{"id":41654,"date":"2015-07-06T01:59:20","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T01:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41654"},"modified":"2015-07-06T20:40:42","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T20:40:42","slug":"5-black-chicagoans-who-passed-for-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41654","title":{"rendered":"5 black Chicagoans who passed for white"},"content":{"rendered":"

5 black Chicagoans who passed for white<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Chicago Sun-Times<\/a>
\n2015-06-16<\/p>\n

Kim Janssen<\/strong><\/a>, Staff Reporter<\/p>\n

A baseball player who broke baseball\u2019s color line decades before Jackie Robinson<\/a> was born.<\/p>\n

A pioneering politician who has a West Side school named after him.<\/p>\n

An Emmy-winning \u201cblonde bombshell.\u201d<\/p>\n

A poet at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And a brilliant novelist who wrote a noted novel on \u201cpassing.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Unlike Rachel Dolezal<\/a> \u2014 the white Spokane, Washington, NAACP<\/a> head who has become the U.S.\u2019s biggest viral news story after she was exposed for lying about her past to pose as a black woman \u2014 all five of these sometime Chicagoans<\/a> were black. But just like Dolezal, they spent at least part of their lives pretending to be something they weren\u2019t, historians now suspect.<\/p>\n

Baseball player William Edward White<\/a>, politician Oscar DePriest<\/a>, bandleader Ina Ray Hutton<\/a>, poet Jean Toomer<\/a> and writer Nella Larsen<\/a> all at times passed as white<\/a>, it\u2019s believed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s part of the history that makes Dolezal\u2019s masquerade so fascinating to many Americans: for centuries, African-Americans were far more likely to attempt to pass as white than the reverse. Writing in \u201cOpportunity: The Journal of Negro Life\u201d in 1927, one of Dolezal\u2019s predecessors at the NAACP, William Pickens<\/a>, vividly described how both the violent threat of racism and the lure of white privilege exacted a powerful pull toward passing for black Americans who were able:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf passing for white will get a fellow better accommodations on the train, better seats in the theatre, immunity from insults in public places, and may even save his life from a mob, only idiots would fail to seize the advantage of passing, at least occasionally if not permanently.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Passing, which had mostly died out by the latter part of the 20th century, also came with a series of heavy costs: families broken by one relative\u2019s denial of their ties to another; the constant fear of exposure; and the psychological damage of denying one\u2019s true identity. But for these five Chicagoans, it may have been a compromise they felt forced to make…<\/p>\n

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

5 black Chicagoans who passed for white The Chicago Sun-Times 2015-06-16 Kim Janssen, Staff Reporter A baseball player who broke baseball\u2019s color line decades before Jackie Robinson was born. A pioneering politician who has a West Side school named after him. An Emmy-winning \u201cblonde bombshell.\u201d A poet at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,8,6462,20],"tags":[3027,10333,5488,20374,10334,87,20373,20372],"class_list":["post-41654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-sun-times","tag-illinois","tag-ina-ray-hutton","tag-kim-janssen","tag-nella-larsen","tag-oscar-depriest","tag-the-chicago-sun-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41654","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=41654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}