She teaches courses on American identity; African American history; African American womens history; American road trips, migration, travel and mobility; and twentieth-century American history and culture. I thought their bond was indestructible. I wantedto get rid of my possessions, because possessions stood between me and death. Allyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Stanford University. 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. Author of the 1923 modernist classic Cane, Toomer came from an illustrious, high-powered racially mixed family. 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. My fathers grandmother had served the white folks at dinner parties, so she took great pride in making her own celebrations equally special. The house where I grew up our sanctuary for 40 years is falling apart and will be sold soon. Every year, as the hour grows late on Christmas night, my fathers eyes become misty. Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor of United States History, the Director of African and African American Studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. As an alumna, her service to Harvard has included interviewing prospective students, coordinating the Harvard Black Alumni Societys San Francisco chapter, and working on the Harvard College Fund Gift Committee for her Class 15th Reunion. Many of them, Hobbs found, reading his papers, couldnt do it. The arrival of these two ostensibly white women allowed Elsie to remain white, even in death, Hobbs writes. David Fulton, SB64, has owned some of historys most treasured violins, violas, and cellos. Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor of United States History, the Director of African and African American Studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. Im a white woman now. She was married to a white man; she had white children. When there is tragedy in these pages, Hobbs locates its source not in the racially ambiguous figure himself or herself, but in the reductive culture into which he or she is born. Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American womens history, and twentieth century American history. All rights reserved. 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. Stop walking like an old man, she scolded him. This collaboration never fails to fill me with joy., She called writing her thesis about the Highlander Folk School, nestled in the mountains of Tennessee, transformative. In June, she will lead the alumni parade as part ofHarvard Alumni Dayand host aspecial luncheon in Widener Library, where University leadership convene with a small group of alumni leaders and other dignitaries, including the Harvard Medalists and theAlumni Day featured speaker. Allyson Hobbs, AM02, PhD09. Its lacerations came without warning. Allyson Hobbs, an assistant professor of American history at Stanford University, discussed research from her award-winning book, A Chosen Exile: A History on Racial Passing in American Life, at a Women's Studies Colloquium. She also has taught classes on, Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program in History, Joint Degree in Law and History (J.D./Ph.D), Stanford Environmental and Climate History Workshop, Storytelling Matters to Historian Allyson Hobbs, Stanford Historian Re-examines Practice of Racial 'Passing, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Obama and the Paradigm Shift: Measuring Change, Neo-Passing - Performing Identity after Jim Crow, Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America - Allyson Hobbs, How to Build a Movement - Featured: Clay Carson, Estelle Freedman, Allyson Hobbs and Pamela Karlan, Sunday Reading: Racial Injustice and the Police-Collection of Essays with 2016 Essay by Allyson Hobbs, Becoming, by Michelle Obama: A pioneering and important work by Allyson Hobbs. One of the loved ones Hobbs lost helped spark her current book project, a study of the Great Migration through the experiences of travelers heading north through a segregated country. 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. Though scholars have widely argued that Toomer passed as white, Hobbs depicts him as not so much rejecting blackness as rejecting racialized thinking. 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. A Chosen Exilewon the Organization of American Historians Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. Merrick Garland to speak at Commencement for Classes of 2020 and 2021, Happiness is not a destination Happiness is the way, Expanding our understanding of gut feelings, Gen Z, millennials need to be prepared to fight for change, Allyson Hobbs is elected Class of 1997s chief marshal, this years featured Harvard Alumni Day speaker, DNA shows poorly understood empire was multiethnic with strong female leadership. Fierce in her conviction that the past has much to teach us, Allyson is an example of the countless Harvard alumni who are shaping our world, like all of the chief marshals before her.. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. As she puts it, there is no essentialized, immutable or true identity . He saw race as superficial, a physical covering, and argued for an American identity that could not extricate its black elements from its white components. In this critically vigilant work, Hobbs refuses to accept any one identity as true. Toomer, in his resistance to being pigeonholed, comes across here as not so much self-loathing as ahead of his time. Hobbs said she realized while at Harvard that a university would be my professional home. The car is cozy and my dad is singing again. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. A few years ago, my mom began to have impossible expectations of my father. Ad Choices. It wasnt like I could go into a library and find a folder. He remained close to the other Harlans, one of whom was Justice John Marshall Harlan the great dissenter of the Supreme Court who argued on behalf of equal rights under the law in Plessy v. Ferguson. They cry as if these were their own parents. Now hes telling their storiesand his own. Elsie changed her name to Mona Manet and wrote Hughes a letter bearing no return address stating that she intended to cease being colored. When she committed suicide years later, only her white-appearing relatives showed up to claim her body, allowing Elsie to remain white, even in death.. Like so many of the people in her book, her own family tree has a gap. Obviously its a very different kind of loss, but passing is often equated with death, she says. Despite the tradition of activism by black women, white women have often played the protagonists in the history of sexual violence, and black women have been relegated to the supporting cast. I was in college at the time, and it felt like the ultimate inside joke handed from one racially ambiguous person to another. