Category: Passing

  • “Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association Volume 36, Number 3 (Summer, 1995) pages 291-312 Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus Occidental College, Los Angeles On sunny summer Sunday afternoons in Harlem when the air is one interminable ball game and grandma cannot…

  • Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects?

  • Science: Passers TIME Magazine 1946-08-12 Will U.S. whites eventually absorb the nation’s Negroes—as Italy, Mexico and Portugal have absorbed theirs? So thought James Bryce, and so, for more than a generation, have thought many sociologists. “It is now estimated,” wrote Author Herbert Asbury in Collier’s last week, “that there are at least between 5,000,000 and…

  • The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White [Discussion] Lillian Goldman Law Library Yale University 2011-03-07 Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law Vanderbilt University Moderator: Claire Priest, Professor of Law Yale University The Lillian Goldman Law Library together with the Yale Law School Legal History Forum and the Yale…

  • Impurely Raced // Purely Erased: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing University of Southern California May 2009 348 pages Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar Brown University Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION) This dissertation…

  • Black or White? The New York Times 2011-05-14 Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law Vanderbilt University Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.” In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private…

  • The campaign for racial purity and the erosion of paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: “nominally white, biologically mixed, and legally Negro”. The Journal of Southern History Volume 68, Number 1 (February 2002) pages 65-106 J. Douglas Smith In September 1922 John Powell, a Richmond native and world-renowned pianist and composer, and Earnest Sevier Cox, a self-proclaimed…

  • While racial passing seems outdated by today’s standards, and the very thought of a black person needing to pass for white actually smacks of racism, this essay repositions the importance of passing as a genre by looking at four key Hollywood films from the early-‘30s through the late-‘50s: two versions of “Imitation of Life” (John…

  • Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed” Cooper Panel American Literature Association Conference San Diego, California May 1998 James Fenimore Cooper Society Barbara Mann, Lecturer of English University of Toledo Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, August 1998 Natty Bumppo—Hawkeye of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales—is indelibly inscribed…

  • Jean Toomer and the Politics and Poetics of National Identity Contributions in Black Studies A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies Volume 7, Number 1 (1985-01-01) Article 3 24 pages Onita Estes-Hicks State University of New York, Old Westbury Jean Toomer’s place in thew world of letters rests on Cane, the author’s profound statement on…