Tag: Brent Staples

  • A recently opened exhibit at Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate gives new recognition to Sally Hemings and the role of slavery in the home — and in his family.

  • Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia struck a resonant historical note last year when he proclaimed June 12 “Loving Day,” in commemoration of Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that invalidated state laws across the country that restricted interracial marriage.

  • Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer—and not just a “Negro writer” consigned to the back of the literary bus. He followed the trail blazed by tens of thousands of light-skinned black Americans. He methodically cut ties with his family (including a mother and two sisters) and took up life as a white man with…

  • Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny — Unless You Passed for White The New York Times 2003-09-07 Brent Staples The New Yorker was trying not to speak ill of the dead when it described Anatole Broyard as the ”famously prickly critic for the Times, a man who demanded so much from books that…

  • Mr. Obama Considers the Nationwide Protests From Three Points of View The New York Times 2014-12-12 Brent Staples, Editorial Writer Barack Obama understood when he sought the presidency that a black candidate who spoke candidly about racism would never attract enough white support to win. He avoided using race as a platform for grievance, kept…

  • The worst racial atrocities that took place in the Jim Crow South were carried out by the medical establishment, not by night riders cloaked in sheets. Indeed, many more African-Americans were killed by racist medical policies than by all the lynch mobs that ever existed. Until the late 1960s, the American Medical Association tacitly endorsed…

  • When Family Trees Are Gnarled by Race The New York Times 2012-09-08 Brent Staples My paternal grandfather, Marshall Staples (1898-1969), was one of the millions of black Southerners who moved north in the Great Migration. Those of us in the family who were born Yankees in the years just after World War II were given…

  • Complexity of Race In America C-SPAN Video Library Program ID: 305676-1 First Aired: 2012-06-03 New York Historical Society New York, New York 2012-04-12 Brent Staples, Host New York Times Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law Vanderbilt University Daniel Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line [:Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White],…

  • The Real American Love Story: Why America is a lot less white than it looks Slate 1999-10-05 Brent Staples The PBS broadcast last month of An American Love Story—a 10-hour film about an interracial family—spawned a great deal of chatter to the effect that mixed-race couplings were the wave of the future. In fact, they…

  • The Politics of Race The New York Times 2008-11-04 The editorial writers Lawrence Downes and Brent Staples discuss how Senator Obama’s mixed-race identity has shaped his persona and his candidacy. View the video here (00:05:13).