Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
There is something specifically traumatic about listening to your own parent expressing prejudiced views against people who look like you, and denying or trivialising your existence. Unlike arguing with a stranger, it’s almost impossible to completely disregard their opinion. Often, we can’t help but care what they think. No matter how old we get, there exists in most of us a small child that still longs for validation from our parents. Accordingly, their words can shatter whatever anti-racism defences we have spent years carefully constructing. This isn’t simply a matter of overlooking political differences, it is deeply personal. As Pauline tells me, her mother’s “complete lack of empathy and eagerness to learn from her own child” is what she finds most hurtful.
As the population of mixed-race Japanese—popularly called hāfu—grows, entertainers and athletes with bicultural backgrounds are increasingly prominent. However, most of those considered hāfu in Japan live normal, private lives, struggling daily with curiosity, prejudice, and their own identity conflicts. Whole, a new short film, takes up the issues facing just such people through the story of two young men. We spoke with the director, writer, and leading actor about the film…
“To be honest, I’ve never fit in anywhere,” she said over Zoom in October. “I think being Black in Ireland when there wasn’t that many Black people and being Black and Irish in London at an all-white school in the early ’90s wasn’t great for me either.”
At the same time, being hard to categorize has not always been a bad thing, she says. “I think sometimes there is a pleasure I get in being different. I felt safe being the other in many ways because that’s where I could be my whole, true self.”
The Ethiopian-Irish actor frequently upends notions of social constructs such as race and identity in her work. In “Passing,” which is set in the 1920s, Clare enjoys the privileges afforded only to white women by day while sneaking off to Harlem to commune with Black folks by night (Tessa Thompson co-stars as Irene, a woman who only flirts with the possibility of passing). And in 2016’s “Loving,” Negga stars as Mildred Jeter, a woman in an interracial marriage who challenges the Supreme Court to end the anti-miscegenation laws that condemn her marriage as unlawful…
This month, “Passing,” a new film by writer and director Rebecca Hall premieres on Netflix. Adapted from Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel of the same name, “Passing” is shot in black and white. It’s a complex film likely to revive old debates and provoke new conversations around unresolved and still unspoken meanings of race, class, gender, power, identity, and resistance. For this week’s Deep Dive, Melissa and co-host Dorian Warren use the film as a jumping off point to explore the thorny questions raised by the concept of passing.
Joining Melissa and Dorian to discuss her film and her family’s history with passing is Rebecca Hall. Adding context on the history of passing is Allyson Hobbs, associate professor of U.S. History and the Director of African and African American Studies at Stanford University and author of “A Chosen Exile.” Karla Holloway, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Duke University and author of Legal Fictions and A Death in Harlem: A Novel, discusses how race has been socially constructed over time. Brit Bennett, author of “The Vanishing Half,” explains how she explored colorism in her 2020 novel. Lauren Michele Jackson, assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker, discusses the idea of “Blackfishing,” which is when white people and even more notably white women, attempt transgressing racial boundaries by adopting a performance of Blackness through darkening their skin excessively, wearing hairstyles and clothing trends that have been pioneered by Black people. Bliss Broyard, author of the award-winning memoir, “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life- A Story of Race and Family Secrets,” talks about finding out in her mid twenties that her father had passed as white for most of his life. And finally, Dean Moncel, a freelance writer based in Switzerland and Aryah Lester, deputy director of the Transgender Strategy Center, join the show to discuss the ways passing emerges around gender and sexuality.
In the first part of my interview with Ginny Summey, an independent scholar, we talk about her forthcoming book on Elreta Melton Alexander, one of the first Black women to become a lawyer in the US, and North Carolina’s first Black woman district court judge. We also discuss the challenges and benefits of being independent scholars.
Dailey brings into sharp relief how white focus on safeguarding purity fueled centuries of brutality and structural racism. Historian Nell Painter looks at the nineteenth and twentieth century south through an intersecting lens. Her book “Southern History Across the Color Line” brings to the surface the many ways in which the lives of southern Blacks and whites were thoroughly entangled. Join these two thinkers as they reflect on the white American psyche, the messy tangles between races in the south, and the throughline that brings us from Emmett Till, to Loving v. Virginia, to the racism that continues today.
Vanessa discusses how being Mixed Race has affected her relationships with colleagues, impacted her work with the prison population, and how she’s been viewed when traveling to different countries.
For nearly a decade, the actress-turned-filmmaker tried to get her ambitious Nella Larsen adaptation made. As she tells IndieWire, she knew there was only one way to make it happen.
Every word that first-time feature filmmaker Rebecca Hall uses to describe the genesis of her “Passing” vibrates with intensity. Her first experience reading the Nella Larsen novella she eventually adapted for the black-and-white period piece was like “being in a fever,” the pages flipping by as if she was “slightly possessed.”
More than 13 years after first reading Larsen’s book, Hall has kept up that same passion for the material, enough to propel her through years of denials from Hollywood brass and the distinct possibility that the film would never get made the way she saw it.
Much has been made of Hall’s personal connection to the material — the film, like Larsen’s seminal work, follows the fraught reunion of a pair of friends (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga), both of whom are Black, though one of them has crossed the color line and lived her life “passing” as a white woman (Negga as Clare). Hall herself is of mixed racial heritage and her own maternal grandfather “passed” for the majority of his life. But for the long-time actress, Larsen’s slim book spoke even more deeply about much larger ideas…
