Download or read book Passing and Posing between Black and White written by Lisa Gotto and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception, U.S. American cinema has grappled with the articulation of racial boundaries. This applies, in the first instance, to featuring mixed-race characters crossing the color line. In a broader sense, however, this also concerns viewing conditions and knowledge configurations. The fact that American film engages itself so extensively with the unbalanced relation between black and white is neither coincidental nor trivial to state — it has much more to do with disputing boundaries that pertain to the medium itself. Lisa Gotto examines this constellation along the early history of American film, the cinematic modernism of the late 1950s, and the post-classical cinema of the turn of the millennium.

Download or read book A Chosen Exile written by Allyson Hobbs and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a 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.

Download or read book White Like Her written by Gail Lukasik and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing is the story of Gail Lukasik’s mother’s “passing,” Gail’s struggle with the shame of her mother’s choice, and her subsequent journey of self-discovery and redemption. In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother’s decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother’s fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother’s racial lineage, tracing her family back to eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage. With a foreword written by Kenyatta Berry, host of PBS's Genealogy Roadshow, this unique and fascinating story of coming to terms with oneself breaks down barriers.

Download or read book White Lies written by A. J. Baime and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “electrifying” biography of Walter White, a little-remembered Black civil rights leader who passed for white in order to investigate racist murders, help put the NAACP on the map, and change the racial identity of America forever (Chicago Review of Books). Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to “pass” for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the civil rights movement. White’s risky career led him to lead a double life. He was simultaneously a second-class citizen subject to Jim Crow laws at home and a widely respected professional with full access to the white world at work. His life was fraught with internal and external conflict—much like the story of race in America. Starting out as an obscure activist, White ultimately became Black America’s most prominent leader, during his time. A character study of White’s life and career with all these complexities has never been rendered, until now. By the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental President, Dewey Defeats Truman, and The Arsenal of Democracy, White Lies uncovers the life of a civil rights leader unlike any other.

Download or read book Passing written by Nella Larsen and published by Alien Ebooks. This book was released on 2022 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926.

Download or read book Black No More written by George Samuel Schuyler and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would happen to the race problem in America if black people could suddenly become white?

Download or read book Playing the Race Card written by Linda Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-23 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book In Full Color written by Rachel Dolezal and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lot of people have made up their minds about Rachel Doležal. But none of them know her real story. In June 2015, the media "outed" Rachel Doležal as a white woman who had knowingly been "passing" as Black. When asked if she were African American during an interview about the hate crimes directed at her and her family, she hesitated before ending the interview and walking away. Some interpreted her reluctance to respond and hasty departure as dishonesty, while others assumed she lacked a reasonable explanation for the almost unprecedented way she identified herself. What determines your race? Is it your DNA? The community in which you were raised? The way others see you or the way you see yourself? With In Full Color, Rachel Doležal describes the path that led her from being a child of white evangelical parents to an NAACP chapter president and respected educator and activist who identifies as Black. Along the way, she recounts the deep emotional bond she formed with her four adopted Black siblings, the sense of belonging she felt while living in Black communities in Jackson, Mississippi, and Washington, DC, and the experiences that have shaped her along the way. Her story is nuanced and complex, and in the process of telling it, she forces us to consider race in an entirely new light—not as a biological imperative, but as a function of the experiences we have, the culture we embrace, and, ultimately, the identity we choose.

Download or read book The Personal Librarian written by Marie Benedict and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Instant New York Times Bestseller! A Good Morning America* Book Club Pick! Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR! Named a Notable Book of the Year by the Washington Post! “Historical fiction at its best!”* A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection. But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American. The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

Download or read book Radical Ambivalence written by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of Flannery O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O’Connor’s thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction.

Download or read book Trans written by Rogers Brubaker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the transgender experience opens up new possibilities for thinking about gender and race In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black? Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up—in different ways and to different degrees—to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry—increasingly understood as mixed—loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience—encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories—Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories. At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.

