Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
“What’s interesting is when I started ballet at 13 years old, I was told I had everything that it took to be a ballet dancer, physically, artistically. So that’s why there’s kind of this interesting dichotomy when I think about Black women specifically in ballet and the language that’s being used in telling us that we are wrong for ballet. Again, I had the ideal body when I joined American Ballet Theater. Of course, I went through puberty — and like a lot of dancers who become professionals between the ages of 16 and 18 … my body did change. But once I became a professional, that’s when people started to really see me as a Black woman in a company where there weren’t any. And that’s when the language started to change around me fitting in.” —Misty Copeland
For Mike, the revelation left him with a sense of confusion. “I had literally no idea of my own racial background,” he says. “I obviously had some questions. I occasionally met relatives. But a large part of the passing meant that we did not see relatives very often. So, I really grew up in a white community acting as white with these kinds of questions. … I spent a couple of years in Chicago sort of running after every Black person I could find saying, ‘Hey, me too, me too,’ and they would look at my perfectly white skin, blondish hair, and light brown eyes and say, ‘Yeah right, not in this lifetime.’”
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On Wisconsin
Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (alumni and friends of the University of Wisconsin, Madison)
2021-03-01
Harvey Long MA’16, Librarian, Assistant Professor North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, North Carolina
Ethelene Whitmire, Professor
Departments of Afro-American Studies; German, Nordic, and Slavic; andGender & Women’s Studies University of Wisconsin, Madison
Librarian Louise Butler Walker ’35 took desperate measures to survive in a racist society.
During the Great Depression, Louise Butler Walker ’35 completed her bachelor’s in French and earned a library diploma from what is now UW–Madison’s Information School. Walker had been an outstanding student, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and completed a prestigious internship at the American Library Association (ALA) headquarters in Chicago. The school’s career placement office said her assets were her “brilliant mind” and “excellent academic background.” Her limitations, they said, were “racial (she is a mulatto).”
Although Walker was not privy to the egregious behind-the-scenes machinations and handwringing about her being Black, she knew that her race was detrimental to her career, so she eventually passed as white to work as a librarian in rural Wisconsin. Her story reveals the extraordinary pressures that African Americans faced…