{"id":16257,"date":"2011-09-14T03:21:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-14T03:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=16257"},"modified":"2013-08-16T02:07:02","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T02:07:02","slug":"family-histories-of-%e2%80%98passing%e2%80%99-from-black-to-white-documented-in-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=16257","title":{"rendered":"Family Histories of \u2018Passing\u2019 from Black to White Documented in Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

Family Histories of \u2018Passing\u2019 from Black to White Documented in Book<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education<\/a>
\n2011-09-06<\/p>\n

Katti Gray<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the summer of 1993, as American-born Daniel Sharfstein<\/a> registered Blacks to cast their first ballot in race-riven South Africa<\/a>, he volunteered alongside a South African woman, who professed to be as authentically African as any other Black. This, she told then college student Sharfstein, despite her family\u2019s decades-old designation as Coloured<\/a>, a mixed-race label that elevated her clan above Blacks in the old White-run government\u2019s hierarchy of peoples.
\n\u00a0
\nThough being Coloured insulated her from brutalities apartheid<\/a> reserved for the so-called purely Black, she was, physically, hard to distinguish from the Black activists who had dominated the anti-apartheid movement, said Dr. Sharfstein, now 38 and a Vanderbilt University law professor. She was dark-skinned, and wore her hair Afrocentrically-braided.
\n\u00a0
\nThat her family would choose to be misclassified racially was both fascinating and bewildering, Sharfstein said. \u201cI came home and was immediately interested in the question of whether the same thing had happened here,\u201d said Sharfstein, who holds a law degree from Yale, and a degree in history, literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard.
\n\u00a0
\nHis book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White<\/a><\/em>, is the outgrowth of parallels Sharfstein drew between apartheid\u2019s racial distortions and those of his own native land.
\n\u00a0
\nWith this nation\u2019s state-by-state variations on how many drops of Black blood legally made a person Black as both a backdrop and core of the 395-page tome, Sharfstein explores the human, financial and ephemeral costs of morphing from an imposed Blackness\u2014notwithstanding one\u2019s light skin, aquiline facial features and straight hair\u2014to live as White…<\/p>\n

…Cape Cod, Mass.<\/a>, is where Isabel Wall Whittemore\u2019s forebears ended up.
\n\u00a0
\n\u201cUntil I read [Sharfstein\u2019s] book, I didn\u2019t realize that, in my mom\u2019s day, 1\/16 [of Black blood] was considered Colored,\u201d said Whittemore, 74, now residing in Hickory Flat, Miss.<\/a>, with her oldest daughter Lisa Colby. \u201cTo tell you the truth\u2026 I\u2019ve always gone as Caucasian. I had no reason not to. I\u2019d love to know what I should be calling myself now, but it doesn\u2019t matter to me either way\u2026 Race isn\u2019t important.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nRoughly a decade before the February 2011 release of Sharfstein\u2019s book, a homework assignment for Colby\u2019s daughter revealed their place on the branches of O.S.B. Wall\u2019s<\/a> family tree. \u201cI\u2019ve met a lot of cousins who I didn\u2019t know,\u201d Colby said. \u201cI, myself, think this is great \u2026 in terms of the history. My great, great-grandfather was able to come up from being a slave to being a lawyer.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nNot everyone who\u2019s learned of their ties to Wall has been so effusive. One informed Sharfstein that \u201che\u2019d become more racist since learning about his descent than ever before,\u201d Sharfstein said. \u201cInitially, he was so intent on maintaining his White identity\u2014and nothing makes you more \u2018White\u2019 than hating Black people. That\u2019s my inference.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Family Histories of \u2018Passing\u2019 from Black to White Documented in Book Diverse: Issues in Higher Education 2011-09-06 Katti Gray In the summer of 1993, as American-born Daniel Sharfstein registered Blacks to cast their first ballot in race-riven South Africa, he volunteered alongside a South African woman, who professed to be as authentically African as any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,1467,8,6462,6940,20],"tags":[2766,2767,7172,7527],"class_list":["post-16257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-daniel-j-sharfstein","tag-daniel-sharfstein","tag-diverse-issues-in-higher-education","tag-katti-gray"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16257","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=16257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}