Category: Passing

  • Ever since renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard’s own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to “pass” in order to get work, he had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries…

  • Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual…

  • “Troubling the Family” argues that the emergence of multiracialism during the 1990s was determined by underlying and unacknowledged gender norms. Opening with a germinal moment for multiracialism—the seemingly massive and instantaneous popular appearance of Tiger Woods in 1997—Habiba Ibrahim examines how the shifting status of racial hero for both black and multiracial communities makes sense…

  • Jean Toomer and the History of Passing Reviews in American History Volume 41, Number 1, March 2013 pages 113-121 DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0016 Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies Brown University Jean Toomer. Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.…

  • I have never had the comfort zone of a given racial identity. My mother is a Bostonian white woman of WASP heritage. My father is a Louisiana black man of mixed African and Mexican heritage. Unlike people who are automatically classified as black or white, I have always been up for debate. I am forever having…

  • Love in black and white Princeton Alumni Weekly 2009-04-22 Lawrence Otis Graham ’83 Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United…

  • Woman finds out famous relative was black The Toronto Star 2011-02-23 Megan Ogilvie, Health Reporter Growing up in Georgetown, Catherine Slaney knew her great-grandfather had an important and interesting past. She knew he was a respected doctor and a surgeon in the American Civil War. She knew he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and…

  • Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line Dundurn Publishing February 2003 264 pages 6 x 9 in Paperback ISBN: 978-1-89621-982-0 eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-55488-161-1 eBook (EPUB) ISBN: 978-1-45971-478-6 Catherine Slaney Foreword by: Daniel G. Hill, III (1923-2003) Catherine Slaney grew into womanhood unaware of her celebrated Black ancestors. An unanticipated meeting was to change her life.…

  • The claim that “there has been vastly less race mixture in the northern hemisphere” than is sometimes alleged, may be questioned in the light of some data which have been submitted to us for publication by Mr. J. C. Trevor, formerly one of the Eugenics Society’s Darwin Research Fellows and now University Lecturer in Anthropology…

  • Hopkins tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who couldn’t care less about being black and appreciating African history, but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost treasures—which he does find in the ancient land. However, he discovers much more than he bargained…