{"id":15628,"date":"2011-08-15T20:17:57","date_gmt":"2011-08-15T20:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15628"},"modified":"2016-04-03T02:21:22","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T02:21:22","slug":"exploring-grays-in-a-black-and-white-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15628","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Grays in a Black-and-White World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.miller-mccune.com\/culture\/exploring-grays-in-a-black-and-white-world-33858\/\" target=\"_blank\">Exploring Grays in a Black-and-White World<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.miller-mccune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Miller-McCune<\/a><br \/>\n2011-07-19<\/p>\n<p><strong>Julia M. Klein<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Two new books explore the intersection of race and identity in America by investigating families whose biracial members might\u2014or might not\u2014\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">pass<\/a>\u201d as white.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Defining racial identity in the United States has always been a fraught enterprise, involving shifting intersections of law, custom, class, ancestry and choice. Physical appearance and money have mattered, but so have family history and community attitudes\u2014and not always in the ways we might suspect.<\/p>\n<p>Two intriguing new books\u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/law.vanderbilt.edu\/bio\/daniel-sharfstein\" target=\"_blank\">Daniel J. Sharfstein\u2019s<\/a> <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=11122\" target=\"_blank\">The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White<\/a><\/em> and <a href=\"http:\/\/juliewinch.com\/Home.html\" target=\"_blank\">Julie Winch\u2019s<\/a> <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=15222\" target=\"_blank\">The Clamorgans: One Family\u2019s History of Race in America<\/a><\/em>\u2014underline the fluidity of racial categories over nearly three centuries of American history. And, thanks to legal records and other archival evidence, they offer illuminating detail about precisely how\u2014and often why\u2014individuals circumvented or manipulated these categories.<\/p>\n<p>The destabilization of racial identity begins with a fact: Sexual relationships between blacks and whites, both romantic and coercive, have existed since the earliest days of slavery. Edward Ball\u2019s National Book Award-winning 1998 volume, <em>Slaves in the Family<\/em>, recounted his search for descendants of slaves owned by his family of South Carolina planters\u2014and his discovery that some of them were his cousins. A decade later, <a href=\"http:\/\/hls.harvard.edu\/faculty\/directory\/10329\/Gordon-Reed\" target=\"_blank\">Annette Gordon-Reed<\/a> imaginatively reconstructed the lives of the mixed-race Hemings family and their ties to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thomas_Jefferson\" target=\"_blank\">Thomas Jefferson<\/a> in her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=4063\" target=\"_blank\">The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family<\/a><\/em>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire review of the books <a href=\"http:\/\/www.miller-mccune.com\/culture\/exploring-grays-in-a-black-and-white-world-33858\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Exploring Grays in a Black-and-White World Miller-McCune 2011-07-19 Julia M. Klein Two new books explore the intersection of race and identity in America by investigating families whose biracial members might\u2014or might not\u2014\u201cpass\u201d as white. Defining racial identity in the United States has always been a fraught enterprise, involving shifting intersections of law, custom, class, ancestry [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,1467,8,6462,20],"tags":[2766,7201,5598,5597,777,7202],"class_list":["post-15628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-daniel-j-sharfstein","tag-daniel-sharfsteins","tag-julia-klein","tag-julia-m-klein","tag-julie-winch","tag-miller-mccune"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15628","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=15628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46463,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15628\/revisions\/46463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}