{"id":44642,"date":"2015-12-20T02:55:16","date_gmt":"2015-12-20T02:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44642"},"modified":"2015-12-21T00:51:19","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T00:51:19","slug":"forward-passes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44642","title":{"rendered":"Forward Passes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forward Passes<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Review of Books<\/a>
\n2015-12-17<\/p>\n

Darryl Pinckney<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Loving Day<\/a><\/em> by Mat Johnson<\/a>; Spiegel and Grau, 287 pp., $26.00<\/p>\n

The importing of human beings into the US from Africa to be sold as slaves was outlawed in 1808, after which the slave markets of the southern states traded in black people born in America. The rules of New World<\/a> slavery decreed that a person\u2019s status was derived from that of the mother, not the father. A slave owner\u2019s children by an enslaved woman were, firstly, assets. Neither Frederick Douglass<\/a> nor Booker T. Washington<\/a> considered himself mixed-race, because of the one-drop rule<\/a> that determined how much black blood made a person black. They loathed the thought of their slave-owning white fathers. Douglass never saw his mother\u2019s face in the daylight, because she was always going to or coming back from the fields in the dark.<\/p>\n

What outraged white southerners about Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/a><\/em> was not only that Harriet Beecher Stowe<\/a> asserted that black people were better Christians than white people; she was also frank about the immorality of the white man\u2019s relations with the black women in his power. But Stowe had as much trouble as Lincoln<\/a> in imagining the social destiny of mixed-race people who were pink enough in fact to pass for white (a problem central to Mat Johnson\u2019s<\/a> brilliantly satirical new novel Loving Day<\/a><\/em>)…<\/p>\n

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

Forward Passes The New York Review of Books 2015-12-17 Darryl Pinckney Loving Day by Mat Johnson; Spiegel and Grau, 287 pp., $26.00 The importing of human beings into the US from Africa to be sold as slaves was outlawed in 1808, after which the slave markets of the southern states traded in black people born […]<\/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":[11860,2355,14230,7008],"class_list":["post-44642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-darryl-pinckney","tag-mat-johnson","tag-new-york-review-of-books","tag-the-new-york-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44642","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=44642"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44652,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44642\/revisions\/44652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}