Category: United States

  • Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Rebekkah Paulin (review) [Ings] African American Review Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2014 Katharine Nicholson Ings, Associate Professor of English Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. 315…

  • CSER W4701 Troubling the Color: Passing, Inter-racial Sex, and Ethnic Ambiguity. Barnard College New York, New York 2016-17 Catalogue Karl Jacoby, Professor of History Columbia University, New York, New York Passing, remarked W.E.B. Du Bois in 1929, “is a petty, silly matter of no real importance which another generation will comprehend with great difficulty.”  Yet passing and…

  • ‘An offer of my heart’: A story of black love after the Civil War The Washington Post 2016-09-08 DeNeen L. Brown, Reporter One hundred and forty-four years after they were written, the civil rights advocate found the letters in the bottom of an old suitcase, stacked in thin envelopes and tied together by a faded,…

  • Memoir Uncovers One Woman’s Painful Search for Racial Identity NBC News 2016-09-08 Brooke Obie When award-winning journalist Sil-Lai Abrams finally sat down to write her memoir, she hoped to stick to her 8-month contract. Instead, it took Abrams 3.5 years to dive into the pain of her upbringing and emerge ready to tell her story…

  • Modern American Spiritualism blossomed in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Creole Faubourgs of Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of…

  • In front of his friends and girlfriend, he criticized my mother for divorcing him and called her, multiple times, “a whore”; then he called her mother—my grandmother—”a nigger.” To prove his point, he slurred, with a knowing tone, as if he were somehow enlightening me, “Your grandmother had nigger lips.”…

  • On Being a Black Female Math Whiz During the Space Race The New York Times 2016-09-05 Cara Buckley, Culture Reporter Katherine Johnson, left, and Christine Darden, two of the former NASA mathematicians in the book “Hidden Figures.” Credit:  Chet Strange for The New York Times HAMPTON, Va. — Growing up here in the 1970s, in…

  • What is Afro-Latin America? African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) 2016-09-04 Devyn Spence Benson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Latin American Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina From Mexico to Brazil and beyond, Africans and people of African descent have fought in wars of independence, forged mixed race national identities, and contributed politically and culturally…

  • SIL LAI ABRAMS HAD HER SUSPICIONS about her race as a very young child. Her brown skin was much darker and her hair much curlier than her fair-skinned, straight-haired younger sister and brother. When she would walk down the street with her Chinese mother and White father, her White neighbors would stare and whisper.

  • My mother loved our actual blackness and African-ness, not just the artistic representations of them — the hair and the clothing and the food. She loved the history, the music, the language. And she wanted it FOR US.