Category: Passing

  • 4th Annual “What Are You?” with Lacey Schwartz’s “Little White Lie” Brooklyn Historical Society 128 Pierrepont Street Brooklyn, New York 11201 Monday, 2015-06-08, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time) A BHS “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations” program. Top: Lacey Schwartz, photo by Michael Hill; Bottom: Lise Funderburg, photo by Tigist Tsegie On the week of Loving Day 2015,…

  • Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 2002 Richard Wormser, Series producer, Co-writer Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, “Jim Crow” came to personify the system of government-sanctioned…

  • The Gains and Losses of Passing for White – Ernest Torregano Creolegen 2015-05-31 Jari Honora, Founder and Consultant In 1912, Ernest Joseph Torregano, a thirty-year old New Orleans native, was a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. For about three years, Torregano had worked the run from New Orleans to San Francisco. After each successful…

  • Crossed lines The University of Chicago Magazine May-June 2015 Lydiayle Gibson Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09. (Photography by Jennifer Pottheiser) A secret in her own family led Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09, to uncover the hidden history of racial passing. “You know, we have that in our own family too.” That was the bombshell, the offhand remark…

  • Two Takes on ‘Imitation of Life’: Exploitation in Eastmancolor The New York Times 2015-05-14 J. Hoberman “I would have made the picture just for the title,” Douglas Sirk said of his last Hollywood production, “Imitation of Life” (1959). But, newly released on Blu-ray by Universal, along with its original version, directed in 1934 by John…

  • When I was four years old, I came home from preschool and said to my mother, “they think I’m one of the white kids.” To their credit, I have always looked like one of the white kids. Unfortunately for those not interested in giving evidence to the proverb about books and their covers, my appearance…

  • “A Chosen Exile” by History Professor Allyson Hobbs, has won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians Stanford University Department of History Palo Alto, California 2015-04-20 “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life” by History Professor Allyson Hobbs has won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson…

  • Racial Reflections American Book Review Volume 36, Number 2, January/February 2015 page 13 DOI: 10.1353/abr.2015.0007 Ben Railton, Associate Professor of English Fitchburg State University, Fitchburg, Massachusetts Hobbs, Allyson, A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Even without a back-cover blurb from Isabel Wilkerson, it seems inevitable that…

  • Today it’s taken for granted that people of all ethnic groups should be treated equally in the armed forces and elsewhere. But as Leslie Gordon Goffe writes, during World War One black officers in the British armed forces faced a system with prejudice at its core.

  • The Family Secret in the Mirror The Brian Lehrer Show WNYC 93.9 FM New York, New York Monday, 2015-03-23 Brian Lehrer, Host Lacey Schwartz wins the documentary section prize for her documentary work-in-progress, ‘Outside The Box’ at the TAA Awards during the 5th Annual Tribeca Film Festival. (Mat Szwajkos/Getty) Raised as a white Jewish kid…