Allyson Hobbs is a highly accomplished scholar holding a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and teaches American and African American history at Stanford. Her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. ( The New York Times wrote an excellent review of this fine work).
Countless African Americans (and black folks from other countries) fooled the world & passed as white for one reason or another & abandoned their own communities, friends & kinfolk in order to get a bigger slice of the action in the white world.. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a conscious decision to drop one part of one's racial identity to adopt another. In sum, this fantastic book tells the tale of loss.
As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.
Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.
What really disturbs me is how white supremacy informs & deforms everything its' old jaundiced hands touches. From politics to religion to education to law to economics to Hollywood movies & music, white skin privilege is still the de facto operating system this country (USA) runs on. Even some non-white folks continue to drink the Kool-Aid and grow up with deformed identities. What a tragedy.
Allyson Hobbs' book dramatizes, personalizes, and historicizes the origins of racial passing in a highly-engrossing narrative & it is scholars like Ms Hobbs who help us navigate the dark, labyrinthine terrain white supremacy has foisted upon the world.
OneLove
:::MME:::
