{"id":47799,"date":"2016-06-19T01:49:14","date_gmt":"2016-06-19T01:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47799"},"modified":"2016-06-19T01:49:14","modified_gmt":"2016-06-19T01:49:14","slug":"editorial-observer-back-when-skin-color-was-destiny-unless-you-passed-for-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47799","title":{"rendered":"Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny — Unless You Passed for White"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny — Unless You Passed for White<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2003-09-07<\/p>\n

Brent Staples<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/em> was trying not to speak ill of the dead when it described Anatole Broyard<\/a> as the ”famously prickly critic for the Times, a man who demanded so much from books that it seemed he could never be satisfied.” From his early reviews for The Times in the 1960’s up to his death in 1990, Mr. Broyard was often gratuitously cruel and clever at the author’s expense.<\/p>\n

The novelist Philip Roth<\/a> was one of the favored few. Mr. Broyard praised him in the column ”About Books” and seemed to see his life through Mr. Roth’s work. When Mr. Broyard was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he compared his symptoms to those of Portnoy, Mr. Roth’s fictional alter ego in ”Portnoy’s Complaint<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

The comparison made perfect sense. Mr. Roth’s great theme was his own struggle to preserve selfhood against the smothering pressures of ethnic identity. That, in a nutshell, was Mr. Broyard’s life. He was a light-skinned black man born in New Orleans<\/a> in 1920 into a family whose members sometimes passed as white<\/a> to work at jobs from which black people were barred. The largest private employer of black labor at the time was the Pullman Company<\/a>, which sought college-educated black men to work essentially as servants on train cars that accommodated white travelers only…<\/p>\n

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

Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny — Unless You Passed for White The New York Times 2003-09-07 Brent Staples The New Yorker was trying not to speak ill of the dead when it described Anatole Broyard as the ”famously prickly critic for the Times, a man who demanded so much from books that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[5427,1804,24224,2640,8110,2327],"class_list":["post-47799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-anatole-broyard","tag-brent-staples","tag-coleman-silk","tag-new-york-times","tag-philip-roth","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47799","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=47799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47800,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47799\/revisions\/47800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}