Mixed Race Studies

Opinion: “White spaces” are everywhere – including ARC

The American River Current
Sacramento, California
2016-09-26

Shiavon Chatman

Imagine being alone in a place where there was no one who looked like you or understood your experiences.

Imagine having a conversation with someone who assumed the actions and behaviors of people who looked like you and made predictions about the way you conducted yourself.

Being a person of color in a predominantly “white space” is similar to this.

Author Toni Morrison addresses this very idea of oppression and loneliness that comes with being racially stereotyped in her first novel entitled “The Bluest Eye.”

In her novel, the main character Pecola is “(the) little black girl who want(s) to rise up out of her pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.”

The idea of “colorblindness” doesn’t exist. No matter how progressive and accepting a person is, they will see color.

Recognizing color, or rather, race and ethnicity, is being consciously aware of the social injustices and stereotypes that people of color experience.

American River College [(ARC)] student Alyssa Senna said “I feel like there’s a stereotype for all people of color and that’s how white people see us.”…

…The stigma of being a person of color in predominantly white spaces has the same level of intensity for mixed people.

“I feel almost like an alien at times,” said ARC student, Sade Butler, “because I’m black, white, and Filipino and I’m of a medium complexion, (so) a lot of people don’t see me as a person of color.”

Mixed people typically experience more privilege, referred to as “passing”, than non-mixed people of color, except in predominantly “white spaces.”…

Read the entire article here.

Lost kin

University of Chicago Magazine
May/June 2015

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

Excerpt from A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2014 by Allyson Hobbs. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

“Going as white” permanently created confusion as some family members disappeared across the color line, creating gaps in family genealogy. One woman explained, “My father’s people, half of them pass for white so naturally I know nothing about hardly any of them.”

For others, embarrassment and shame prevented an open discussion of family history: “Not much has been disclosed about the Patterson family. It is our guess that there were too many blood mixtures of which the immediate family is not any too proud to relate. … That this family has many skeletons is without a doubt true.” Merthilda C. Duhe wrote that her father used passing as a strategy to create a new life for himself; she knew little about him or his family because he left New Orleans and “deserted the family while they were very young and went over to the white side in Chicago.”

Others expressed uncertainty about the racial backgrounds of their ancestors. One man questioned his grandfather’s race and explained, “Father was always sensitive about that side of his family.” When asked whether her relatives in Detroit “go for colored or do they go for white,” Mrs. Clemens responded, “I don’t know, and I don’t know what I am. We are 100 per cent American and that is all we can say.” Raymond Brownbow did not know much about his maternal grandmother, a mixed- race house servant who was “described as being very nearly white.” As he explained, “I know very little about her, because it seems that my mother was and is a bit reluctant to discuss her. I remember my mother once telling me that she couldn’t stand the remarks that people would make upon learning of her mother’s mixed blood, and for that reason she refrained from talking much about her.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Pain of Passing

Reviews in American History
Volume 44, Number 2, June 2016
pages 264-269
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2016.0028

Renee Romano, Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $29.95.

In the past year, racial passing became the subject of intense media controversy and scrutiny when it was discovered that Rachel Dolezal, then-head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, was a white woman who had misrepresented herself as being partly black. In the wake of the media frenzy that followed, commentators took pains to point out that, even though it was unusual to see a white assuming an identity as black, passing itself was nothing new in U.S. history. “The history of people breaching social divides and fashioning identities for themselves is as old as America,” an editorial in the New York Times proclaimed in response to the controversy. But while the act of passing has long been a part of the American story, it has not, until now, been the subject of a sweeping chronological and narrative history. A Chosen Exile by historian Allyson Hobbs succeeds in the ambitious project of crafting a social and cultural history of the most famous version of the practice, that of people of black ancestry who passed as white. Racial passing, of course, was meant to be hidden and to leave no trace. But in A Chosen Exile, Hobbs demonstrates not only that sources exist to recover the history of blacks who assumed white identities, but also that historians have offered a rather onesided story of black-to-white passing that does not mine the experience fully for what it can tell us about the lived experience of racial identity in different eras in American history.

Drawing on creative research in sources—including runaway slave ads, diaries and letters, census and military data, student college records, and novels—A Chosen Exile offers a wide-ranging chronological history of the experience of blacks who passed as white from the late eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. In taking that approach to the subject, it stands out from most of the existing literature on passing. Scholarly work on passing, for the most part, falls into one of two camps: studies by literary and media scholars that explore literary and cultural representations of the practice, such as Gayle Wald’s Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000) or more historical works that take a biographical approach to reconstruct the lives and stories of specific individuals or families who passed as white. Gerald Horne’s The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (2009), for example, sheds light on the strange life of Lawrence Dennis, a former child-preacher who chose to pass as white and who eventually became an outspoken supporter of fascism in the 1930s. Legal historian Daniel Sharfstein follows the lives of three families who changed from black to white from the colonial era to today in The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America (2012). But A Chosen Exile has a much broader scope. Although Hobbs offers lengthy discussions of some key historical figures, she seeks to bring together as many stories of passing as possible to “reveal larger social, cultural, and national dynamics that would be far less visible if viewed through a lens fixed on the idiosyncrasies of a single person, family, or place” (p. 25).

That approach enables Hobbs to develop arguments about how the meanings and practice of passing have changed over time—arguments that are simply not possible in works that are more narrowly focused. She shows, for example, that passing was a relatively egalitarian practice that both elites and the poor engaged in when circumstances allowed; although, as the book progresses, it is clear that Hobbs has found more evidence to reconstruct the stories of economically privileged blacks than she has for poorer ones. She includes the experiences of both men and women who crossed the color line, and she compares the experiences of those who passed strategically—or who temporarily claimed a white identity in order…

Book Launch: A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs

The Powerhouse Arena
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Telephone: 718.666.3049
Wednesday 2016-06-15, 19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Focusing on individuals and their experiences, Allyson Hobbs examines how racial passing became both a strategy for survival and an avenue to loss.

About A Chosen Exile:

Racial passing is an exile, sometimes chosen, sometimes not. Between the late-eighteenth and midtwentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and communities, without any available avenue for return. Lives were lost only to be remembered in family stories. In A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs helps us to understand how racial ambiguity can be a cross to bear as well as a blessing for those of indeterminate color.

Much of the existing literature on passing is dominated by a focus on what its practitioners gained socially, culturally, economically or politically through assuming a white identity; Hobbs departs from this interpretation by suggesting that passing also resulted in loss, most significantly the loss of family and community ties. To pass as white was to make the decision to turn one’s back on a black racial identity and to claim to belong to a group to which one was not legally assigned.

When one decided to pass as white, a sense of embeddedness in a community or a collectivity was lost. Passing reveals that the essence of identity is not in an individual’s qualities, but rather in the ways that one recognizes himself or herself and is recognized as kindred. These forms of recognition may begin with superficial markers such as skin color, speech, and dress, but these are only indicators of relations to powers, ways of being in the world, and an imagined sharing of a common origin and iconic experiences. Passing, then, works as a prism: it refracts different aspects of what we commonly think of as race and reveals what is left once an ascribed status is stripped away.

Hobbs explores how race-making goes beyond skin color to one’s connection to family, culture, and community as well as to the popular perception of race in the larger society. Focusing on individuals and their experiences, A Chosen Exile examines how passing became both a strategy for survival and an avenue to loss.

About the Author:

Allyson Hobbs is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. You can find more information on her website: http://allysonhobbs.com/.

For more information, click here.

Philanthropy, Jobs for African Youth, Racial Passing

Top of Mind with Julie Rose
BYU Radio
2016-05-25

Julie Rose, Host

…Racial Passing (52:22)

Guest: Allyson Hobbs, PhD, Assistant Professor of American History at Stanford University, Author of “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.”

