Mixed Race Studies

In a Novelist’s World, You Choose Your Race

The New York Times
2014-08-11

Felicia R. Lee

In the weak light of a February afternoon, Kelly Thorndike has a strange chance encounter in a Baltimore parking lot with Martin Lipkin, an old friend from high school. But time has brought a big change. The Martin that Kelly knew was white. The man standing before him is black.

Their meeting sets the stage for “Your Face in Mine,” Jess Row’s debut novel, which is to be published on Thursday by Riverhead Books, joining a long tradition of fiction about racial guises. Mr. Row’s tale is set in a near future in which Martin is the first person to undergo “racial reassignment surgery” to change his features, skin color, hair texture and even his voice. His surgical package includes a new biography and even a dialect coach — all a corrective for Martin’s “racial dysphoria.”

“I wanted to make the novel the logical outcome of the way certain vectors in our society are going,” Mr. Row, 39, a soft-spoken, self-described WASP, said during a recent interview. He pointed to the current state of plastic surgery, in which it’s possible for features and body parts to be changed to mask or remake ethnicity. “I wanted people to ask, ‘If I could have the surgery, would I?’ ” said Mr. Row, the author of two story collections, “The Train to Lo Wu” and “Nobody Ever Gets Lost.”

A fan of James Baldwin’s work, Mr. Row said he set out to have “Your Face in Mine” explore the ways people try to escape their racial identities, as well as investigate their desire for racial reconciliation and deeply unconscious fears and discomforts around race.

“Passing” has been a major theme in African-American literature for over a century, and has usually meant blacks living as whites to escape bias. “Your Face in Mine” owes something to classic stories of passing like “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” by James Weldon Johnson (published anonymously in 1912 and under his name in 1927), and the 1931 satire “Black No More,” by George S. Schuyler, in which blacks rush to embrace a new scientific process to become white.

It also calls to mind “Black Like Me,” the groundbreaking 1961 account by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, who darkened his skin to appear African-American and wrote about the discrimination he experienced…

…“Is Race Plastic?,” a recent New York magazine cover article, considered just this issue, exploring the implications of “ethnic plastic surgery” with its menu of procedures that go about “sharpening the stereotypically flat noses of Asians, blacks and Latinos, while flattening the stereotypically sharp noses of Arabs and Jews.”

Allyson Hobbs, an assistant professor of history at Stanford, whose book, “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life,” comes out in October, said that in life and in literature, passing showed the complexity, and even absurdity, of racial categories.

“Historically, it was much clearer what was to be gained by being white, in the literature as well,” she said. “There was a social and economic logic to becoming white.” About “Your Face in Mine,” she said: “What this book sort of raises as a question is what someone expects to gain by being black, Hispanic or Asian in the 21st century? What is gained and what is lost through a racial reassignment in the 21st century?”…

Read the entire article here.

The Chosen Exile of Racial “Passing:” Allyson Hobbs at TEDxStanford

TEDx Talks
2014-05-30

Allyson Hobbs, PhD 2009, speaks about the history of racial passing for TEDx Talks. Using the Emersonian idea of “coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience,” Hobbs tells the story of a cousin who passed for white, and how this story set her research in motion.

From the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in America, some light-skinned black people passed for white in the hopes of gaining economic and social privilege—the writer and critic Anatole Broyard being a recent example. In her research, Hobbs found that the losses of passing far outweighed the gains. Like Broyard, those who passed became exiled from family, past, and home. This tragic loss of identity became the key for Hobbs to explore the construction of racial identity in the United States.

Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor of American history at Stanford University. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard, 2014) is an expansion of her University of Chicago dissertation, directed by Thomas Holt, George Chauncey, and Jacqueline Stewart.

Allyson Hobbs: Racial Passing and African American Family Life in Jim Crow America

The Ethics@noon Series
The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Stanford University
2011-02-04

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

On February 4th, 2011 Allyson Hobbs discussed the Jim Crow era as a watershed in the history of racial passing. The talk examines passing’s disruptions and dislocations to black families in Jim Crow America. Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor of American history. Her research interests include racial mixture, migration and urbanization, and the intersections of race, class and gender.

The Ethics@noon series consists of informal noon-time talks and discussions, focused on different ethical issues. Each week, Stanford faculty tackle important questions of ethics that arise in private and public life.

The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society is committed to bringing ethical reflection to bear on important social problems through research, teaching, and engagement.

Baseball’s Secret Pioneer

Slate
2014-02-04

Peter Morris, Baseball Historian
Haslett, Michigan

Stefan Fatsis, Sports Writer

William Edward White, the first black player in major-league history, lived his life as a white man.

On June 22, 1937, Joe Louis knocked out James Braddock with a right to the jaw to become the world heavyweight champion. At a time when Major League Baseball was still a decade from integration, Louis’ victory in Chicago’s Comiskey Park was a triumph for black America, and for racial progress. “What my father did was enable white America to think of him as an American, not as a black,” Joe Louis Jr. told ESPN in 1999. “By winning, he became white America’s first black hero.”

Three months before the fight, another notable moment involving race and sports occurred in the same city: the death of a 76-year-old man named William Edward White, of blood poisoning after a slip on an icy sidewalk and a broken arm. Fifty-eight years earlier, White played a single game for the Providence Grays of baseball’s National League to become, as best as can be determined, the first African-American player in big-league history. Unlike Louis’ knockout, though, White’s death merited no coverage in the local or national press. A clue as to why can be found in cursive handwriting in box No. 4 on White’s death certificate, which is labeled COLOR OR RACE. The box reads: “White.”

