{"id":8594,"date":"2010-08-30T21:11:26","date_gmt":"2010-08-30T21:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=8594"},"modified":"2014-10-23T22:52:48","modified_gmt":"2014-10-23T22:52:48","slug":"the-tapestry-of-walter-white%e2%80%99s-contradictions-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=8594","title":{"rendered":"The Tapestry of Walter White\u2019s Contradictions [Book Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/sewanee_review\/summary\/v118\/118.3.pinsker.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Tapestry of Walter White\u2019s Contradictions [Book Review]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/sewanee_review\" target=\"_blank\">Sewanee Review<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/sewanee_review\/toc\/sew.118.3.html\" target=\"_blank\">Volume 118, Number 3<\/a>, Summer 2010<br \/>\npages lxxxii-lxxxiv<br \/>\nE-ISSN: 1934-421X<br \/>\nPrint ISSN: 0037-3052<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.vqronline.org\/author\/32\/sanford-pinsker\" target=\"_blank\">Sanford Pinsker<\/a><\/strong>, Emeritus Professor of English<br \/>\n<em>Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Tom Dyja. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=8586\" target=\"_blank\">Walter White: The Dilemma of Black identity in America<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0 The\u00a0Library of African American\u00a0Biography.\u00a0 Lanham, Maryland:\u00a0Ivan R. Dee Publishsers, 2008.\u00a0 224 pp.. (hardcover).\u00a0 ISBN1-56663-766-X \/ 978-1-56663-766-4.<\/p>\n<p>In the early stages of his campaign for the presidency, many blacks regarded <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barack_Obama\" target=\"_blank\">Barack Obama<\/a> as too \u201cwhite\u201d; later many whites regarded him as too \u201cblack.\u201d To his credit the biracial Obama presented himself as a mainstream American\u2014and, more than that, as an exemplar of the postracial age. He did not play the race card although others, alas, did. No doubt there are still many folks, most of them over sixty, who are as ignorant, as mean-spirited, and as prejudiced as were their forefathers. Racial identity, always complicated, always contentious, is a current that alternates between how people are defined by others and how they define themselves.<\/p>\n<p>The now nearly forgotten <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Walter_Francis_White\" target=\"_blank\">Walter White<\/a> (1893\u20131955) belongs to an earlier time when lynching was commonplace in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=4781\" target=\"_blank\">Jim Crow<\/a> South, and when the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/National_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Colored_People\" target=\"_blank\">National Association for the Advancement of Colored People<\/a> spent much of its time trying to get federal antilynching laws passed. Because White was fair-skinned\u2014and had blond hair and blue eyes to boot\u2014he could not only \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">pass<\/a>\u201d for white, but also play the trickster in the bargain: White would amble into a small southern town, posing as an insurance salesman (which he had, in fact, been for the black-owned Standard Life Insurance Company) and engage the locals in conversation about a recent local lynching. For their part the rednecks were happy to oblige, often bragging about what had occurred in bloodcurdling&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read or purchase the review <a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/sewanee_review\/v118\/118.3.pinsker.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Tapestry of Walter White\u2019s Contradictions [Book Review] Sewanee Review Volume 118, Number 3, Summer 2010 pages lxxxii-lxxxiv E-ISSN: 1934-421X Print ISSN: 0037-3052 Sanford Pinsker, Emeritus Professor of English Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania Tom Dyja. \u201cWalter White: The Dilemma of Black identity in America\u201d.\u00a0 The\u00a0Library of African American\u00a0Biography.\u00a0 Lanham, Maryland:\u00a0Ivan R. Dee Publishsers, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,125,1467,8,20],"tags":[3684,3685,3686,1929],"class_list":["post-8594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-identitydevelopment","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-sanford-pinsker","tag-sewanee-review","tag-tom-dyja","tag-walter-white"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8594","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=8594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}