Author: Steven

  • When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute “Ethiopian Hebrew.” “God did not make us Negroes,” declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century…

  • Not many private relationships in history have received as much press attention in recent years as that between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. First alleged in 1802 by the journalist James Callender, who based his account on stories that had been current in Virginia for some years, the affair has since then been…

  • The Hapa Japan Festival celebrates mixed-race and mixed roots Japanese people and culture. Come join us at the Japanese American National Museum and the USC campus for film screenings documenting the story of mixed race Japanese people, rich conversations with Hapa cultural icons, jam sessions, and a gastoronomic experience to remember.

  • I am a mixed-race person who remembers stumbling across the word “mulatto” in my history textbook, clinging to the first historical representation of myself despite the fact that it was rooted in the rape of slave women by their masters. Throughout the Obama presidency, I wondered about his first encounter with that word. I wondered…

  • Miscegenation and passing provide the primal scenes of American racial anxiety. In Boy, Snow, Bird they become more than themes: miscegenation and passing also drive the novel’s fundamental imagination and its modes of narration. The novel is replete with sly passing metaphors. One character describes another as “seventy percent all right and thirty percent pain…

  • A president’s past yields a modern parable The Berkshire Eagle Pittsfield, Massachusetts 2017-01-24 Jenn Smith A tree is planted and dedicated to the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, at Monticello’s Mulberry Row. Mulberry Row was the center of activity of Jefferson’s 5,000-acre agricultural enterprise. According to the Monticello website, it was…

  • Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family Random House December 2002 160 pages Hardcover ISBN: 978-0195031720 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-82168-4 Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman Personal testimonies from descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings pose important questions about equality, freedom, and family. On October 31, 1998, the Associated Press broke the news that…

  • How do you break a spell? How do you get over the grief of racial, gendered, and childhood injuries? Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird is not a black-and-white parable but a black-and-blue story. A bruising tale about miscegenation, passing, and beauty, this novel brings to life the idealization and wounding that haunt the American…

  • @X: Making America White 200 Years Ago Public Books 2017-02-17 Brandon R. Byrd, Assistant Professor of History Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee In the latest edition of our anniversaries series, Brandon Byrd examines resistance to the American Colonization Society’s attempts to remove free blacks from the US. In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans…

  • The True Story of Pocahontas: Historical Myths Versus Sad Reality Indian Country Media Network 2017-02-16 Vincent Schilling AP Images A portrait of Pocahontas saving the life of John Smith with Father Wahunsenaca. Oral history from the descendants of Pocahontas dictate such a thing could never have happened. Pocahontas had a Native Husband and Native Child;…