Family Storytellers Inspired Professor-HistorianPosted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2018-11-09 03:37Z by Steven |
Family Storytellers Inspired Professor-Historian
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
2018-10-30
LaMont Jones, Senior Staff Writer
Dr. Allyson Hobbs comes from a family of storytellers, perhaps chief among them her Aunt Shirley.
It was Shirley Kitching’s fascinating stories shared during holiday and summer visits to Chicago – particularly one about an ancestor who was sent to the West Coast to live her life as a White woman by “passing” – that influenced Hobbs’ decision to become a historian and author.
Now Hobbs, an associate professor of American history and director of African and African-American Studies at Stanford University, spends a lot of time researching historical people, places and phenomena and bringing those stories to life for the public – the same way Kitching and other relatives did for her…
…“You have to understand Chicago to understand African-American history,” Hobbs contends, noting its longtime centrality to Black culture.
And that, along with one of Aunt Shirley’s stories, is what led to research and ultimately an award-winning book about the racial phenomenon of passing – when very light-skinned and European-featured Black Americans secretly pass themselves off as White people. Published in 2014, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life explored the history of passing in the United States from the 1700’s to current times…
Read the entire article here.