William Edward White was born in 1860 to a Georgia businessman and one of his slaves, who herself was of mixed race. That made White, legally, black and a slave. But his death certificate and other information indicate that White spent his adult life passing as a white man. Since the 1879 game was unearthed a decade ago, questions about White’s race have clouded his legacy. If he didn’t want other people to think of him as black, did he actually break the sports world’s most infamous racial barrier? Or is the reality of his racial heritage, and the difficult personal issues it no doubt forced him to confront, enough to qualify him as a pioneer? Should William Edward White be recognized during Black History Month alongside Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and other groundbreaking African-Americans?

These are complicated questions. Allyson Hobbs, an assistant professor of American history at Stanford, says the practice of “racial passing” in America dates at least to runaway slaves in the 1700s. Slaves, she says, often attempted to pass as white to gain their freedom but then lived out their lives as black. By the Jim Crow era, when William White came of age, the social and economic advantages of living as white—and the disadvantages of living as black—were so profound that people who could successfully pass did so and never looked back.

“People who passed did not want to leave a trace,” says Hobbs, whose book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life will be published by Harvard University Press in the fall. “They did not want to leave records, they did not want to have anyone find them, to discover that they were passing. It’s very difficult to get a well-rounded image of these people’s lives, and that’s by their design. It’s a hidden history, and it’s one that can be very frustrating because there is often so little data available about these people.”…

Read the entire article here.

The ‘white’ student who integrated Ole Miss

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-02-05

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of American History
Stanford University

(CNN) — When Harry S. Murphy arrived at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1945, he was nervous. He landed at Ole Miss by way of the Navy’s V-12 program, a wartime measure that allowed young men to take college classes, receive naval training and preparation to become officers.

Murphy was black, but university officials did not know that. He had a white complexion and wavy brown hair. A military official checked the “W” box for white when Murphy enlisted in the Navy.

This official unwittingly set Murphy on an entirely new path. Murphy explained that he had no intention to “pass,” and once at Ole Miss in Oxford, no one inquired about his race.

“I guess they just assumed I was white,” Murphy said.

If no one asked, why tell?

Passing—the choice to leave behind a black racial identity and present oneself as white—allowed many African-Americans to navigate a racist society. In today’s multiracial America, the decision to pass may seem unnecessary and unwarranted.

But historically, erasing one’s black identity was one of a limited number of avenues available to light-skinned African-Americans to secure a better life in the era of legalized segregation.

Those who passed often reaped financial rewards, gained social privileges and enjoyed the fun of “getting over” by playing a practical joke on unsuspecting whites and winning a clandestine war against Jim Crow America…

Read the entire article here.

“I want to show that passing is a deeply individualistic practice, but it is also a fundamentally social act with enormous social consequences. I want to show what was lost by walking away from a black racial identity.” —Allyson Hobbs

Nate Sloan, “Stanford historian re-examines practice of racial ‘passing’,” Stanford News, (December 18, 2013). http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/december/passing-as-white-121713.html

Stanford historian re-examines practice of racial ‘passing’

Stanford News
The Humanities at Stanford
2013-12-18

Nate Sloan, Doctoral Candidate in Musicology
Stanford University

In the margins of historical accounts and the dusty corners of family archives, Stanford history Professor Allyson Hobbs uncovers stories long kept hidden: those of African Americans who passed as white, from the late 18th century to the present.

Dr. Albert Johnston grew up in Chicago, attended the University of Chicago Medical School in the 1920s, and went on to become a radiologist in a small town in New Hampshire. He and his wife were black – a fact they initially hid so that Johnston could secure an internship – and for 20 years, they kept this secret from their neighbors, and even their children.

After the United States entered World War II, Johnston effectively “outed” himself by applying for the Navy. He was rejected because of his racial background, and word of his mixed-race roots spread. What motivated Johnston to sacrifice his social status and job security? Was it wartime patriotism, or something else: a desire to have the truth out in the open?

Questions like these have motivated the latest research project of Stanford history Professor Allyson Hobbs. The Johnstons’ story is one of the many instances of racial “passing” – the practice in which light-skinned African Americans chose to present themselves as white – that Hobbs profiles in her upcoming book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing (Harvard University Press, 2014)…

Read the entire article here.

Searching for a new soul in Harlem

Gender News
The Clayman Institute for Gender Research
Stanford University
2012-02-27

Annelise Heinz, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History
Stanford University

Allyson Hobbs on passing and racial ambiguity during the Harlem Renaissance

Harlem in the 1920s is known for its creative outpouring of art, music, and literature. A consciously political movement, the Harlem Renaissance was a cultural response to the dehumanizing limitations of Jim Crow, blackface minstrelsy, and economic disenfranchisement.

Early-20th-century America was organized along strict racial demarcations within a white supremacist world. Black authors like Alain Locke promoted a vision of the empowered “New Negro,” imbued with race pride. Ironically, during the same era that explicitly embraced a black identity, an extensive audience grew for literature focused on racial passing – stories about individuals of mixed-race heritage who passed as white.

For historian Allyson Hobbs, passing literature “functioned as a literary vehicle to critique racism and to draw attention to the absurdity of the American racial condition.” Yet, Hobbs also asserts that passing “opened a space for a fuller consideration of complex relationships within African American group identity.”

In this moment of celebrating African American culture, Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, literary luminaries in the Harlem Renaissance, struggled with definitions of race. As individuals with mixed European and African ancestry, race structured the ways others saw them and shaped the choices available to them. Hobbs examines their personal and professional writings to argue for the diversity of mixed-race experiences and self-identities, which have largely been obscured or forgotten in the literature on passing…

Read the entire article here.