Category: United States

  • Across the Border The Nation 2016-07-21 Michael A. Elliott, Professor of English Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia William Henry Ellis, (Photo courtesy of Fanny Johnson-Griffin) A new biography of William Henry Ellis reminds us how much we still don’t know about the elusive history of racial subterfuge in America. When, in 1912, James Weldon Johnson published…

  • How white parents talk with their black and biracial kids about race The Brood 89.3 KPCC, Southern California Public Radio Pasadena, California 2016-07-19 How does “the talk” about race and policing play out when a parent is white and their children are black or biracial? Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

  • Recently, there’s been numerous viral photos of white parents posting pictures of their mixed Black children with #AllLivesMatter political statements.

  • Obama Faces Growing Expectations on Race and Policing The New York Times 2016-07-21 Julie Hirschfeld Davis WASHINGTON — At the White House last week, DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter activist who was arrested only days before in Baton Rouge, La., for protesting police violence against African-Americans, had a lengthy list of demands for President…

  • More than a coming of age story, Danzy Senna’s first novel, “Caucasia” (Riverhead Books, 1998) addresses themes of coming into consciousness within the U.S. ethnoracial landscape. Clearly in dialogue with Nella Larsen’s “Passing” as well as Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” “Caucasia” is a first person narrative where anything that happens to the protagonist, Birdie Lee,…

  • A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border The New Yorker 2016-07-20 Jonathan Blitzer The African-American businessman William Ellis, pictured here around the year 1900, frequently passed as Mexican. COURTESY FANNY JOHNSON-GRIFFIN Some people knew him as William Ellis, and others as Guillermo Eliseo. He could be Mexican, Cuban, or even Hawaiian, depending on…

  • The Complexities of Skin Color Black Issues Forum UNC-TV Raleigh, North Carolina 2016-05-01 Running Time: 00:26:46 Deborah Holt Noel, Host Inspired by the casting of Latina actress Zoe Saldana to play Nina Simone, the performer and activist known for her pride in her dark skin, Deborah chats with professor Dr. Yaba Blay, filmmaker Eric Barstow,…

  • My Soul Has Found Its Home Jews of Colour Canada: Building community through identity and faith 2016-07-11 Shirley Gindler-Price Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Out of the 95,000 US Occupation babies born in Germany shortly after WWII, there were approximately 5000 of us, post WWII Afro-German children, so-called Negro mulatto babies, better known as German ‘Brown Babies.’…

  • Lost kin University of Chicago Magazine May/June 2015 Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History Stanford University Excerpt from A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2014 by Allyson Hobbs. Used by permission. All rights reserved. “Going as white” permanently created confusion…

  • Commodification of the Black Body, Sexual Objectification and Social Hierarchies during Slavery The Earlham Historical Journal: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Inquiry Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana Volume VII: Issue II (Spring 2015) pages 21-43 Iman Cooper The horror of the institution of slavery during the late eighteenth century was not that it displaced millions of…