Race in America: A Reading from New Nonfiction

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. Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community.  In A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press), Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, presents a revelatory history of passing, which explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

Formerly the associate director of media relations at the Vanderbilt athletic department and the first-ever media relations manager for the Tampa Bay Rays, Andrew Maraniss is now a partner at McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations. He is the author of Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South (Vanderbilt University Press). Based on more than eighty interviews, this fast-paced, richly detailed biography of Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the SEC, digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated and profound story of sports pioneering than we've come to expect from the genre. Perry Wallace's unusually insightful and honest introspection reveals his inner thoughts throughout his journey.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson worked for years as a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine, and The New Republic. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. Her latest book, a memoir, is Negroland (Pantheon), a meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author’s rarefied upbringing and education among the black elite. Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society—a small segment of America known as “Negroland.” Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America—Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Flavorwire calls it, “one of the truly indispensable books of 2015."