Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Though I am younger than Ms. Harris by six years, in her Blackness, I recognize my own. It is a Blackness born not in slavery but much later, in a whole other context, in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements, when there was no mixed-race category. You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness. The big secret I knew — and Ms. Harris surely knows it as well — is that our Blackness was born not out of something lost but out of something gained.

Danzy Senna, “In Kamala Harris’s Blackness, I See My Own,” The New York Times, August 4, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/opinion/kamala-harris-biracial.html.

Historian Allyson Hobbs on the History of Racial Passing

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2015-07-13 01:29Z by Steven

Historian Allyson Hobbs on the History of Racial Passing

The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons’ Radio
2015-06-28

Robert Pollie, Host, Creator and Producer

The recent case of Rachel Dolezal – the “black” activist outed as white – may have seemed novel, but she’s actually part of an old tradition of racial passing in this country. How long has passing been going on and how has it changed over the years? What’s it tell us about racial categories and color lines? Why are we so fascinated with passing stories? I spoke with historian Allyson Hobbs about her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

Download the interview (01:11:05) here.

Tags: 7th Avenue Project, Allyson Hobbs, Rachel A. Dolezal, Rachel Dolezal, Robert Pollie, The 7th Avenue Project, The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons' Radio

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Mixed Race Studies

Historian Allyson Hobbs on the History of Racial Passing

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