{"id":58650,"date":"2019-08-03T02:22:52","date_gmt":"2019-08-03T02:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58650"},"modified":"2019-08-05T20:18:57","modified_gmt":"2019-08-05T20:18:57","slug":"book-review-white-like-her-by-gail-lukasik-reviewed-by-c-ellen-connally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58650","title":{"rendered":"BOOK REVIEW: \u201cWhite Like Her\u201d by Gail Lukasik, Reviewed By C. Ellen Connally"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOK REVIEW: \u201cWhite Like Her\u201d by Gail Lukasik, Reviewed By C. Ellen Connally<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Cool Cleveland<\/a>
\n2019-07-16<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Former Clevelander and author Gail Lukasik<\/a> named her recently published memoir White Like Her<\/em><\/a>. Subtitled My Family\u2019s Story of Race and Racial Passing<\/em><\/a>, Lukasik tells the story of her mother, Alvera Frederic Kalina, who changed her racial identity from black to white<\/a> when she married in 1944 and moved to Cleveland<\/a>. With that move, she abandoned her black family and racial heritage and in her mind, became white like the man she married.<\/p>\n

Alvera hid her secret from the world until her daughter made the discovery when she was tracing her family tree. Her mother\u2019s birth certificate and that of her grandfather and other relatives ,along with census records, showed that her mother and other relatives were black. When confronted with such concrete evidence, Alvera refused to admit her mixed-race heritage. In her mind, her life as a black person was over when she married and left New Orleans<\/a>, the city of her birth. She begged her daughter not to reveal her secret. For 17 years, until her mother\u2019s death, Lukasik continued her research but did not reveal her findings outside her immediate family.<\/p>\n

Stories of passing<\/a> \u2014 a term used to define the process of abandoning one\u2019s cultural identity and adopting another \u2014 are traditionally associated with a light-skinned black person who assumes a white identity. People of color living as white have been the theme for many literary works in the late 19th and 20th century. Clevelander Charles W. Chesnutt<\/a>, a black man who could have easily passed for white, wrote a significant number of stories about black people passing for white around the turn of the 20th century. Many of the stories take place in Cleveland which he fictionalized to be Groveland, Ohio…<\/p>\n

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

BOOK REVIEW: \u201cWhite Like Her\u201d by Gail Lukasik, Reviewed By C. Ellen Connally Cool Cleveland 2019-07-16 Former Clevelander and author Gail Lukasik named her recently published memoir White Like Her. Subtitled My Family\u2019s Story of Race and Racial Passing, Lukasik tells the story of her mother, Alvera Frederic Kalina, who changed her racial identity from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[27597,30095,898,8626,30094,25614,1438,260],"class_list":["post-58650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-alvera-frederic-kalina","tag-c-ellen-connally","tag-charles-w-chesnutt","tag-cleveland","tag-cool-cleveland","tag-gail-lukasik","tag-new-orleans","tag-ohio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58650","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=58650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58651,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58650\/revisions\/58651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}