Slim and innocuous as a business card, it reads: Dear Friend, I am black. David Fulton, SB64, has owned some of historys most treasured violins, violas, and cellos. Whats at Stake in the Fisher v. University of Texas Case? My father slowly takes off his glasses and dabs his eyes. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.com and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. And well take a cup o kindness yet, for auld lang syne. My father cant go back to the Chicago of the nineteen-fifties. Staggered by this nightmarish new reality, I am grasping for explanations for why my parents can no longer live together. I think of my friends whose parents divorced when they were children or teenagers. The car is cozy and my dad is singing again. She is a contributing writer to The NewYorker.com and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians . My dad, for his part, winced when my mom couldnt remember a name or asked the same question twice. That story opens Hobbss book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014), a lyrical, searching, and studious account of the phenomenon from the mid-19th century to the 1950s. The arrival of these two ostensibly white women allowed Elsie to remain white, even in death, Hobbs writes. We two have run about the slopes, and picked the daisies fine; But weve wandered many a weary foot, since auld lang syne. Subscribe to our Weekly eNewsletterUpcoming EventsRecent News, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 360 I bought a flocked Christmas tree, just like the ones that my grandmother chose when my father was growing up. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. From left: a portrait; Jean Toomer Papers: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; The Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library. Allyson Hobbs, AM02, PhD09. This is a different type of grief. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/parents-divorce.html. His probable father made him a free man and he went on to make a fortune in the gold rush in California. As historian Allyson Hobbs explains in A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, scholars have traditionally paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white than . The book was selected as a Times Book Review Editors Choice, a Best Book of 2014 by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a Book of the Week by the Times Higher Education in London. Her tragedy once again feels like mixed fate. Their four children grew up believing they were white. One story Hobbs tells is of Elsie Roxborough, a socialite who briefly dated Joe Louis and Langston Hughes, and who in 1937, after graduating from the University of Michigan, began passing as white to become a model. Because people who passed obviously guarded their tracks and tried to leave no trace. I cling to my sister and childhood friends who remember the past. About Allyson Hobbs Her work has appeared inThe New York Times,The New York Times Book Review,The Washington Post,The Nation,The Root.com,The Guardian,Politico,andThe Chronicle of Higher Education. When a child dies before a parent, such a loss defies the expected order of life events, leading many people to experience the event as a challenge to basic existential assumptions, a 2010 study by the National Institutes of Health explained. I should be able to stanch the wound, but I cant. Chan School of Public Health celebrates opening of $25M Thich Nhat Hanh Center for research, approaches to mindfulness, Women who suppressed emotions had less diverse microbiomes in study that also found specific bacterial link to happiness, Tenn. lawmaker Justin Pearson, Parkland survivor David Hogg 23 talk about tighter gun control, GOP attempts to restrict voting rights, importance of local politics, Dangers involved in rise of neurotechnology that allows for tracking of thoughts, feelings examined at webinar, 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Allyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Stanford University. Remember that, Joyce? he asks my mother. Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. A secret in her own family led Allyson Hobbs, AM02, PhD09, to uncover the hidden history of racial passing. I drift into my own misty reveries: a childhood when the excitement of Christmas would not let me sleep; years later, watching my brother-in-law assemble elaborate and exquisite floral centerpieces as his generous gift to us; the games played; the joy and laughter before my sisters illness and untimely death, at thirty-one; even the hectic but happy balancing act of celebrating two Christmasesone with my family and one with my husbands familybefore our marriage collapsed, four years ago. After 60 years, my parents marriage is ending. He sits at the dining table after our holiday feast and stares off in the direction of the CD player, holding the remote in his hand. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Nowhere to Run: African American Travel in Twentieth Century America, CCSRE 25th Anniversary Commemorative Book, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Ph.D. Minor in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, CSRE Ph.D. Minor Frequently Asked Questions, CSRE Graduate Teaching Fellowship Program, Technology & Racial Equity Graduate Fellowship, Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Annual Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Lecture. Allyson Hobbs Latest Articles | The New Yorker Excerpt: Lost Kin (University of Chicago Magazine, MayJune/15). Rich Murray, AB94, finds the stuff of life for beloved TV characters. During the 19th century, African Americans sometimes passed as white in order to pass as free, using their light complexions to elude slaveholders and slave hunters. Sign up for daily emails to get the latest Harvardnews. Or, perhaps in their mid-80s after all of the joys, the stories, the sorrows, after all of the life that they have lived together my parents find this final act too frightening and too disorienting. Is it possible that it might be easier to live without each other by choice, to break that once indestructible bond now, rather than to wait until it is broken cruelly, against their will? But by far the books most potent thread is about loss. Her grandmother died just as she was finishing A Chosen Exile, but the stories stayed with her. Her aunt responded by telling her the story of a distant cousin from the South Side of Chicago who disappeared into the white world and never returned. Hobbsis an associate professor in Stanford Universitys Department of History,director of African and African American studies,and a Kleinheinz University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Both of Hobbss parents came to Chicago as children during the Great Migration, her mother from New Orleans and her father from Augusta, Georgia. Ill remember my dad putting up the volleyball net in the backyard, securing the swing set and carrying home kids who had taken hard falls on the Slip N Slide. The after-dinner hustle and bustle do not disturb my fathers reverie. It tells a whole story about the highways and the ways that the creation of the highways destroyed a lot of black neighborhoods.. Where were the sources going to be? Listen to these stories, maybe you can imagine. She plans to shed light on their journey by looking at the places where African Americans ate, slept, danced, where they stopped for gas or groceries or a hair cut or a bathroom break. I was really struck reading these family histories and seeing all these examples of people who could barely tell the stories of their families., Thats when she began to see loss as part of the narrative. And surely youll buy your pint cup and surely Ill buy mine! As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. Hobbss father remembers visiting the familys house once as a child and noticing how light skinned they all were, the parents and the children, and shethis cousinwas the most light skinned. Some years later, long after the phone call and the fathers death, one of the brothers died, and Hobbss father went to the funeral. She is a contributing writer to, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. As the youngest of two children and the only boy in his family, my father was doted on, adored, and treasured. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. The book was also selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014, a Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014 by The Root, a featured book in the New York Times Book Review Paperback Row in 2016, and a Paris Review What Our Writers are Reading This Summer Selection in 2017. Allyson is currently at work on two books, both forthcoming from Penguin Press. I thought, Ive really got to write about the people who were left behind, she says. Hobbs said she felt deeply honored to be chosen, and called the Class of 1997 the most wonderful group of people Ive ever known. The authors father in 1943, at age three. There was a time when families got dressed up for holidays. His family did not have much money, but, as he would later tell us with a smile, We didnt know we were poor. His grandmother cleaned the homes of white families and often came back to the apartment with stories of what the white folks do. Setting the Christmas table with her best china, she would turn to my father and my aunt and say, with satisfaction, This is the way the white folks do it. The world of the white folks was just as remote geographically as it was in imagination and in experience. Allysons first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Perhaps knowing that these memories live on in all of us makes the times gone by a little easier to bear. One of the most interesting figures in the book is the novelist and poet Jean Toomer. She has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC and National Public Radio. She is the recipient of Stanfords highest teaching prize. Albert Johnston, SB25, MD29, and his wife Thyra passed as white so that he could practice medicine in a job that would have been unavailable to him as a black doctor. ever waiting to be found just below the surface.. Then one day, when their eldest son made an off-the-cuff comment about a black student at his boarding school, Albert blurted out, Well, youre colored. It was almost as if Albert had grown weary after 20 years of carefully guarding their secret. Allyson Hobbs is an associate professor of history and director of African and African-American studies at Stanford. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.com and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. He is dressed in his finest clothes. He is a little boy, seven or eight years old, in a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago, which he shares with his sister, his mother, and his grandmother. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. . They would say, Well, I really dont know much about this relative or that relative. Or, I dont know that much about my fathers side because this person passed as white and we never heard from them again, Hobbs says. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Joe Christmas, the tormented drifter in William Faulkners Light in August, considers his blackness evidence of original sin (a.k.a. The Johnstons maintained the pretense for more than a decade, until one day in the early 1940s, when Albert Jr., home from boarding school, made an unthinking remark about a colored student there, and his father said, Well, youre colored.. It was protected by a boundary that no black person (aside from domestics and other workers) dared to cross. My mom would smile and slowly shake her head and my dad would chuckle fitfully as the words tumbled out. The Root named A Chosen Exile among its Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014., 2023 Cond Nast. Married to Thyra in 1924, Albert graduated from medical school but couldnt get a job as a black doctor, and passed as white in order to gain entry to a reputable hospital. Throughout the book, there are also those who refused to give up their blackness, despite straight hair and fair skin, who declined, as James Weldon Johnson famously worded it in the 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, to sell ones birthright for a mess of pottage. Robert Harlan, born to a slave woman and a white fathermost likely the masterin Kentucky, grew up in the same household as the white Harlan boys and later went on as a free man to make a fortune in the California gold rush. She was a master of improvisation, the original mother of invention. She has won teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. A Chosen Exile Allyson Hobbs | Harvard University Press But for every Elsie there is a Robert Harlan, light-skinned, straight-haired, who showed no interest in renouncing his blackness. It is also to be perpetually aware of both the primacy of race and the bankruptcy of the race idea, as Allyson Hobbs, an assistant professor of history at Stanford University, puts it in her incisive new cultural history, A Chosen Exile., Hobbs is interested in the stories of individuals who chose to cross the color line black to white from the late 1800s up through the 1950s. (Photography by Jennifer Pottheiser). Nowhere to Run: African American Travel in Twentieth Century America explores the violence, humiliation, and indignities that African American motorists experienced on the road and To Tell the Terrible, which examines black womens testimonies against and collective memory of sexual violence. And well take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne. Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. Her endless patience was wearing thin, her natural gentleness was hardening, and she seemed uncharacteristically annoyed. Perhaps it was more beloved by him because he knew the sacrifices that his mother had made to buy it. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. She is a contributing writer toThe New Yorker.comand a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Long after I had fallen asleep, they would sit next to each other in recliners in front of the fireplace, drinking daiquiris and watching the latest family drama on HBO. A Chosen Exile won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. . While she worked, she sent my father and my aunt to double features at movie theatres as a less expensive alternative to hiring a babysitter. Allyson Hobbs' Profile | Stanford Profiles Ive been perseverating over my parents mortality for years. She has won teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. "Storytelling Matters to Historian Allyson Hobbs,"The Stanford Dish, February 19, 2016, "Stanford Historian Re-examines Practice of Racial 'Passing,'"Stanford Report, December 18, 2013. Its a story weve of course read and seen before in fictional accounts numerous novels and films that have generally portrayed mixed-race characters in the sorriest of terms. The phrase Auld Lang Syne translates to times gone by, and, while Americans expect to hear this song every New Years, few know what the Scottish lyrics actually mean. One of the best birthday presents anybody ever gave me was a calling card by the conceptual artist Adrian Piper. She committed suicide in 1949. While the song absorbs my father, plates are cleared, dishes are washed, Uno cards are located, and new rules for the game are debated. As she puts it, there is no essentialized, immutable or true identity . This history of passing explores the possibilities, challenges, and losses that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.
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