Tag: Felicia Lee

  • Poet’s Muse: A Footnote to Beethoven The New York Times 2009-04-02 Felicia R. Lee Haydn almost certainly encountered him as a child in a Hungarian castle, where the boy’s father was a servant and Haydn was the director of music, and Thomas Jefferson saw him performing in Paris in 1789: a 9-year-old biracial violin prodigy…

  • A Look at Looking Different The New York Times 2014-12-02 Felicia R. Lee ‘Crossing Borders,’ at the Brooklyn Historical Society Alexander David grew up with a Chinese mother and a white Jewish father in the liberal Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. He attended the predominantly Asian elite Stuyvesant High School. He was comfortable in his…

  • 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…

  • “Biological race trumps cultural race. Race is something we’re really invested in validating or comprehending. It’s about how we understand race as a marker of difference, something that a story about ancestry can’t resolve.” —Jenifer L. Bratter, Rice University Felicia R. Lee, “After the ‘White Lie’ Implodes, a Rich Narrative Unfurls,” The New York Times,…

  • Little White Lie,’ Lacey Schwartz’s Film About Self-Discovery

  • Black History’s Missing Chapters: ‘The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,’ on PBS The New York Times 2013-10-18   Felicia R. Lee The television mini-series “Roots,” about the slave Kunta Kinte and his descendants, is a classic, inspired by real lives and real history. But it is a truism among historians that young people do…

  • Family Tree’s Startling Roots The New York Times 2012-03-19 Felicia Lee Thirty-nine lashes “well laid” on her bare back and an extension of her indentured servitude was Elizabeth Banks’s punishment for “fornication & Bastardy with a negroe slave,” according to a stark June 20, 1683, court document from York County, Va. Through the alchemy of…

  • Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice The New York Times 2011-07-05 Felicia R. Lee Heidi Durrow, left, and Fanshen Cox, the co-producers of the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival. (Ann Johansson for The New York Times) Note from Steven F. Riley: Please make sure to view the many reader comments for the article here.…

  • Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White New York Times 2010-12-26 Felicia R. Lee Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck…