{"id":12129,"date":"2011-02-17T14:39:49","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T14:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=12129"},"modified":"2013-09-16T02:15:41","modified_gmt":"2013-09-16T02:15:41","slug":"til-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=12129","title":{"rendered":"A conversation with Daniel J. Sharfstein (Author of \u201cThe Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White\u201d)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A conversation with Daniel J. Sharfstein (Author of\u00a0 The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White<\/em><\/a>)
\n<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Penguin Press<\/a>
\nJanuary 2011<\/p>\n

Lauren Hodapp<\/strong>, Senior Publicist
\nThe Penguin Press<\/em><\/p>\n

Daniel J. Sharfstein<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Law
\nVanderbilt University<\/em><\/p>\n

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White<\/a><\/em>. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN 9781594202827.<\/p>\n

What is \u201crace\u201d in America?<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

This is a question that has never had a single answer.\u00a0 The idea that human beings can be classified, ordered, and assigned superior and inferior status is much older than this country.\u00a0 In America racial classifications were initially justified on religious grounds, but they evolved into something biological, transmitted through blood from one generation to the next.\u00a0 At the same time, race was also about how people acted and the rights that they exercised.\u00a0 During slavery and Jim Crow<\/a>, each state had its own rules for what made someone white and what made someone black.\u00a0 Some people who were black in North Carolina<\/a>, for instance, were white in South Carolina<\/a>.\u00a0 Even when there seemed to be some public consensus about what race was, it has always meant something different behind closed doors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once we understand that African Americans were continually crossing the color line and establishing themselves as white, we have to rethink what the categories of \u201cblack\u201d and \u201cwhite\u201d mean.\u00a0 This is a history that has touched the lives of millions of Americans.\u00a0 Biology\u2014\u201cblack blood\u201d\u2014cannot be what makes a person black.\u00a0 After all, plenty of white people have black blood, too.\u00a0 In The Invisible Line<\/a><\/em> I try to strip away centuries of shifting justifications for race and suggest instead that the category of \u201cblack\u201d has always functioned as little more than a marker of discrimination.\u00a0 W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a> said it best: black means the \u201cperson who must ride \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 in Georgia<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE INVISIBLE LINE shares the stories of three families over two centuries.\u00a0 How did you select these particular families?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I chose to focus on the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they epitomize how individuals and families changed racial identities from black to white in different periods of American history and in different parts of the South.\u00a0 They challenge our conventional wisdom about racial identity and the color line.\u00a0 I initially researched hundreds of families after years of looking through court cases, government records, histories and other scholarly works, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and family papers from manuscript collections in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. I wound up selecting the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they were typical, but also extraordinary.\u00a0 An incredible wealth of material about each family has survived the centuries\u2014letters, trial testimony, speeches, wills, property and census records, and more.\u00a0 Because of this information, I was able to go beyond just establishing the fact that people migrated across the color line and could explore why they did and what effects the migration had on their lives and on the lives of their descendants.<\/p>\n

The fluidity with which many of your subjects approach race seems, in many ways, more sophisticated than the way we envision race today. Why?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Much of what we take for granted about race and its history are actually relatively recent developments.\u00a0 For example, the \u201cone-drop rule<\/a>,\u201d or the idea that any African ancestry makes a person black, was not the law of Southern states until the 1910s and 1920s.\u00a0 Before that, states used a patchwork of fractional rules\u2014one-fourth African \u201cblood\u201d made a person black, one-eighth, etc.\u00a0 These rules, and the ways that courts interpreted them, reflected a reality in which people were constantly crossing the color line.\u00a0 If the line were policed too strictly, then virtually no one would be safe from reclassification.\u00a0 And people knew it.\u00a0 Many scholars today talk about race as a \u201csocial construction,\u201d but you can find eerily similar language from plain folks in small Southern towns one hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

What did this mean for individuals and families in the 19th<\/sup> century? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

White communities often knew that people were racially mixed and let them in anyway. The typical accounts of \u201cpassing for white\u201d involve wholesale masquerade\u2014abandoning family and moving far away, assuming a new name and identity, and the ever present fear of being found out.\u00a0 But people could become white in areas where their families had lived for generations, and many could become white even when they looked different.\u00a0 There was such a thing as a \u201cdark white man.\u201d\u00a0 But for Southern communities, acceptance of individuals did not translate into tolerance on a larger scale.\u00a0 In fact, some of the very communities that allowed people of color to assimilate supported slavery, segregation, and even lynching.\u00a0 There was a collective denial, a capacity for living with intense contradiction that is hard for many of us to grasp today.<\/p>\n

What did you discover in your research that particularly surprised you? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Becoming white was not necessarily an upwardly mobile act.\u00a0 In fact, it could be spectacularly downwardly mobile, especially for the \u201cNegro aristocracy\u201d of the late nineteenth century.\u00a0 Hundreds\u2014including O.S.B. Wall\u2019s children\u2014traded in lives of distinction and leadership for anonymity and often poverty.\u00a0 It is easy to think that crossing the color line was a perfectly rational act for people who wanted better opportunities for themselves and their children, but the fact that people would go to great lengths to become white even when it was against their interest shows just how poisonous racism has been in the United States.<\/p>\n

Henry Louis Gates and the African American Studies department at Harvard has become a legendary source of fresh thinking about race. When you were studying with Gates was there a sense that he and the students were creating a new vision of race?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely.\u00a0 My first year as a student in the department was Gates\u2019s first year at Harvard.\u00a0 He had come with a mission to reinvent the field.\u00a0 The seminar I took with him that fall was not only an intense introduction to a series of extraordinary texts, but also a class devoted to rethinking what African American Studies should be and making a case for its centrality to our understanding of the American experience.\u00a0 It was a very exciting time to be at Harvard, and the discussions we had nearly twenty years ago continue to influence me and my work.<\/p>\n

How did your own experiences with and perceptions of race influence your work? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

My interest in African American history developed as a child listening to stories about my father\u2019s civil rights activism in the early 1960s\u2014the time as an undergraduate he met Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/a>, his experience attending the [1963] March on Washington<\/a>.\u00a0 I also grew up with stories about my grandparents\u2019 experience as the children of Eastern European immigrants living in a racially integrated neighborhood in northwest Baltimore.\u00a0 They learned English from their black neighbors\u2014it was their first exposure to what it meant to be American.<\/p>\n

As a college student in 1993, I volunteered on a voter education project in South Africa<\/a> before the country\u2019s first free elections.\u00a0 Our office was in a building with two elevators that were still marked \u201cEuropeans Only\u201d and \u201cNon-Europeans and Goods.\u201d\u00a0 My colleagues were all longtime anti-apartheid activists.\u00a0 The government had classified them as \u201cAfrican,\u201d they said, except for one, who was \u201cColoured<\/a>\u201d or mixed-race.\u00a0 But, she explained, she was not mixed at all\u2014she would have been classified \u201cAfrican,\u201d except for the fact that her father had been a police officer.\u00a0 In the 1950s an official responsible for classifying the people in her neighborhood decided to reward her father\u2019s service by listing him as \u201cColoured.\u201d\u00a0 As a result of that one simple act\u2014one word\u2014she had led a very different life from her colleagues.\u00a0 She had grown up in a different kind of township, went to different schools, and only spoke English and Afrikaans<\/a>.\u00a0 It was a revelation to me that something that seemed as natural and inevitable as race could bend because of personal relationships, community ties, and individual whim.\u00a0 I came back to the U.S. wondering if the same kinds of things had happened here, and for the first time, I began reading legal cases from the Jim Crow South in which judges and juries had to determine whether someone was white or black.\u00a0 The cases presented fascinating portraits of communities that were committed to segregation and white supremacy even as they willed themselves to forget their own ambiguous roots. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>How did your law background impact your understanding of the stories, journals, and documents that you encountered while researching THE INVISIBLE LINE? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Dozens of court cases have involved people crossing the color line and assimilating into white communities\u2014they are some of the best sources of material on the subject\u2014so having experience working with legal documents really helps in making sense of this history.\u00a0 From soon after the Revolution until well into the twentieth century, just about every law that distinguished white from black provided occasions where courts were forced to determine someone\u2019s race.\u00a0 Along with marriage prohibitions and segregated schools and trains, there were different tax rates, gun ownership rules, restrictions on who could testify in court, even libel penalties for falsely accusing someone of being black.\u00a0 Race in America has always involved a lot of rules, and my legal training has enabled me to recognize both the power of law and its limitations.<\/p>\n

Which of the individuals you encountered do you feel most affinity for and why?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I really enjoyed getting to know O.S.B. Wall (1825-1891), the son of a plantation owner and his slave, who was freed and sent north to become educated and learn a trade.\u00a0 He began as a shoemaker and then became a radical abolitionist, Union Army officer, and eventually a politically active lawyer in Washington, D.C.\u00a0 He was able to preserve his sense of honor and idealism in terrible times both before and after the Civil War<\/a>.\u00a0 Even when he was a humble shoemaker, he was never intimidated by powerful people.\u00a0 And he had a great sense of humor.<\/p>\n

The families that you profile span 200 years of American history. What have we previously overlooked in this time span?\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>We have overlooked one of the great mass migrations in American history: the journey from black to white.\u00a0 It is a migration that affected large numbers of families and communities.\u00a0 It contradicted and reinforced slavery and segregation.\u00a0 It forced people to consider what race means, and changed how they thought about race.\u00a0 The migration occurred alongside other mass movements in our history\u2014the settlement of North America, our expansion west, the rise of great cities, new waves of immigration, and the industrialization of even our most isolated areas.\u00a0 In a world defined by change, race could never be a static concept.\u00a0 Americans have always been in motion and have continually reinvented themselves.\u00a0 The migration from black to white is a part of this dynamic tradition.<\/p>\n

More broadly, we have overlooked the vexed relationship between liberty and equality in our nation\u2019s history.\u00a0 The prospect of freedom for African Americans has been one of the major forces in the evolution of racism in the United States.\u00a0 In colonial Virginia<\/a>, African Americans\u2019 quest for freedom gave rise to black codes.\u00a0 Even as large numbers of African Americans were being freed during the Revolutionary Era<\/a>, ideas that blacks were biologically inferior gained widespread currency.\u00a0 In the decade before the Civil War, white Southerners countered Northern arguments against slavery with race-based justifications for the institution that survived its demise.\u00a0 After the Civil War, black freedom took root alongside modern forms of racism that persist to this day.\u00a0 Each advance in liberty gave way to potent new forms of inequality.\u00a0 Every time the struggle seemed over, it had only begun again.<\/p>\n

What about today? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The idea that race is blood-borne and grounded in science still has incredible power over how we think about ourselves and order our worlds.\u00a0 Even in our \u201cpost-racial\u201d era, it is very easy for whites to tune out issues involving African Americans or to regard blacks as fundamentally different from\u2014even opposed to\u2014themselves.\u00a0 Race remains a potent dividing line and political tool.\u00a0 I hope to shatter the notion that this line exists and help us to realize that we are all related, that the African American experience is absolutely central to the American experience generally, and that our conventional understanding of racial difference and the persistent legacy of racism are shaped in no small part by the secret history that The Invisible Line<\/a><\/em> explores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A conversation with Daniel J. Sharfstein (Author of\u00a0 The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White) The Penguin Press January 2011 Lauren Hodapp, Senior Publicist The Penguin Press Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law Vanderbilt University Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,13743,1467,8,6462,6940,20],"tags":[2766,2767,15791],"class_list":["post-12129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-interviews","category-law","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-daniel-j-sharfstein","tag-daniel-sharfstein","tag-lauren-hodapp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}