Tag: Brent Staples

  • Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think The New York Times 2005-10-31 Brent Staples People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a…

  • Escape into Whiteness The New York Review of Books 2011-11-24 Brent Staples Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827. Tickets to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial were a hot item in the spring of…

  • “One of the things that interested me in the last campaign, was the byplay having to do with Obama’s racial origins. It struck me that the press and the public generally reserve the ‘mixed race’ label for the offspring of racially mixed marriages. But there is a paradox here. Obama, half black and half white,…

  • Up Front: Brent Staples Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2011-09-02 The Editors Brent Staples, who reviews Randall Kennedy’s “Persist­ence of the Color Line” in this issue, is working on a history of mixed-race identity in the United States. “One of the things that interested me in the last campaign,” Staples wrote in an…

  • The Too Black, Too White Presidency The New York Times 2011-09-02 Brent Staples Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. 322 pp. The next time you see Barack Obama gliding into a White House press conference, take note of that jazzy walk. It…

  • Times writer talks ‘construction’ of race Yale Daily News 2009-01-23 Conrad Lee, Contributing Reporter For any Yale student who has taken English 120, chances are he or she has come across Brent Staples and his popular essay “Black Men and Public Space.” Thursday afternoon, Staples — an author and editorial writer for the New York…