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life PROVO, Utah (Mar. This time, he is doing his best imitation of Sam Cooke: Its been too hard living, oh my/And Im afraid to die/Cause I dont know whats up there/Beyond the sky/Its been a long, a long time coming/But I know a change is gonna come/Oh yes, it will.. In 2017, she was honored by the Silicon Valley chapter of the NAACP with a Freedom Fighter Award. It was fascinating how many of the students really struggled, she says. I thought, Ive really got to write about the people who were left behind, she says. The spectacular collapse of my parents marriage has been too much for me. She wanted her grandchildren to know that, even though they might live in a kitchenette in Chicagos overcrowded Black Belt, they were just as precious and just as cherished as the white children who lived in the prestigious neighborhoods of the North Shore. She takes nothing at face value least of all the idea that the person who is passing is actually and truly of one race or the other. As the youngest of two children and the only boy in his family, my father was doted on, adored, and treasured. 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. Her endless patience was wearing thin, her natural gentleness was hardening, and she seemed uncharacteristically annoyed. When you talk to African Americans of a certain generation, everybodyeverybodycan remember the difficulty they had, how hard it was to find a place to stay and a place to eat, Hobbs says. Events will be simultaneously live-streamed for those who cannot attend in person. Slim and innocuous as a business card, it reads: Dear Friend, I am black. And well take a cup o kindness yet, for auld lang syne. Her tragedy once again feels like mixed fate. Sarah Jane, a character in Douglas Sirks 1959 remake of the film Imitation of Life, denies her black mother in her attempt to be seen as white. He wears a light-blue cashmere V-neck sweater over a neat button-down shirt and brown corduroy pants, classic gifts for Dad from previous Christmastimes. When historians have taken on the subject, Hobbs points out, they have generally paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white than to what was lost by rejecting a black racial identity. Hobbs, on the other hand, insists on seeing the history of passing as a coherent and enduring narrative of loss. We hear from the black family left behind. His life was not an easy one. (now Secretary of Commerce) Gina M. Raimondo 93. Hobbs calls it nine to five passing, although it required the passer to leave home before sunup and not come back until after dark to avoid being seen in their black neighborhoods. 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 Americathe triumphs and possibilities, secrets and sorrows, of African Americans who crossed the color line and lived as white. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor of United States History, the Director of African and African American Studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. Both of Hobbss parents came to Chicago as children during the Great Migration, her mother from New Orleans and her father from Augusta, Georgia. She served on the jury for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History. Stanford, CA 94305-2024%20history-info [at] stanford.edu ()target="_blank"Campus Map, Understanding the past to prepare for the future, Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program in History, Joint Degree in Law and History (J.D./Ph.D), Stanford Environmental and Climate History Workshop, Harvard University Press, Obama and the Paradigm Shift: Measuring Change, Concl. Born a slave to his black mother and a white father, probably the master, James Harlan, he was raised in the same household as the white Harlan boys. I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as Im sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me., To be black but to be perceived as white is to find yourself, at times, in a racial no mans land. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor.. Fraziers dissertation, The Negro Family in Chicago, became a groundbreaking text in the field. Try as I might, I cant relive my childhood or young adulthood in Morristown. I am in a small boat, too fatigued to pick up an oar, lost at sea. 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. For her, rather, passing is an opportunity to consider deeper questions. 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. My parents told the same stories of growing up on the South Side of Chicago hundreds of times. Hobbs also describes the upper-class Johnston family, who in the early 1900s became stalwarts of social and civic life in an all-white New Hampshire town. "Perhaps . It was kind of this obsession or intrigue with them, she says. Ill remember my bright pink bedroom with curtains that my mom made from Benetton sheets. Could a California Christmas with yards of garland, a lively rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and a signature Christmas cocktail substitute for our traditional New Jersey one? She committed suicide in 1949. They seemed to relish sharing the smallest and most mundane moments of life: running errands to the grocery store, the post office, the mall. Sign up for daily emails to get the latest Harvardnews. It must be terrifying for them. I wonder if my parents marriage would have survived if my sister Sharon hadnt died from breast cancer at 31 in 1998. I tell new friends, I wish you could have known my parents before. Look at these pictures look at their high school prom picture maybe you can understand. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com. She teaches courses on American identity; African American history; African American womens history; American road trips, migration, travel and mobility; and twentieth-century American history and culture. Stanford, CA 94305Phone:(650) 736-6790Fax:(650) 723-8528Campus Map, Ph.D., University of Chicago, with distinction B.A., Harvard University, magna cum laude, Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor of United States History, the Director of African and African American Studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. And yet, as Hobbs reminds us, hybrid identities are still racial identities, and as our present moment unfolds, we are often left to wonder if we have seen this movie before., https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/a-chosen-exile-by-allyson-hobbs.html. I should be able to stanch the wound, but I cant. Traveling from New Orleans to Nashville, she found that most of the places listed in the guide no longer exist. My dad, for his part, winced when my mom couldnt remember a name or asked the same question twice. Her father was dying, she could never come back, she would never see her brothers again., Over the next decade or so while she worked on her dissertation and then the book, Hobbs suffered her own series of losses as people close to her diedthe aunt who told her the story about the cousin and three first cousins who were like brothers and sisters to Hobbs. Hobbs traveled to the school the summer before her senior year.