A 1949 film called “Lost Boundaries” tells the mostly-true story of Albert and Thyra Johnston – a respected doctor and his blue-eyed high-society wife – who passed for “white” in a New Hampshire town, raised their children to believe they were white and then were outed as having African American heritage. The film ends with a minister preaching a sermon about tolerance. The subtext is that this is a town of magnanimous white Christians willing to forgive the Johnstons for deceiving them.

But were the Johnstons really in need of forgiveness? Or did the greater sin lie with the community’s racist conditions that prompted the Johnstons to claim whiteness in the first place?

Stanford history professor Allyson Hobbs explores the long history of racial passing in America in her acclaimed 2014 book, “A Chosen Exile.” It is fundamentally, she says, a book about loss. Those who “passed” as white had a world of privileges opened up to them from the time of slavery through the era of Jim Crow laws. But they lost family and ties to a community. Many even lost themselves.

Listen to the interview (00:52:22) here.

Racial Passing in American Life

The Hill Center
Washington, D.C.
2016-05-10

Lisa Page, Director of Creative Writing at The George Washington University, and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, #Passing, moderates a discussion with Dr. Allyson Hobbs. Hobbs is an assistant professor of American history at Stanford University. She is the author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

Paperback Row

Book Review
The New York Times
2016-04-29

Joumana Khatib

Seven new paperbacks to check out this week…

…A CHOSEN EXILE: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, by Allyson Hobbs. (Harvard University, $16.95.) People who chose to “pass” were intentionally clandestine and left few clues of their histories, but here, Hobbs, a historian at Stanford, delves into the fraught history of African-Americans who passed as white in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the black families and identities that were left behind…

Read the entire article here.

“We assigned [Allyson] Hobbs’s book [A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life] because we thought it was a model for writing cultural history – it is beautifully crafted and draws on sources in very clear ways to tell its story. We hoped to inspire our history students to commit themselves in similar ways to telling the stories of people who are often lost to history,” —Colgate University Assistant Professor of History Daniel Bouk

Megan Leo, “Uncovering Hidden Histories: Hobbs Discusses Her Award-Winning Book,” The Colgate Maroon-News, March 31, 2016. http://www.thecolgatemaroonnews.com/news/article_f2fab440-f757-11e5-9c94-cb38fb52fc0d.html.

Uncovering Hidden Histories: Hobbs Discusses Her Award-Winning Book

The Colgate Maroon-News
Hamilton, New York
2016-03-31

Megan Leo, Section Editor

On Monday, March 21, Colgate students and faculty gathered in the Persson Auditorium to listen to Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University Allyson Hobbs, who gave a lecture about her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

Racial passing occurs when a member of a certain racial group is also accepted as a member of another racial group. In the context of her book and lecture, Hobbs specifically examined the phenomenon of African Americans passing as Caucasian to escape systematic racism in the United States.

“[Passing is fundamentally] a social act, with enormous social consequences,” Hobbs said…

…Assistant Professor of History Daniel Bouk was instrumental in bringing Hobbs to speak at Colgate.

“Professor Heather Roller and I dreamed up a plan of inviting Professor Hobbs out to campus after we decided to assign her book to both our introductory history workshop classes and our senior honors seminar. We were thrilled when Hobbs said yes and when we won the support of the History Department, the Africana and Latin American Studies Program and the Sio Chair in Diversity in Community, which made the visit possible,” Bouk said.

Bouk provided some background as to why he made the decision to assign A Chosen Exile to Colgate students.

“We assigned Hobbs’s book because we thought it was a model for writing cultural history – it is beautifully crafted and draws on sources in very clear ways to tell its story. We hoped to inspire our history students to commit themselves in similar ways to telling the stories of people who are often lost to history,” Bouk said…

Read the entire article here.

Allyson Hobbs discusses A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Monday, 2016-04-11, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University Allyson Hobbs discusses the paperback release of her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

About A Chosen Exile

Countless African Americans have passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and communities. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile. This history of passing explores the possibilities, challenges, and losses that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

For more information, click here.