Mixed Race Studies

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile, in conversation with Helena Brantley

Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, California 94025
Tuesday, 2016-03-15, 19:30 PDT (Local Time)

Presented by Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler’s Books

Join us for a look back at the history of racial passing, and a topical discussion of race and identity problems in America today.

For centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community, almost always for the benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility. But along with these brighter possibilities came grief, loneliness, and isolation that often outweighed the rewards. A Chosen Exile is a beautiful, extensively researched book, with historical photographs and over 82 pages of notes.

As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.

Allyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. Hobbs teaches courses on African-American history, African-American women’s history and 20th century American history. Her research interests include American social and cultural history, racial mixture, identity formation, migration and urbanization, and the intersections of race, class and gender.

Helena Brantley is the founder of Red Pencil Publicity + Marketing, working with both publishers and authors. Previously, she managed publicity campaigns for HarperCollins. She is a proud alumna of the Stanford Publishing Course. Helena tweets and posts about books and other interesting things on Twitter and Instagram.

For more information, click here.

Speaker: Allyson Hobbs

Colgate University
27 Persson Hall
13 Oak Drive
Hamilton, New York 13346
Monday, 2016-03-21, 16:15-18:15 EDT (Local Time)

Contact: Diane English 315-228-7511

Guest speaker Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Stanford University will give a lecture entitled: “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life”, Monday, March 21, 4:15-5:45 pm, in 27 Persson Hall. Her revelatory work of history explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions and it also tells a tale of loss. Hobbs teaches at Stanford University and writes for the New Yorker. Her book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root name A Chosen Exile as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.”

For more information, click here.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Emory University
2016-02-18

In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014. The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

The Race and Difference Colloquium Series is sponsored by the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, which supports research, teaching, and public dialogue that examine race and intersecting dimensions of human difference including but not limited to class, gender, religion, and sexuality.

Allyson Hobbs: A Chosen Exile

Miami University
Room 1 Upham Hall
100 Bishop Circle
Oxford, Ohio 45056
Thursday, 2016-02-25, 17:00 EST (Local Time)

The E.E. McClellan Lecture in History

Allyson Hobbs is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. Her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present.

The book is winner of both the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history from the Organization of American Historians.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. Hobbs’s revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions, and also tells a tale of loss.

As racial relations in America have evolved, so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own…

For more information, click here.

Storytelling matters to Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs

Stanford News
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2016-02-19

Kate Chesley, Associate Director of University Communications

Allyson Hobbs and her award-winning book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

ALLYSON HOBBS, assistant professor of American history, finds much of the inspiration for her research in the stories of her own remarkable family. Telling those stories – and connecting them with larger themes in U.S. history – is one of the things that matters most to her.

Hobbs was the featured speaker recently at the popular “What Matters to Me and Why” noontime discussion series, sponsored by the Office for Religious Life. The series asks members of the Stanford community to reflect on matters of personal values and beliefs.

Hobbs is the author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014. The book, which won the 2015 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the 2015 Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history, was inspired by a story Hobbs’ beloved aunt told her about a distant cousin.

That cousin, Hobbs told the audience, was born on the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s. Light skinned, the cousin was forced by her mother to leave her home and pass for white in Los Angeles. Hobbs told the heartbreaking story of how the cousin, married to a white man and raising children who were unaware of their mother’s heritage, was unable to return to Chicago to see her dying father lest her secret be revealed…

Read the entire article here.

How and why did they do it?

Harriet Beecher Stowe House
2950 Gilbert Avenue
Cincinnati, Ohio 45206
Sunday, 2016-02-28, 13:00 EST (Local Time)

Between the the 18th and mid-20th centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and communities.

Allyson Hobbs, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of History, Stanford University, will be at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Sunday, February 28, at 1 pm to discuss her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published Harvard University Press.
A Chosen Exile was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review, The Root, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
It’s a story of challenges and loss in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

Free to the public. Refreshments will be served. Reservations available by e-mail @ friendsharrietbeecherstowe@gmail.com or call 513-751-0651.

What Matters to Me & Why – Allyson Hobbs

Stanford University
Common Room
Center for Inter-Religious Community Learning and Experiences (CIRCLE) at Old Union, 3rd Floor
Stanford, California
Wednesday, 2016-02-17, 12:00 PST (Local Time)

Allyson Hobbs

Sponsored by: Office for Religious Life

The purpose of What Matters to Me and Why is to encourage reflection within the Stanford community on matters of personal values, beliefs, and motivations in order to better understand the lives and inspirations of those who shape the University.

