Passing

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For other uses of the words pass or passing, see Pass.

Passing is a person's being regarded as a member of a social class other than his or her own, such as a different sex, race, or disability status, generally with the purpose of gaining social acceptance or of comporting with the person's own cultural or gender identity.

Etymologically, the term is simply a clipped form of the phrasal verb pass for or pass as, as in a counterfeit passing for the genuine article or an impostor passing as another person. It has been in popular use since at least the late 1920s.

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Sex

Passing describes a transgender person's ability to be accepted as their preferred sex, to have an appearance that causes one to be assumed by strangers to be a cisgendered man (for transmen) or woman (for transwomen). The term refers primarily to acceptance by people the individual does not know, or who do not know that the individual is transgender. Typically, passing involves a mix of physical sex cues, like hair style and clothing, as well as behavioral attributes, comportment and mode and style of interpersonal communication. For example, a person who is physically female and is attempting to pass as a cisgendered male may be dressed in men's clothing and walk in a masculine manner, but if they speak with a woman's voice or using a traditionally feminine speech pattern, they will not be accepted as a male.

The endeavor of trying to pass is most often practiced by transvestites and transsexuals. Because most performers, drag queens and those drag kings who consciously perform are open about their natal sex and are not actually trying to appear to be the opposite sex, they are not typically referred to as passing, even though some may be able to or may actually do so at other times. As RuPaul once said, "How many women do you know who wear seven inch heels, four foot wigs, and skintight dresses?"

Similarly, while most cross-dressers and transvestites who venture out into public areas do try to pass, unlike transsexuals, they do not (usually) undergo any permanent physical alterations or live full-time in order to make passing easier. They should be referred to with whatever gender-specific pronouns they wish, but they do not consider themselves the opposite sex or expect others to.

Conversely, almost all transsexuals will attempt to live and work as their preferred gender and be fully accepted as that sex rather than their natal sex. Therefore, passing is not just an option but is seen as a necessity. The majority who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery or who are past the transition stage do not usually refer to themselves as passing, since they now consider themselves to actually be that sex. Those who are completely accepted after transition often choose not to disclose their natal sex and instead live in stealth, a term used because they are so completely invisible within the population of their current sex.

Transgender people who do not describe themselves as either cross dressers/transvestites or transsexuals may have different attitudes towards passing. For example, they might not try to pass at all, they may send consciously mixed signals, or they might be able to pass but do not hide the fact that they are transgender. Personal views on passing and the desire or need to pass are independent of whether an individual has had medical treatment or changed their name or legal sex.

The failure to pass is called being read, being clocked, or being made. A person might say, "When I was out shopping, I could tell that sales girl read me, but she didn't say anything." However, even though a person may be read as being "cross-dressed," it is usually impossible to tell whether the person is actually a cross-dresser, or is actually a non-passing transsexual or another kind of transgender.

Compare the terms passing and stealth with in the closet, and being made or being read with being outed.

In the transgender community, those that pass may sometimes be viewed with jealousy by those that can not pass. Because of this, there may be a tendency for some of those who pass to avoid those that are easily read. There is the perception among many that when one person is read, anyone with that person will be assumed to be transgender by association. This is one reason why people living in stealth rarely if ever associate with other transgender people.

See also: List of transgender-related topics

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Race

Image:Grey Owl.jpgRacial or ethnic passing describes a member of a usually disadvantaged racial or ethnic group, and usually member of a minority, who is successfully accepted by others as a different race or ethnicity, especially in the case of a person of mixed race or ethnicity being accepted as a member of the racial or ethnic majority. It is usually used derisively and is not considered politically correct to aspire or attempt to pass, or to accuse another person of aspiring or attempting to pass. The term has, therefore, been used rarely in recent years.

As an example, civil rights leader Walter Francis White, the chief executive of the NAACP from 1929 until his death in 1955, was of mixed race; five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. When he went out on investigative assignments of lynchings and hate crimes he was forced to pass as white for his own safety. Other light-skinned persons, such as Lena Horne and Fredi Washington, refused the opportunity to pass.

Some darker-skinned people of European ancestry, such as the Greek-American musician Johnny Otis, or Jewish American musician Mezz Mezzrow, have chosen to pass as African Americans. Environmentalist Grey Owl was actually a white British man named Archibald Belaney, rather than a First Nations Canadian, as he presented himself to be. While it is extremely uncommon for dark-skinned Europeans to aspire to pass as African American, at some stages in history, some Caucasoid peoples living in the United States, who may have at one time or another been excluded from White-American society and categorized as non-Whites, allied themselves with African Americans and other races for common causes such as civil rights.

African Americans passing as whites in the United States brought the possibility of running afoul of anti-miscegenation laws in several states in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

If asked, most Americans today would say that they would consider it unlikely or even impossible ("genetically impossible," some would say) for a Black mother to have a White child.<ref>Naomi Zack, Thinking About Race (Belmont, CA, 1998), 116; Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York, 2000), 356.</ref> If pressed, some might admit that several generations of out-marriage to Whites might produce a child that superficially looks White, but that this would be an exceedingly rare occurrence.<ref>Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both (Cambridge, 1997), 247; Hilary Beckles, "Black Men in White Skins: The Formation of a White Proletariat in West Indian Society," The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, October (no. 15, 1986), 5-21; F. James Davis, Who is Black?: One Nation’s Definition (University Park PA, 1991), 13-34; Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971).</ref>

