The gains and losses of racial “code switching”

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2015-01-29 16:19Z by Steven

The gains and losses of racial “code switching”

KALW 91.7 FM
San Francisco, California
2015-01-27

Hana Baba, News Reporter/Host

On today’s episode of “Crosscurrents,” we are talking about identity. We have heard how people, whether intentionally or not, can “pass” as another race, just by the sound of their voice. Passing can also be a full-time, physical endeavor. The United States has a long history of African Americans who chose to live as white in their daily lives.

Stanford Professor Allyson Hobbs recently released a book covering this history, called A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Hobbs recently visited KALW, and I asked her to explain when and why this form of “code switching” was preferred.

ALLYSON HOBBS: Particularly during the Jim Crow era, which was the era of legalized segregation, there were many advantages to passing as white. … To pass as white meant to get a better job, it meant to live in a better neighborhood, being treated with much more respect and dignity than African Americans were often treated…

Listen to the interview here.

Tags: , ,

A Dialogue on Institutional Colorism and Moving Toward Healing with Dr. Yaba Blay

Posted in Articles, Audio, Interviews, Media Archive, Social Science, United States, Women on 2015-01-29 16:16Z by Steven

A Dialogue on Institutional Colorism and Moving Toward Healing with Dr. Yaba Blay

For Harriet
2015-01-28

Kimberly Foster, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher

For Harriet is nearly five years old, and I’ve learned there are a few topics that are sure to spark contentious debate. Colorism is one of them. Discussions on colorism provoke strong feelings in Black women, in particular, and it seems that rarely do the conversation’s participants walk away with a deeper understanding of the institutional consequences of colorism or the ways we can move forward in combatting them.

What Bill Duke’s Light Girls documentary sorely missed was the voice of a Black woman colorism scholar, so I felt compelled to speak with Dr. Yaba Blay about how we can have a more effective conversation on colorism in our attempts to heal. Dr. Blay is currently co-director and assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University. She’s the artistic director and producer of the (1)ne Drop Project, and she was a consulting producer for CNN’s Black in America 5.

Read her phenomenal book, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

Listen to the interview and read the transcript here.

Tags: , , , , ,