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History

Allyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Stanford. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford.

Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history.

A Chosen Exile has been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root named A Chosen Exile as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.”

Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history and culture. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award.

Allyson is a contributing writer to the New Yorker.com and her work has also been featured on cnn.com, slate.com, and in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The National Review, and the Christian Science Monitor.

For more information, click here.

Episode 16: The Value of Diversity

Inflection Point: Conversations with women changing the status quo
2015-09-24

Lauren Schiller, Host

Companies are now paying consultants to increase the diversity of their workforce, with an eye on innovation and the bottom line. But is that the only motivation businesses should be considering?

We’ll talk with Joelle Emerson, a diversity consultant, and Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University and the author of “A Chosen Exile. A History of Racial Passing in American Life.” Hobbs argues that what is missing from our society is a deep understanding of the lives of others. The value of diversity. That’s our Inflection Point.

Listen to the episode here.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

Emory University
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Jones Room
540 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Monday, 2016-02-15, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Presented by: James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014. The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

For more information and to RSVP, click here.

Color Lines: Racial Passing in America

BackStory with the American History Guys (A program of the Virginia Foundation of the Humanities)
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016-01-15

M. H. Kimball portrait of Isaac White and Rosina Downs, two New Orleans slave children, c. 1863. (Library of Congress).

On this episode of BackStory, the Guys will consider how and why Americans throughout the centuries have crossed the lines of racial identity, and find out what the history of passing has to say about race, identity, and privilege in America. We’ll look at stories of African-Americans who passed as white to escape slavery or Jim Crow and find out how the “one-drop rule” enabled one blonde-haired, blue-eyed American to live a double life without ever arousing suspicion. We’ll also explore the story of an African-American musician who pioneered a genre of exotic music with a bejeweled turban and an invented biography, and examine the hidden costs of crossing over.

Guests Include:

• Carol Wilson, Washington College
• Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University
• Martha Sandweiss, Princeton University
• Johanna Lanner-Cusin, high school history teacher
• Eva Garroutte, Boston College
• Allyson Hobbs, Stanford University
• Vasanth Subramanian, business consultant
• R. J. Smith, former senior editor, Los Angeles Magazine
• Adrienne Hernandez, great niece of Korla Pandit
• Maya Hernandez, great niece of Korla Pandit

Segments

• The Spark of Recognition
  • Historian Carol Wilson tells the story of a New Orleans slave named Sally Miller, who sued for her freedom after a German woman became convinced that Sally was really a long-lost German girl named Salomé Müller.
• Double Image
  • Historian Martha Sandweiss explains how the one-drop rule enabled a blue-eyed, blonde-haired geologist named Clarence King to lead a second life as a Black Pullman porter, without ever drawing suspicion.
• “Code-Switching”
  • Listener Johanna Lanner-Cusin, who identifies as black, talks about people’s assumptions about her race, not having experiences similar to darker African Americans, and “qualifying her blackness.”
• Blood Brothers
  • Historian Annette Gordon-Reed illustrates the fluidity of race with the stories of two sons of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, one of whom passed into white society while the other lived his life as an African-American.
• High Stakes
  • Sociologist Eva Garroutte tells the story of Sylvester Long, a multiracial man who rose to silent film stardom in the 1920s after adopting the persona of an “authentic” Native American—until it all came crashing down.
• Passing In, Passing Out
  • Brian Balogh talks with historian Allyson Hobbs about an enormous but overlooked cost of racial passing: leaving one’s family, community, and heritage behind.
• “Guess Your Ethnicity”
  • Listener Vasanth Subramanian wishes society allowed him to choose his identity. He talks in detail about the prejudices children of immigrants face.
• Drawing the Line
  • The Guys explain how American slavery practices created racial boundaries, and, at the same time, complicated them.
• Playing Indian
  • Producer Nina Earnest explores the boundary between passing and performance with the story of John Roland Redd, an African-American organist who donned a bejeweled turban and rewrote his life story to become “Godfather of Exotica” Korla Pandit.

CORRECTION: This show includes a story about Sylvester Long, a man of mixed descent who styled himself as a pure-blooded Native American named Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. We refer to him as a movie star who published a famous autobiography. In fact, Long Lance published his autobiography first—the popularity of the book catapulted him into movie stardom.

Listen to the podcast (01:05:14) here. Download the podcast here.