{"id":50043,"date":"2016-11-19T21:44:38","date_gmt":"2016-11-19T21:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50043"},"modified":"2016-11-19T21:44:38","modified_gmt":"2016-11-19T21:44:38","slug":"half-and-half-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50043","title":{"rendered":"Half and Half"},"content":{"rendered":"

Half and Half<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sunday Book Review<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2007-02-11<\/p>\n

Bliss Broyard<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

David Matthews, Ace of Spades, A Memoir<\/em><\/a> (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Twenty minutes into David Matthews\u2019s<\/a> first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he is. When Matthews doesn\u2019t answer, they trail him down the hallway \u2014 \u201cas though I were a reprobate head of state ambushed by reporters outside a lurid hotel\u201d \u2014 shouting out their guesses: \u201cBlack! White! You crazy?! He(\u2019s) too light\/dark to be black\/white!\u201d One jokester suggests he\u2019s Chinese.<\/p>\n

One possible response is that Matthews is mixed: his father is African-American, actually a \u201cprominent black journalist\u201d who counted Malcolm X<\/a> and James Baldwin<\/a> among his friends, and his mother is Jewish, although she disappeared to Israel<\/a> shortly after Matthews was born. But this scene takes place in 1977 in a Baltimore<\/a> public school that sits between a \u201cWaspy enclave of tony brownstones\u201d and a \u201cworld of housing projects, roaming street gangs and bleating squad cars,\u201d and the difference between black and white seems too vast to allow for any unions \u2014 or their byproducts \u2014 across the conceptual divide. (Although we learn that Matthews needn\u2019t look any further than his own life for exceptions: his best friend, his stepbrother and his half brother are also mixed, though none of them quite so indeterminately as he is.) In the lunchroom, Matthews heads to the table of students he resembles most \u2014 in skin color, yes, but also in character. The white kids, with their \u201cnerdy diction\u201d and \u201cStarsky and Hutch<\/a>\u201d lunchboxes, are similarly introverted and unthreatening, while the black kids, playing the dozens<\/a> and double Dutch<\/a> on the playground, are \u201calive and cool,\u201d and frightening. When a white boy assigned by the homeroom teacher to be Matthews\u2019s buddy for the day makes room for him to sit down, this small, serendipitous gesture sets the dye of his racial identity for the next 20 or so years…<\/p>\n

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

Half and Half Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2007-02-11 Bliss Broyard David Matthews, Ace of Spades, A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007). Twenty minutes into David Matthews\u2019s first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,5,8,20],"tags":[5973,1871,25459,5972,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-50043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-baltimore","tag-bliss-broyard","tag-david-matthews","tag-maryland","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50043","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=50043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50044,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50043\/revisions\/50044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}