The chosen exile of racial "passing": Allyson Hobbs at TEDxStanford

[Music] thank you so much I am a historian I love history I fell in love with history because I've always been surrounded by it I grew up in a town in New Jersey where George Washington spent two winters during the Revolutionary War as an undergraduate I was a tour guide at Harvard and I used to love telling prospective students about the great fire of 1764 that engulfed the campus and destroyed John Harvard's prized book collection when I started graduate school at the University of Chicago history continued to surround me but this time it was my own history it was my family's history that met me at every turn I lived on Chicago's South Side in Hyde Park which is one of the most historic african-american neighborhoods in the country so history once distant in New Jersey and at Harvard was suddenly getting closer and closer to me here was the apartment where my father and my aunt pictured here as children lived when they moved to Chicago after migrating from Augusta Georgia in 1939 here was Wendell Phillips High School one of Chicago's first predominantly african-american high schools this high school was a source of pride and an anchor in the black community this was also where my parents met and went to their prom together Carl Sandburg famously described Chicago as the hog butcher for the world and the city of Big Shoulders but to me Chicago was a place where my family's history came to life now there was one story that my aunt shared with me about my family's history that was so compelling but also so tragic that I couldn't stop thinking about it and it was the story of a distant cousin of ours who had grown up on kaga Southside she lived a life like any other black child of her time she went to Wendell Phillips high school and she cheered as the historic bud Billiken parade made its way through Washington Park but her life would take a dramatically different turn when she graduated from high school my cousin was very light-skinned she looked white and her mother had decided that with that it was in her best interest to leave the southside of Chicago and move far away to Los Angeles and pass as a white woman now my cousin did not want to do this she pleaded with her mother she did not want to leave her family and her friends and the only life that she had ever known but her mother was insistent and the matter was decided so years later after my cousin had married a white man and raised white children who knew nothing of their mother's past she received a very inconvenient phone call it was her mother and she was calling to tell her that her father was dying and that she must come home immediately despite these dire circumstances my cousin would never return to Chicago's South Side she was a white woman now and there was simply no turning back now this is all that my family knows about this story so we can only imagine how her life unfolded we can only imagine how she must have felt knowing that her father was dying and that she would never see him again this had to have been a heartbreaking loss but this was not even the only loss that she would have experienced once she passed as white she was gone from the black community she would never go to another bud Billiken parade she would never smell the hot dogs that were sold at the parade she would never hear the sounds of the marching bands as they made their way through the park and she would never have the joy of sharing this experience with her own children so this story really stayed with me and I I've I've been wrestling with it ever since my aunt shared it with me and as a historian and as a scholar I've always kept history at arm's length that's what we're trained to do but I couldn't be dispassionate about this story I knew that as a historian I was supposed to be objective but I couldn't I couldn't let this story go it wouldn't let me go so I decided to write a history of racial passing now conventional wisdom says that you can't write a history of racial passing that there's no records because the people who passed were so careful to make sure that there was no trace of their transgression that they were careful to make sure that they couldn't be found but I believed that the sources were out there and I believed that they were waiting for historian to discover so I went out looking for ghosts I went into the archives looking for ghosts in the hopes that I could tell their story and what I found was that writing a history of passing is writing a history of loss now this doesn't quite make sense because it seems that to pass as white was to gain to be white particularly during the period of racial segregation meant to have a better job it meant to live in a better neighborhood it meant the right to vote it meant to enjoy countless social privileges everything from sitting at a better table in a restaurant or enjoying a more comfortable seat at a movie theater but what struck me was not so much what was gained by passing but rather what was lost by leaving an african-american identity behind so let me share one story with you from my research that I think elucidates this idea of loss and this is a story of a woman named Elsie Roxboro Elsie rocksboro was born into a storied african-american family but she chose to pass as white in 1937 after she graduated from the University of Michigan her story ends in tragedy she took her own life in 1949 the Roxboro family lived a life during the Great Depression that few Americans could imagine Elsie rode horses and drove her father's cars the family had maids and chauffeurs and they vacationed with other black elites at Idlewild a prestigious resort nicknamed the black Eden one family member said we knew times were hard out there we knew that there were people who were selling apples on the street corners but not our crowd we wore white linen jackets to Sunday school when Elsie arrived at the University of Michigan in 1933 she would become the first black woman to live in a dorm Elsie's friends described her as driven and ambitious Elsie had a beauty that few men black or white could resist she was tall and slender glamorous and vivacious the poet and novelist Langston Hughes admired her her classmate and the future playwright Arthur Miller called her a beauty the classiest girl in Ann Arbor Langston Hughes wrote that Elsie used to tell him her dreams and she used to wonder if maybe if she passed as white she might be able to achieve them more easily Elsie did decide to pass first she moved to California and then she moved to New York and once she arrived in New York she dropped the famous Roxboro name and became the unattached white but even as a white woman her dreams would not come true when L sees white roommate returned from a weekend trip she found LC in her bed it appeared that she had committed suicide LC sister could also pass as white so she traveled to New York with the wrenching assignment of claiming the body the arrival of this ostensible white sister allowed LC to remain white even in death LC had asked her father for financial help and he refused her and three days later she was dead LC sister would never talk to her father again I never expected to see myself in my research I did not choose a different racial identity but I have walked through a lot of loss in my life as I was writing this book I lost my marriage and the life that I had dreamed for myself I also lost so many loved ones who I cared about so deeply including two cousins who are like sisters to me and my dear aunt the Magnificent storyteller who had connected me so closely to my own family history and who had also told me the story of my cousin that would set my project on passing into motion and for the last thirteen years I have carried with me the loss of my sister who died of breast cancer at the age of 31 writing this book has been a profoundly painful and also emotional journey but perhaps it was my own experience with loss that helped me to see and to feel so keenly what the subjects in my book felt as I was writing about LC rocksboro I began to realize just how Universal the experience of loss is now certainly those people who passed as white it experience a very specific kind of loss a severing of family relationships and a wondering of what could have been at some point in each of our lives we all must walk away from something that we hold dear and when all that's left are the memories and the fragments we all wonder what could have been at some point in each of our lives we all reach out for someone or for something that is no longer there divorce and death are perhaps two of losses most painful iterations but we all experience many forms of loss there's the loss of moving away from home and knowing that you're never going back or moving away from home and knowing that even if you did go back it would never be quite the same so this is why I fell in love with history because no matter how far we look back we can always find a history that is so very close to our own no matter how far we look we can always find an image of ourselves and isn't that the beauty of history for once we realize just how common and just how universal the experience of loss is doesn't that make it so much easier to bear thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 112,947

Rating: 4.780899 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talk, ted x, stanford, race, tedx, ted talks, ted talk, african american history, racial passing, passing as white, TEDx, ted, history of race, Passing (Film Subject), illustrate, tedx talks, university, a chosen exhile

Id: CIulfoJPnq0

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Fri May 30 2014