012-11-24

Jacki Lyden, Host

Growing up blond-haired and blue-eyed in Southern California, Joe Mozingo always thought his family name was Italian.

But as an adult, Mozingo became skeptical of that theory when friends and co-workers began to ask him about his unusual-sounding last name.

The journey to discover the truth about the Mozingo name took him from the libraries of Los Angeles to the courthouses and plantations of Virginia and, finally, to Africa.

Mozingo spoke with weekends on All Thing Considered guest host Jacki Lyden about his first book, The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family, which chronicles that journey…

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

In ‘Red Pyramid,’ Kid Heroes Take On Ancient Egypt

Backseat Bookclub
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2012-12-19

Melissa Block, Host

Robert Siegel, Senior Host

If there was a recipe for the best-selling writer Rick Riordan, it would go something like this — start with a love of storytelling, fold in more than a decade of teaching middle school English, combine that with two sons of his own who don’t quite share their dad’s love of literature, and marinate all of that with a deep passion for mythology.

Riordan has sold tens of millions of kids’ books. He hit pay dirt with the Percy Jackson series — it’s about an everyday kid who has superhero powers because he’s the secret son of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea.

Egyptian gods reign supreme in our latest book for NPR’s Backseat Book Club. It’s The Red Pyramid from Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles. It tells the story of a brother and sister — Carter and Sadie Kane — who have lived apart most of their lives. One Christmas Eve, their father brings them both together for a trip to the British Museum, and a terrible, magical accident happens that unleashes the gods of ancient Egypt into the modern world.

Carter and Sadie learn that they are descended from ancient Egyptian magicians. This means they are the only ones who have the magic that might be able to put the gods back where they belong — before the world spirals out of control.

Riordan is an author who knows his audience — and that has influenced his writing. “I imagine myself in front of my own class,” he tells NPR’s Michele Norris. “I don’t teach anymore, but I can still clearly see fifth period after lunch — that’s a real tough time to teach. And I tried to imagine writing a story that would appeal to those kids — even when they’re tired, even when they’re bouncing off the walls. … If I could find a way to tell a story that would resonate with them, then I had something going.”

Carter and Sadie are biracial characters, but Riordan doesn’t dwell on this in the book. He is more interested in the idea of kids being caught between two worlds, a concept to which he says his readers can relate…

Read the entire article here. Read the transcript here. Download the interview here.

Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection
2012-08-30

NPR Staff

As summer winds down, All Things Considered is winding down its series “Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection.”

For the past few months, the show has asked listeners to tell their stories about a particular piece of music they associate with their parents. Listener Melanie Cowart of San Antonio, Texas, wrote in to explain how Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” — a song that’s been interpreted by Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald and many others — became a running soundtrack for her parents’ relationship.

“My father was African-American; my mother was white,” Cowart tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “They met in 1929, at a time when that type of a relationship was not something that was acceptable in society. In fact, in many states, including in Missouri where they met, it was against the law. But they fell in love and formed a very strong bond.”…

Read the entire transcript here. Download the audio here (00:05:42).

‘In The Blink Of An Eye,’ A Change In Racial Identity

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2011-07-07

Michele Norris, Host

Michael Sidney Fosberg grew up thinking he was white. His mother is white. His stepfather is white. And while he never met his biological father, the assumption was that he was white too. But well into his adulthood, Fosberg found out that his father was a black man. Michele Norris speaks to him about his story that he’s told in his one-man play and his book, both called Incognito.

Read the transcript of the interview here.  Listen to the interview here.

‘Passing’ Across The Color Line In The Jazz Age

National Public Radio
All Things Considered: You Must Read This
2010-04-07

Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. Her debut novel is “The Girl Who Fell From The Sky.”

There are novels that are enjoyable to read and others that say something about the world.  And sometimes there are novels that are both.  Passing by Nella Larsen is one of those books…

Read the entire essay here.
Listen to the essay here.

Reimagining The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ [Interview with Author Heidi W. Durrow]

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2010-03-02

Michele Norris, Host
All Things Considered

Like so many children of mixed marriages, the author Heidi Durrow has often felt like she’s had to straddle two worlds.

She is the daughter of a black serviceman and a white Danish mother.

Her own personal search for identity inspired her debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky. The story revolves around a girl who moves across the country to live with her grandmother after surviving a family tragedy.

The book has received breathless critical acclaim, and it was awarded the Bellwether Prize for fiction that addresses issues of social justice…

Read the entire story and an excerpt from the book here.  Listen to the interview here.

NPR’s All Things Considered Interview with Heidi W. Durrow

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2010-03-02, 21:00 to 23:00Z

Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow, author of the new Bellwether Prize winning novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, is scheduled to be interviewed on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered today (Tuesday, March 2, 2010 between 16:00 and 18:00 EST).  Please check your local NPR affiliate for actual broadcast times.