{"id":61901,"date":"2021-10-21T01:01:42","date_gmt":"2021-10-21T01:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61901"},"modified":"2021-10-21T14:21:32","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T14:21:32","slug":"the-fiction-of-the-color-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61901","title":{"rendered":"The Fiction of the Color Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fiction of the Color Line<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Vulture<\/a>
\n2021-10-18<\/p>\n

Brittany Luse<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Photo-Illustration: Vulture<\/em>; Photo: Getty, Yale University Library<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Black women writers have long used passing<\/a> stories to crack our fa\u00e7ades of race, class, and gender.<\/em><\/p>\n

Somewhere on Long Island<\/a> around 1980, a blondish preteen is onstage at summer camp channeling Hodel from Fiddler on the Roof<\/em><\/a>, her confident voice and star power self-evident. Her tawny-skinned father beams from the audience, and as she takes her bow, soaking in the applause, he approaches the stage bearing a hefty bouquet of daisies. He hands her the flowers, their eyes and hearts locking for a beat in shared pride. Then the girl realizes that every other parent, instructor, and child in the auditorium is staring at them. \u201cNot in a way that felt good, not because I had given the outstanding performance of the night,\u201d she would recall decades later. \u201cThey were staring because my father was the only Black man in sight, and I belonged to him.\u201d The others had assumed until that moment that Mariah Carey<\/a> \u2014 the girl with the frizzy honey-blonde hair \u2014 was white like them.<\/p>\n

The Meaning of Mariah Carey<\/em><\/a>, the singer\u2019s delectable memoir co-written with Michaela Angela Davis<\/a>, a former editor at Essence<\/em> and Vibe<\/em>, recalls many such stories. In doing so, it\u2019s in direct conversation with the American literary tradition of novels about passing<\/a> and passing-capable Black women \u2014 stories about the concealment, or the possibility of concealment, of one\u2019s Black parentage and all of the attendant personal and social complexity. Since the late-19th century, writers have used passing as a narrative tool to do everything from encouraging white readers to sympathize with the struggles of Black characters to scrutinizing the hypocrisy of America\u2019s racial hierarchy…<\/p>\n

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

Black women writers have long used passing stories to crack our fa\u00e7ades of race, class, and gender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,1196,8,6462,20,25],"tags":[9812,30881,32146,32148,1340,5634,2367,5235,330,113,12980,87,28879,20879,32145],"class_list":["post-61901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-brit-bennett","tag-brittany-luse","tag-cid-ricketts-sumner","tag-danzy-senna","tag-edna-ferber","tag-fannie-hurst","tag-fran-ross","tag-frances-e-w-harper","tag-mariah-carey","tag-michaela-angela-davis","tag-nella-larsen","tag-rebecca-hall","tag-vulture","tag-vulture-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61901","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=61901"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61906,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61901\/revisions\/61906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}