Crossed Line

[question everything]

This is about Allyson Hobbs, who recently published a book called "A Chosen Exile" about black American passing as white.

In this, University of Chicago Magazine, Ms. Hobbs described how researching her family got her dissertation and the book. I was taken by her story and am posting several paragraphs from her story, not the book. And, yes, it took an extra meaning after the Rachel Dolezal story.

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“You know, we have that in our own family too.” That was the bombshell, the offhand remark that plunged historian Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09, into a 12-year odyssey to understand racial passing in America—the triumphs and possibilities, secrets and sorrows, of African Americans who crossed the color line and lived as white. As a first-year graduate student at the University of Chicago, Hobbs happened to mention to her aunt the subject of passing, a casual curiosity sparked by the Harlem Renaissance writers she was reading in school. 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.

That story opens Hobbs’s book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014). Hobbs’s cousin was 18 when she was sent by her mother to live in Los Angeles and pass as a white woman in the late 1930s. “And our cousin—and this was the part of the story that my aunt really underscored—was that our cousin absolutely did not want to do this,” Hobbs says. “She wanted to stay in Chicago; she didn’t want to give up all her friends and the only life she’d ever known.” But her mother was resolved. And so the matter was decided.

Ten or 15 years later, her cousin got what Hobbs calls an “inconvenient phone call.” Her father was dying. And her mother wanted her to come home right away. “And she says to her mother, ‘I can’t come home. I’m a white woman now.’” She was married to a white man; she had white children. “So she never goes back,” Hobbs says.

Many threads weave through A Chosen Exile, released last fall to glowing reviews: the meaning of identity, the elusive concept of race, ever-shifting color lines and cultural borderlands. But by far the book’s most potent thread is about loss. “The core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for,” Hobbs writes in the prologue, “but losing what you pass away from.” Historians have tended to focus on the privileges and opportunities available to those with white identities. Hobbs reckons with the trauma, alienation, and scars—not only for those who passed, but also for those they left behind. In letters, unpublished family histories, personal papers, sociological journals, court cases, anthropological archives, literature, and film, she finds “a coherent and enduring narrative of loss.”


More..

http://mag.uchicago.edu/law-policy-society/crossed-lines

Excerpt of the book A chosen Exile

http://mag.uchicago.edu/law-policy-society/lost-kin

[delrem]

1. I don't understand that.

"‘I can’t come home. I’m a white woman now.’"

I can only guess that she lied, she figured that she had to lie, about her family background, in order to marry her husband and start a family, because she was marrying into extreme bigotry. So she accepted that extreme bigotry as part of her life, and part of the life of her children as well.

[bettyellen]

2. well she had to hide her family to do it. Not knowing if there would be a racist backlash

Could well be part of it. But I think if she owned up to lying about her family that could be enough to cause a deep rift in the only family she has now. She's likely not know how much upset was about race and how much over her own deception. Such a huge risk.
How could anyone expect her to give up everything twice?

[KitSileya]

3. And if this was 15 years after the 1930s, it was before Loving vs Virginia

And in many states, her marriage would be illegal.