Passing as Identity Crisis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Megan Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Social Strategy ◽  
Authentic Identity ◽  
Racial Ambiguity ◽  
Harry Belafonte ◽  
Psychological Disability

This chapter examines how passing in Hollywood films that were produced in the late 1950s changed from being represented as an accepted external social strategy to one that reflected a psychologically motivated identity crisis. This is evident in films like Island in the Sun and Imitation of Life, which were portrayed as a pathological psychological failure to accept an imagined authentic identity. The chapter attributes this shift to a change in attitudes toward passing as the civil rights movement, the rise of black stars including Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge, post-passing narratives, and the psychoanalytic turn in Hollywood redefined how Americans understood race. It suggests that passing evolved into a sign of a deeper internal psychological disability and became marginalized and relegated to unsympathetic and/or supporting characters. It also considers how anxiety about racial ambiguity was framed as a crisis about sexual deviance and masculinity.

Southern Projections: Black Television Hosts, Madison Avenue, and Nationalizing the South in 1950s Primetime

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642098009
Author(s):  
Phoebe Bronstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The South ◽  
Network Television ◽  
Madison Avenue ◽  
National Network ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Television Content ◽  
Harry Belafonte

This article situates Nat King Cole’s NBC experience within those of Hazel Scott and Harry Belafonte, whose own programs bookended the first decade of television. While Scott was blacklisted and her Dumont show canceled, the brief primetime stints of Cole and Belafonte on national network television, reveal a shifting rhetoric surrounding the policing of blackness on TV that focused blame on the South. The South, then, became a convenient rhetorical device in the rejection of Black national television content. This article follows these two parallel yet interlocking threads, with the first section detailing the rise of national television in conversation with the South and the deflection of racism onto the region—an easy representational task amidst news coverage of the civil rights movement. The latter portion of the article follows a genealogy of Black hosted variety programs and Black televisual resistance from Scott to Cole and Belafonte.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
North American ◽  
The North ◽  
The U.S

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

Innovation by Political Outsiders

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Communication Goals ◽  
Print Era ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

This chapter explores communication innovations made by American social movements over time. These movements share political communication goals and outsider status, which helps to connect innovation decisions across movements and across time. The chapter primarily explores two long-lasting movements. First is the women’s suffrage movement, which lasted over seventy years of the print era from the mid-nineteenth century until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Next is the long-lasting fight against racial discrimination, which led to the modern civil rights movement starting in the print era, but coming of age along with television during the 1950s and 1960s. Both the women’s suffrage movement and civil rights movement utilized innovative tactics with similarly mild results until mainstream coverage improved. Finally, these historical movements are compared with movements emerging during the internet era, including the early Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Resist movement.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

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