{"id":37237,"date":"2014-09-03T17:52:09","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T17:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37237"},"modified":"2014-09-03T17:52:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T17:52:09","slug":"choose-your-own-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37237","title":{"rendered":"Choose Your Own Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Choose Your Own Race<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sunday Book Review<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-08-29<\/p>\n

Emily Raboteau<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Your Face in Mine,\u2019 by Jess Row<\/p>\n

Do you ever dream of starting again in a new skin? This is the central question of Jess Row\u2019s<\/a> provocative and intriguing first novel, \u201cYour Face in Mine<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s also a tag line of the shady enterprise in Bangkok where the book\u2019s central character, Martin Wilkinson (n\u00e9 Lipkin), has paid a hefty sum to undergo something called racial reassignment surgery, to transform from a white Jewish man to an African-American one.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen variations on this premise before, in the 1986 comedy flop \u201cSoul Man<\/a>,\u201d in which C. Thomas Howell takes self-tanning pills so he can attend \u00adHarvard Law School on a scholarship for African-Americans, and in the 1961 best seller \u201cBlack Like Me<\/a>,\u201d wherein the white journalist John Howard Griffin<\/a> disguised himself as black to tour the segregated South by bus. Those stories advanced blackface<\/a> tradition from minstrelsy<\/a> to illustrate (as only a white man can \u2014 with a wink) that it\u2019s harder in this country to be black than white. Thankfully, Row\u2019s narrative delves into more nuanced territory.<\/p>\n

Martin becomes black not to teach anyone a lesson but to better reflect his \u201ctrue self.\u201d As in Adam Mansbach\u2019s<\/a> novel \u201cAngry Black White Boy<\/a>,\u201d Martin\u2019s condition speaks to a generation of suburban white kids who came up in the 1990s possessed by a vibrant hip-hop culture that let them access sincere rage at the world\u2019s injustice in a way music hadn\u2019t done since punk. (One of the book\u2019s sharpest moments is its loving remembrance of the Spike Lee<\/a> film \u201cDo the Right Thing<\/a>,\u201d and Row is gifted throughout at writing about music.) Martin\u2019s self-diagnosis is \u201cRacial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome.\u201d He compares his plight to that of a transsexual, but oddly enough, instead of being born into the wrong gender, he believes that he was born into the wrong race. Odder still, that race can be purchased, packaged and sold. More convincingly, he demonstrates it can be performed…<\/p>\n

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

Choose Your Own Race Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2014-08-29 Emily Raboteau \u2018Your Face in Mine,\u2019 by Jess Row Do you ever dream of starting again in a new skin? This is the central question of Jess Row\u2019s provocative and intriguing first novel, \u201cYour Face in Mine.\u201d It\u2019s also a tag line of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[2358,17726,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-37237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-emily-raboteau","tag-jess-row","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37237","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=37237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}