Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
To begin to undo the work of racecraft is to insist on the subjective—on one’s own individuality, and that of all others. After all, racism’s most insidious wounds are not of policy, economics, or even life and limb, though those do of course hurt, but of the psyche. The classifications that we claim to derive from nature and then ascribe to people and groups are confining to any human spirit: We are all injured by racism. So in that way, calling for the end of white supremacy necessitates calling for the end of whiteness itself, which, thankfully, might be well understood nowadays. In the fullness of time, we may also come to understand, in a life-giving manner, that the end of whiteness must also mean the end of blackness, brownness, and any other colorness.
Dr. Albert C. Johnston, Negro physician in Keene, N. H., whose story of passing for white was told in the movie Lost Boundaries, was fired from his post as radiologist at Keene’s Elliott Community Hospital. Chester Kingsbury, hospital board president, said racial prejudice was not the reason for the dismissal, claimed that Dr. Johnston could not devote full time to the job. Dr. Johnston said he would not seek reinstatement, Dr. Johnston explained there was “no doubt whatsoever” that he was fired because of the film of his life. “They have been picking on me ever since my story came out (in 1949). I don’t give a darn for the job itself, but I’m concerned over the fact that I was fired because I’m a Negro,” he declared. The physician said he learned that the hospital was looking for a new radiologist soon after he let his children know their racial identity in 1947, added that “somebody began knifing me.”
A Johnston family portrait. From left to right, standing: Albert Sr. and Albert Jr. From left to right, seated: Thyra, Paul, Ann and Donald.
How a UNH student inspired one of America’s first “race films” and why we’re still talking about it
Albert Johnston Jr. was 16 when he found out he was Black. His fair-skinned African American parents had been “passing” as white, they told him, since moving from Chicago to rural Gorham, New Hampshire, and later to Keene. His father had been the town’s country doctor with 2,500 white patients. He was an active member of the school board, the Masons and the Rotary. His mother Thyra was a two-time president of the Gorham Women’s Club and active in the Congregational Church.
Born in 1925, growing up skiing the White Mountains, Albert had only a single Black acquaintance in high school. In an era of widespread racial segregation and discrimination, he felt a seismic shift as he adapted from a dark-skinned Caucasian to a light-skinned Negro. Formerly gregarious, he drew inward. He attended and then dropped out of Dartmouth College. He enlisted and left the Navy, talked of suicide, battled with his parents, and spent time in a psychiatric ward.
Then Albert took a road trip. Decades before Ken Kesey and “Easy Rider,” with only a few dollars in their pockets, Albert and an old school chum named Walt hitch-hiked and hopped freight trains from New Hampshire to California. For Albert, it was a spiritual journey into the homes of his long-lost African American relatives and into the roots of Black culture. For Walt, who was white, it was a great adventure with a good friend. After odd jobs, a love affair and a stint at the University of California in Los Angeles, Albert found his way home. Renewed and focused, he enrolled in the well-regarded music program at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. And there in a UNH college lounge in front of 20 fellow students, Albert (Class of ’49) finally laid his burden down. During a seminar on the “race problem” in America, the topic turned to “cross-bred” people. He could offer some insight on that topic, Albert told his classmates, because he, himself, was a Negro. The room got very still, he later recalled, like the sudden silence after the climax of a concerto.
“Why not tell everybody?” Albert said. “Why carry a lie around all your life?”…
White Lies author A.J. Baime tells the story of Walter White, a light-skinned Black man whose ancestors had been enslaved. For years White risked his life investigating racial violence in the South.
Listen to the story (00:42:04) and read the transcript here.
Mayukh Sen, a US-based writer and academic, first stumbled across her name in 2009 when he found out that Oberon was the first actor of South Asian origin to be nominated for an Oscar.
His fascination grew as he saw her films and dug deeper into her past. “As a queer person, I empathise with this feeling that you must hide a part of your identity to survive in a hostile society that isn’t really ready to accept who you are,” he says. Sen is now working on a biography to tell Oberon’s story from a South Asian perspective…
William A. Darity, Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Jason Dietrich, Section Chief, Compliance Analytics and Policy Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Washington, D.C.
Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment
The New School, New York, New York
The conventional wisdom is that race is constructed in vastly different ways in the United States and throughout Latin America. Race is ostensibly understood as genotypical in the United States, while race ostensibly is understood as phenotypical in Latin America. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom, represented by the rainbow people metaphor, characterizes racial identity as far less a source of stigma in Latin America than in the United States. In contrast, research reported in this article indicates strong similarities in the construction and the operation race the entire Americas. Genotype, or African ancestry, is shown to matter in Latin America; phenotype, or appearance, is shown to matter in the United States. Race is strongly associated with social exclusion and inequality throughout all of the Americas, with Latinos demonstrating a strong preference for Whiteness and an aversion toward a Black identity. African Americans’ tendency to be Black identified may be the result of the social selection effects the phenomenon “passing.”
June Shagaloff in 1953. Thurgood Marshall hired her out of college to work for the N.A.A.C.P. on school desegregation cases. Bill Sullivan/Newsday RM via Getty Images
June Shagaloff Alexander, whose work for the N.A.A.C.P. and its legal arm in the 1950s and ’60s put her at the forefront of the nationwide fight for school integration and made her a close confidante of civil rights figures like Thurgood Marshall and James Baldwin, died on March 29 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 93…
…Although she was white, her dark complexion sometimes led people to assume she was Black, to the point of barring her from certain whites-only public spaces, an experience that she said shaped her early commitment to civil rights.
But this ambiguity proved to be an asset in her work. When investigating a segregated school district, she would visit a white school pretending to be a prospective white parent, then do the same at a Black school, pretending to be a prospective Black parent — a ruse that gave her a unique, unvarnished view of the district’s education inequities…
ACMRS Press
April 2022
160 pages
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780866986946
Paperback ISBN: 9780866986595
Margo Hendricks, Professor Emerita University of California, Santa Cruz
This study brings race and the literary tradition of romance into dialogue.
Romance and Race: Coloring the Past explores the literary and cultural genealogy of colorism, white passing, and white presenting in the romance genre. The scope of the study ranges from Heliodorus’Aithiopika to the short novels of Aphra Behn, to the modern romance novel Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins. This analysis engages with the troublesome racecraft of “passing” and the instability of racial identity and its formation from the premodern to the present. The study also looks at the significance of white settler colonialism to early modern romance narratives. A bridge between studies of early modern romance and scholarship on twenty-first-century romance novels, this book is well-suited for those interested in the romance genre.
Stranger and Alone dramatizes the psychological and moral costs of denying one’s racial identity and allowing one’s “white face” to predominate. Striving for individual success through rejection of one’s people, the novel implies, amounts to a betrayal of oneself, as well as a futile striving against history, “the time on the clock of the world.
Williams spent the first ten years of his life believing he was white in segregated Virginia, and that his dark-skinned father was Italian. When his parents’ marriage ended, his father took him and his brother to Muncie, Indiana, where the boys learned that they were half black. Williams’ new memoir “Life on the Color Line” is about the struggle and repression he faced growing up between the races. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “(an) affecting and absorbing story.”
Listen to the interview (00:23:10) here. Download the interview here.
“Still’s Underground Rail Road Records,” 1886 /Boston African American National Historic Site
To escape slavery in Georgia, light-skinned Ellen Craft and her dark-skinned husband William posed, respectively, as a white gentleman traveling with his enslaved manservant in 1848.
Elsie Roxborough was born in 1914 in Detroit to one of Michigan’s most prominent Black families. When she died in New York City in 1949, her death certificate listed her race as white. She had lived there as a white woman for over a decade, working for a time as a model while aspiring to acclaim as a playwright.
“She almost immediately goes to New York City after graduation from the University of Michigan,” said Ken Coleman, a journalist who has researched the Roxborough family. Elsie Roxborough “at least professionally changed her name to Pat Rico at one point, and then ultimately, Mona Manet, and her brown, brownish-black hair becomes Lucille Ball auburn.”
Roxborough represents one of the few documented historical instances from Michigan of a Black person choosing to live nearly full-time as a member of white society. This phenomenon, known as racial passing, has received renewed popular attention through recent artistic works like Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing and Britt Bennett’s novel The Vanishing Half…
