{"id":57361,"date":"2019-01-23T22:39:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T22:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57361"},"modified":"2019-01-23T22:39:21","modified_gmt":"2019-01-23T22:39:21","slug":"the-passing-of-david-matthews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57361","title":{"rendered":"The passing of David Matthews"},"content":{"rendered":"

The passing of David Matthews<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Savannah Now<\/a> (Savannah Morning News)
\nSavannah, Georgia<\/em>
\n2007-01-13<\/p>\n

John Stoehr<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nDavid Matthews<\/small><\/a><\/p>\n

In Harlem Renaissance<\/a> author Claude McKay\u2019s<\/a> 1931 short story \u201cNear-White,\u201d Angelina Dove, a pale African American hoping to move up in the world, asks her mother \u201cif some people are light enough to live like whites, why should there be such a fuss? Why should they live colored when they can be happier living white?\u201d<\/p>\n

Apparently many did. According to \u201cThe White African American Body<\/a>,\u201d by Charles D. Martin, a professor of literature at Florida State University, Ebony<\/em> magazine published an article in 1948 titled \u201c5 million U.S. white Negroes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story, Martin wrote, proudly reported an upsurge in the number of African Americans who crossed the color line undetected by Jim Crow America<\/a>. The article\u2019s centerpiece was a series of photographs. The reader was invited to guess which person was black and which was white. Of the 14 portraits, three were white.<\/p>\n

One of these \u201cmillions\u201d of \u201cwhite Negroes\u201d was Anatole Broyard<\/a>, the New York Times<\/em> literary critic who, for decades, protected the Ivory Tower of European high culture from the unwashed proletariat while also \u201cpassing\u201d for white<\/a>, to the extent that even his wife and children didn\u2019t know of his African ancestry until after his death in 1990<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Broyard\u2019s hidden identity was revealed by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/a> in a piece titled \u201cThe Passing of Anatole Broyard<\/a>\u201d for the New Yorker<\/em> in 1996. The practice of racial passing, and the serious questions the social phenomena raises about the metaphysics of race and the paradox of racial identity, received wider attention four years later thanks to Philip Roth\u2019s<\/a> novel \u201cThe Human Stain<\/a>\u201d and its eventual movie adaptation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the decades since Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s<\/a> \u201cI Have a Dream<\/a>\u201d speech, which have witnessed the rise of black nationalism, hip-hop, political correctness and influential black figures like Tiger Woods<\/a> and Barack Obama<\/a>, one might think passing for another race an archaic endeavor – discouraged by proud enfranchised blacks, dismissed by guilt-ridden whites.<\/p>\n

As David Matthews<\/a> demonstrates in his new memoir, \u201cAce of Spades<\/a>,\u201d however, passing continues. Like Angelina Dove, Matthews passed for white for the first 20 years of his life – throughout the 1970s, \u201980s and into the \u201990s – as a means of living more happily in an America still in thrall to the oppressive requirement of identification according to race…<\/p>\n

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

As David Matthews demonstrates in his new memoir, \u201cAce of Spades,\u201d however, passing continues. Like Angelina Dove, Matthews passed for white for the first 20 years of his life – throughout the 1970s, \u201980s and into the \u201990s – as a means of living more happily in an America still in thrall to the oppressive requirement of identification according to race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[5427,11217,25459,2935,29304,8110,29306,29305,29307],"class_list":["post-57361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-anatole-broyard","tag-charles-d-martin","tag-david-matthews","tag-henry-louis-gates-jr","tag-john-stoehr","tag-philip-roth","tag-savannah-morning-news","tag-savannah-now","tag-the-savannah-morning-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57361","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=57361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57362,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57361\/revisions\/57362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}