Download or read book White Like Me written by Tim Wise and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flipping John Howard Griffin's classic Black Like Me, and extending Noel Ignatiev's How The Irish Became White into the present-day, Wise explores the meanings and consequences of whiteness, and discusses the ways in which racial privilege can harm not just people of color, but also whites. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and yet scholarly; analytical and yet accessible.

Download or read book Black on White written by David R. Roediger and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America? From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society. Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.

Download or read book Accidental Orientalists written by Barbara Spackman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first monograph in English to address Orientalism in the writings of Italian travellers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to do against a backdrop of comparative reference to works in English and French that preceded or were contemporary to them.

Download or read book Same Family Different Colors written by Lori L. Tharps and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaving together personal stories, history, and analysis, Same Family, Different Colors explores the myriad ways skin-color politics affect family dynamics in the United States. Colorism and color bias—the preference for or presumed superiority of people based on the color of their skin—is a pervasive and damaging but rarely openly discussed phenomenon. In this unprecedented book, Lori L. Tharps explores the issue in African American, Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race families and communities by weaving together personal stories, history, and analysis. The result is a compelling portrait of the myriad ways skin-color politics affect family dynamics in the United States. Tharps, the mother of three mixed-race children with three distinct skin colors, uses her own family as a starting point to investigate how skin-color difference is dealt with. Her journey takes her across the country and into the lives of dozens of diverse individuals, all of whom have grappled with skin-color politics and speak candidly about experiences that sometimes scarred them. From a Latina woman who was told she couldn’t be in her best friend’s wedding photos because her dark skin would “spoil” the pictures, to a light-skinned African American man who spent his entire childhood “trying to be Black,” Tharps illuminates the complex and multifaceted ways that colorism affects our self-esteem and shapes our lives and relationships. Along with intimate and revealing stories, Tharps adds a historical overview and a contemporary cultural critique to contextualize how various communities and individuals navigate skin-color politics. Groundbreaking and urgent, Same Family, Different Colors is a solution-seeking journey to the heart of identity politics, so that this more subtle “cousin to racism,” in the author’s words, will be exposed and confronted.

Download or read book Complaint written by Sara Ahmed and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.

Download or read book Racechanges written by Susan Gubar and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the actor Ted Danson appeared in blackface at a 1993 Friars Club roast, he ignited a firestorm of protest that landed him on the front pages of the newspapers, rebuked by everyone from talk show host Montel Williams to New York City's then mayor, David Dinkins. Danson's use of blackface was shocking, but was the furious pitch of the response a triumphant indication of how far society has progressed since the days when blackface performers were the toast of vaudeville, or was it also an uncomfortable reminder of how deep the chasm still is separating black and white America? In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar, who fundamentally changed the way we think about women's literature as co-author of the acclaimed The Madwoman in the Attic, turns her attention to the incendiary issue of race. Through a far-reaching exploration of the long overlooked legacy of minstrelsy--cross-racial impersonations or "racechanges"--throughout modern American film, fiction, poetry, painting, photography, and journalism, she documents the indebtedness of "mainstream" artists to African-American culture, and explores the deeply conflicted psychology of white guilt. The fascinating "racechanges" Gubar discusses include whites posing as blacks and blacks "passing" for white; blackface on white actors in The Jazz Singer, Birth of a Nation, and other movies, as well as on the faces of black stage entertainers; African-American deployment of racechange imagery during the Harlem Renaissance, including the poetry of Anne Spencer, the black-and-white prints of Richard Bruce Nugent, and the early work of Zora Neale Hurston; white poets and novelists from Vachel Lindsay and Gertrude Stein to John Berryman and William Faulkner writing as if they were black; white artists and writers fascinated by hypersexualized stereotypes of black men; and nightmares and visions of the racechanged baby. Gubar shows that unlike African-Americans, who often are forced to adopt white masks to gain their rights, white people have chosen racial masquerades, which range from mockery and mimicry to an evolving emphasis on inter-racial mutuality and mutability. Drawing on a stunning array of illustrations, including paintings, film stills, computer graphics, and even magazine morphings, Racechanges sheds new light on the persistent pervasiveness of racism and exciting aesthetic possibilities for lessening the distance between blacks and whites.