Passing (racial identity)

United States

Passing for white

Although anti-miscegenation laws outlawing racial intermarriage existed in the North American Colonies as early as 1664, there were no laws preventing or prosecuting the rape of enslaved girls and women. Rape of slaves was legal and encouraged during slavery to increase the slave population. As a result, for generations, enslaved women (who might also be mixed-race) bore mixed-race children who were deemed "mulattos", "quadroons", "octoroons", or "hexadecaroons" based on their percentage of "black blood".

Although these mixed-race people were often half White or more, institutions of hypodescent and the 20th-century one drop rule in some states – particularly in the South – classified them as black and therefore, inferior, particularly after slavery became a racial caste. But there were other mixed-race people who were born in colonial Virginia among the working class to unions or marriages between free white, almost exclusively Irish, women and African or African-American men, free, indentured, or slave, and became ancestors to many free families of color in the early decades of the United States, as documented by Paul Heinegg in his Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.{{Cite book|title=Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware|url=https://www.freeafricanamericans.com/|access-date=2023-01-24 | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20100807191511/http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/ | archive-date= 7 August 2010

For some people, passing as White and using their whiteness to uplift other black people was the best way to undermine the system that relegated black people to a lower position in society. These same people that were able to pass as white were sometimes known for leaving the African American community and getting an education, later to return and assist with racial uplifting. Although the reasons behind the decision to attempt to pass are deeply individual, the history of African Americans passing as white can be categorized by the following time periods: the antebellum era, post-emancipation, Reconstruction through Jim Crow, and present day.

Antebellum United States

During the antebellum period, passing as white was a means of escaping slavery. Once they left the plantation, escaped slaves who could pass as white found safety in their perceived whiteness. To pass as white was to pass as free. However, once they gained their freedom, most escaped slaves intended to return to blackness—passing as white was a temporary disguise used to gain freedom. Once they had escaped, their racial ambiguity could be a safeguard to their freedom. If an escaped slave was able to pass as white, they were less likely to be caught and returned to their plantation. If they were caught, white-passing slaves such as Jane Morrison could sue for their freedom, using their white appearance as justification for emancipation.

Post-emancipation

Post-emancipation, passing as white was no longer a means to obtain freedom. As passing shifted from a necessity to an option, it fell out of favor in the black community. Author Charles W. Chestnutt, who was born free in Ohio as a mixed-race African American, explored circumstances for persons of color in the South after emancipation, for instance, for a formerly enslaved woman who marries a white-passing man shortly after the conclusion of Civil War. Some fictional exploration coalesced around the figure of the "tragic mulatta", a woman whose future is compromised by her being mixed race and able to pass for white.

From Reconstruction through Jim Crow

During the Reconstruction era, black people slowly gained some of the constitutional rights of which they were deprived during slavery. Although they would not secure "full" constitutional equality for another century until after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, reconstruction promised African Americans legal equality for the first time. Abolishing slavery did not abolish racism. During Reconstruction whites tried to enforce white supremacy, in part through the rise of Ku Klux Klan chapters, rifle clubs and later paramilitary insurgent groups such as the Red Shirts.

Passing was used by some African Americans to evade segregation. Those who were able to pass as white often engaged in tactical passing or passing as white in order to get a job, go to school, or to travel. Outside these situations, "tactical passers" still lived as black people, and for this reason, tactical passing is also referred to as "9 to 5 passing." The writer and literary critic Anatole Broyard saw his father pass in order to get work after his Louisiana Creole family moved north to Brooklyn before World War II.

This idea of crossing the color line at different points in one's life is explored in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. But the narrator closes the novel by saying "I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage", meaning that he regrets trading his blackness for whiteness. The idea that passing as white was a rejection of blackness was common at the time and remains so to the present time.

African-American people also chose to pass as whites during Jim Crow and beyond. For example, United States civil rights leader Walter Francis White conducted investigations in the South during which he passed as white to gather information on lynchings and hate crimes, and to protect himself in socially hostile environments. White, who was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and had a light complexion, was of mixed-race, mostly European ancestry. Twenty-seven of White's 32 great-great-great-grandparents were white; the other five were classified as black and had been slaves. White grew up with his parents in Atlanta in the black community and identified with it. He served as the chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 until his death in 1955.

In the 20th century, Krazy Kat comics creator George Herriman, a Louisiana Creole cartoonist born to mulatto parents, passed as white throughout his adult life. Around this time, those who passed as white were referred to through French Creole slang as passant (passing) à blanc or pour blanc (as white).

The aforementioned 20th-century writer and critic Anatole Broyard was a Louisiana Creole who chose to pass for white in his adult life in New York City and Connecticut. He wanted to create an independent writing life and rejected being classified as a black writer. In addition, he did not identify with northern urban black people, whose experiences had been much different from his as a child in New Orleans' Creole community. He married an American woman of European descent. His wife and many of his friends knew he was partly black in ancestry. His daughter Bliss Broyard did not find out until after her father's death. In 2007, she published a memoir that traced her exploration of her father's life and family mysteries entitled One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets.

From 2000 to the present

Passing as white is more controversial in the 21st-century because it is frequently seen as being a rejection of blackness, family and culture. In August 2021, Black writer for Steven Universe Future and Craig of the Creek, Taneka Stotts, told Insider that often Black and brown characters in animation exist ambiguously, calling this a "White passing narrative...where the narrative is written in a way that it's white-passing enough to get past your executives and the powers that be." Mae Catt, a queer Asian-American writer for Young Justice, added that when shows are not run or written by people of color, Black characters are "surface decoration" with racial representation going "very similarly to queer representation" as the cultural identity of characters is not shown, with an "unspoken implicit destructive bias" that their behavior is "correct," behavior that is "inevitably white."

