{"id":61774,"date":"2021-10-09T02:47:09","date_gmt":"2021-10-09T02:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61774"},"modified":"2021-10-10T20:17:36","modified_gmt":"2021-10-10T20:17:36","slug":"race-off-the-fantasy-of-race-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61774","title":{"rendered":"Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Yale Review<\/a>
\n2021-09-27<\/p>\n

Namwali Serpell<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of English
\nHarvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Genevieve Gaignard, People Make the World Go Round<\/em>, 2019. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This essay was first delivered in September 2021 as the Finzi-Contini Lecture at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center. The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by the Honorable Guido Calabresi<\/a>, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former Dean of the Yale Law School, and Dr. Paul Calabresi, in memory of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi.<\/em><\/p>\n

WHAT IF YOU COULD change your race? Some disturbing scandals of late have put this hypothetical to the reality test. A cluster of white American academics and activists, all women it seems, have been revealed to have spent years cosplaying a different race\u2014Latinx, North African, black\u2014deceiving their colleagues and comrades. The valedictorian of this recent class of racial fakers remains Rachel Dolezal<\/a>, the former college instructor, activist, and president of an NAACP<\/a> chapter, who was outed by a reporter in 2015. She confessed that she was \u201cborn white to white parents,\u201d but still declares herself to be \u201cracially human\u201d and culturally black.<\/p>\n

Such deceptions are nothing new. Racial hoaxes have been around for a long time, as Laura Browder<\/a> explains in Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities<\/em><\/a> (2000). In the mid-nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum<\/a> showcased people of concocted races, such as \u201cthe Circassian Beauty,\u201d and promoted a \u201cNegro\u201d who claimed to have discovered \u201ca weed that turns a black person white.\u201d Newspapers at the time called out runaway slave imposters, who went around \u201csoliciting money,\u201d \u201cpurchasing relatives and friends.\u201d White writers published fake slave narratives, with some unconscious tells, according to Browder: their narrators tend to discover that slavery is bad (as if this were not obvious) and to betray both \u201cdisgust with the African-American body\u201d and \u201can obsession with physical pain.\u201d As late as the 1920s, the British- born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney<\/a> disguised himself as Grey Owl, a Native American man. In his 2017 history Bunk<\/em><\/a>, Kevin Young<\/a> notes that \u201cthe hoax regularly steps in when race rears its head\u2014exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation The Yale Review 2021-09-27 Namwali Serpell, Professor of English Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Genevieve Gaignard, People Make the World Go Round, 2019. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. This essay was first delivered in September 2021 as the Finzi-Contini Lecture at Yale University’s Whitney […]<\/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],"tags":[32104,32103,20241,32101,32102],"class_list":["post-61774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","tag-archibald-stansfeld-belaney","tag-namwali-serpell","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-the-yale-review","tag-yale-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61774","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=61774"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61778,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61774\/revisions\/61778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}