{"id":36295,"date":"2014-09-26T15:52:01","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T15:52:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36295"},"modified":"2019-07-10T18:12:46","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T18:12:46","slug":"a-chosen-exile-history-of-racial-passing-in-american-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36295","title":{"rendered":"A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368101\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em><strong>A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Harvard University Press<\/a><br \/>\nOctober 2014<br \/>\n350 pages<br \/>\n5-1\/2 x 8-1\/4 inches<br \/>\n26 halftones<br \/>\nHardcover ISBN: 9780674368101<br \/>\nPaperback ISBN: 9780674659926<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/history.stanford.edu\/people\/allyson-hobbs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Allyson Hobbs<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of History<br \/>\n<em>Stanford University<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368101\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/images\/jackets\/9780674368101-lg.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/30\/books\/review\/editors-choice.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>New York Times<\/em> Editors&#8217;\u00a0Choice 2014<\/a> (2014-11-26)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Best Book of 2014\u201d by the <em>San Francisco Chronicle<\/em><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oah.org\/programs\/awards\/frederick-jackson-turner-award\/oah-frederick-jackson-turner-award-winners\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Frederick Jackson Turner Award<\/a> for best first book in American History<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oah.org\/programs\/awards\/lawrence-w-levine-award\/lawrence-w-levine-award-winners\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lawrence Levine Award<\/a> for best book in American cultural history<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">passed<\/a> as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.<\/p>\n<p>As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one\u2019s birthright. When the initially hopeful <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reconstruction_Era\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">period of Reconstruction<\/a> proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=4781\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jim Crow<\/a> and strike out on one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n<p>Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied\u2014and often outweighed\u2014these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to \u201cpass out\u201d and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,459,8,17,6462,20],"tags":[9812,340],"class_list":["post-36295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-harvard-university-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36295","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=36295"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58445,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36295\/revisions\/58445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}