Australia

Edward Stirling, one of the early British settlers in South Australia, was the illegitimate child of a Scottish slaveholder in Jamaica and an unidentified woman of colour. Financed by his father's slave compensation, he passed as Scottish after arriving in Australia and became one of the colony's wealthiest individuals. He and his sons Lancelot and Edward Charles Stirling were all members of parliament.

Leslie Joseph Hooker, the founder of one of Australia's real estate firms LJ Hooker, concealed his Chinese ancestry during his lifetime, including changing his birth surname of Tingyou.{{cite Australian Dictionary of Biography|id2=hooker-sir-leslie-joseph-10537|title= Sir Leslie Joseph Hooker (1903–1976)|year=1996|volume=14|first=Peter|last=Spearritt}}

Similarly to the African-American practice, many Aboriginal Australians have passed as white to avoid legal and social discriminations. In the iconic autobiography My Place, a central theme is Sally Morgan, whose family passed as Indians, discovering her Aboriginal heritage.

Germany

For Jews in Nazi Germany, passing as "Aryan" or white (in the context of Nazi racial theory) and non-Jewish was a means of escaping persecution. There were three ways to avoid being shipped off to the death camps: run, hide or pass. No option was perfect, and all carried the risk of getting caught. People who could not run away but wanted to maintain a life without hiding attempted to pass as "Aryan." People who were "visibly Jewish" could try to alter their appearance to become "Aryan", while other Jewish people with more ambiguous features could pass into the "Aryan" ideal more easily. In these attempts to pass as "Aryan", Jewish people altered their appearance by dyeing their hair blonde and even attempting to reverse circumcisions. Edith Hahn Beer was Jewish and passed as "Aryan"; she survived the Holocaust by living with and marrying a Nazi officer. Hahn Beer wrote a memoir called: The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust. Another such example is Stella Kübler, a Jewish collaborator who initially attempted to hide her Jewish background.

There are also examples of the opposite: some persons such as Misha Defonseca, Laurel Rose Willson or the author who wrote Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood falsely claimed to be Jewish Holocaust survivors after 1945.

Canada

Examples of racial passing have been used by people to assimilate into groups other than European. Marie Lee Bandura, who grew up as part of the New Westminster Indian Band in British Columbia, was orphaned and believed she was the last of her people. She moved to Vancouver's Chinatown, married a Chinese man, and raised her four children believing they were Chinese and French. One day she told her daughter Rhonda Larrabee about her heritage: "I will tell you once, but you must never ask me again." Marie Lee Bandura had chosen to hide her roots due to the prejudice she faced.

References

Notes

Further reading

• Brune, Jeffrey A., and Daniel J. Wilson (eds.), Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013.
• Crary, David (November 4, 2003). "Passing for White Not a Relic of the Past". The Gainesville Sun (Gainesville, Florida). Associated Press.
• Davenport, Lauren. 2020. "The Fluidity of Racial Classifications". Annual Review of Political Science.
• Dahis, Ricardo, Emily Nix, Nancy Qian. 2019. "Choosing Racial Identity in the United States, 1880–1940". NBER Working Paper No. 26465.
• De Micheli, D. (2020). "Racial Reclassification and Political Identity Formation". World Politics.
• Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (1997). "The Passing of Anatole Broyard". Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. New York: Random House. pp. 180–214. The life story of a famous writer, whose family was Louisiana Creole (whom Gates labels black), who passed as white for most of his adult life in the Northeast.
• Definitions and examples, history, famous cases and a look at the theme in works of fiction.
• A variety of ways to "pass".

References

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4. (1992). "Passing for White, Passing for Black". Transition.
5. (2014). "A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life". Harvard University Press.
6. "The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s". University of Vermont Journal of American History.
7. (2008). "Reconstruction: People and Perspectives". ACB-CLIO, Inc..
8. (2011). "The Colors of Zion". Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
9. (1912). "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man". Sherman, French, & Company.
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11. Williams, Scotty. (2023-04-18). "The Creole Collection: Odes to Ancestral Childhood".
12. Martin, Gilbert E.. (1993). "Passé Pour Blanc (passed for White): Creole Secrets". Mandingo Press.
13. (August 31, 2021). "LGBTQ characters of color are making animation history — but creatives of color can't escape the industry's discriminatory past".
14. Robertson, Beth M.. (2022). "Edward Stirling: Embodiment and beneficiary of slave-ownership". Australian Journal of Biography and History.
15. "LJ Hooker's Chinese roots". ChineseAustralia.org.
16. Barlow, Karen. (2005-10-28). "Justice Spigelman calls for pride on Indigenous ancestry". Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
17. (2017). "Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany". University of Michigan Press.
18. (2017). "Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany". University of Michigan Press.
19. (2009). "A Tribe of One". [[National Film Board of Canada]].
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21. (June 10, 1996). "White Like Me".
22. (November 21, 2017). "My mother spent her life passing as white. Discovering her secret changed my view of race - and myself".
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25. Green, Penelope. (11 January 2024). "Alice Mason, Real Estate Fixer and Hostess to the Elite, Dies at 100".
26. (July 28, 2017). "The Fascinating Old Hollywood Story That Inspired The Last Tycoon's Best Plotline".
27. Hauke, Kathleen A.. (Spring 1984). "The "Passing" of Elsie Roxborough". Michigan Quarterly Review.