Harvard Club of Washington, DC: A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life w/ Allyson Hobbs AB '97 FREE

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life w/ Allyson Hobbs AB '97 FREE

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. A book-signing follows the program.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as historian Allyson Hobbs titled her book, 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 reaped benefits, expanded opportunity, and loss. A book-signing follows the program.

Allyson Hobbs received her AB in Social Studies (magna cum laude) from Harvard, and this book is being published by the Harvard Press.