To a physical anthropologist such beliefs are nonsensical.<ref>Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York, 2000), 356; Naomi Zack, Thinking About Race (Belmont, CA, 1998), 5. It is nonsensical because it defines "racial" membership as intangible by definition. The notion of invisible Blackness, no matter how sincerely held, is a pre-enlightenment belief in an unseen and un-seeable world of heredity that is independent of genes.</ref> Only a dozen or so genes encode for the handful of physical traits that Americans consider "racially" important (skin tone, hair curliness, nose width, and the like).<ref>Curt Stern, Principles of Human Genetics, 3d ed. (San Francisco, 1973), 443-65; L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and W. F. Bodmer, The Genetics of Human Populations (Mineola NY, 1999), 527-31; Richard A. Sturm, Neil F. Box, and Michele Ramsay, "Human Pigmentation Genetics: The Difference is Only Skin Deep," BioEssays, 20 (1998), 712-21; B.K. Rana and others, "High Polymorphism at the Human Melanocortin 1 Receptor Locus," Genetics, 151 (no. 4, 1999), 1547-48; R.M. Harding and others, "Evidence for Variable Selective Pressures at MC1R," Journal of Human Genetics, 66 (no. 4, 2000), 1351; P.A. Kanetsky and others, "A Polymorphism in the Agouti Signaling Protein Gene is Associated with Human Pigmentation," American Journal of Human Genetics, 70 (2002), 770-75.</ref> Many studies have demonstrated that those few genes are so ephemeral that they can vanish in just two or three generations, producing physically European-looking individuals even from biracial parents.<ref>C. Stern, "Model Estimates of the Frequency of White and Near-White Segregants in the American Negro," Acta Genetica, 4 (1953), 281-98, 445-52; A.K. Kalla, "Inheritance of Skin Colour in Man," Anthropologist, Special Volume (1968), 158-68; G.A. Harrison and J.J.T. Owen, "Studies on the Inheritance of Human Skin Colour," Ann. Human Genetics, 28 (1964), 27-37; Caroline Bond Day and Earnest Albert Hooton, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1932); Melville J. Herskovits, The Anthropometry of the American Negro (New York: Columbia University, 1930).</ref> The mismatch between U.S. popular culture and genetic reality is of interest to anthropologists and historians because it demands explanation.<ref>Among scholars who have found this bizarre U.S. pre-enlightenment belief fascinating are:
Naomi Zack, Thinking About Race (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998)
Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1964)
Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000)
Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1977)
Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971)
Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980)
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1962)
Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both (Cambridge: Harvard university, 1997)
Hilary Beckles, "Black Men in White Skins: The Formation of a White Proletariat in West Indian Society," The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History October, no. 15 (1986): 5-21
F. James Davis, Who is Black?: One Nation's Definition (University Park PA: State University of Pennsylvania, 1991)
Neil Gotanda, "A Critique of 'Our Constitution is Color-Blind'," Stanford Law Review 44, no. 1 (1991): 1-68
Michael L. Blakey, "Scientific Racism and the Biological Concept of Race," Literature and Psychology 1999, no. 1/2 (1999): 29
Julie C. Lythcott-Haims, "Where Do Mixed Babies Belong-Racial Classification in America and Its Implications for Transracial Adoption," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 29 (1994): 531-58
Christine Hickman, "The Devil and the One Drop Rule," Michigan Law Review 95, no. 5 (1997): 1161-1265
David A. Hollinger, "Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States," American Historical Review 108, no. 5 (2003): 1363-90
Thomas E. Skidmore, "Racial Mixture and Affirmative Action: The Cases of Brazil and the United States," American Historical Review 108, no. 5 (2003): 1391-6
G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2002)
Joe R. Feagin, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York: Routledge, 2000)
Ian F. Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University, 1996)
David L. Brunsma and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, "What Does 'Black' Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization," Critical Sociology 28, no. 1/2 (2002): 101-121
Barbara Fields, "Of Rogues and Geldings," American Historical Review 108, no. 5 (2003): 1397-405
Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995)
Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California, 1990)
Debra J. Dickerson, The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon, 2004)
Luther Wright, Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review 48, no. 2 (1995): 513-70
Peter J. Aspinall, Collective Terminology to Describe the Minority Ethnic Population: The Persistence of Confusion and Ambiguity in Usage," Sociology 36, no. 4 (2002): 803-16
Phillip Gleason, "Minorities (Almost) All: The Minority Concept in American Social Thought," American Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1991): 392-424
Yu Xie and Kimberly Goyette, "The Racial Identification of Biracial Children with One Asian Parent: Evidence from the 1990 Census," Social Forces 76, no. 2 (1997): 547-70
James M. O'Toole, "Racial Identity and the Case of Captain Michael Healy, USRCS," Prologue: 'Quarterly of the National Archives & Records Administration 29, no. 3 (1997)
James E. DeVries, Race and Kinship in a Midwestern town: The Black Experience in Monroe, Michigan, 1900-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1984)
Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University, 1986)
Bijan Gilanshah, "Multiracial Minorities: Erasing the Color Line," Law and Inequality 12 (1993): 183
Maria P.P. Root, "Resolving 'Other' Status: Identity Development of Biracial Individuals," Women and Therapy 9 (1990): 185-205
Brooke Kroeger, Passing: When People Can't be Who They Are (New York: Public Affairs, 2003)
Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University, 1984).
</ref> No other country has anything like it.<ref>Scholars who have tried and failed to find a similar belief outside the United States include: Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge, 1977), 193; Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971), 101; Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980), 2; James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York, 1962), 19. To be sure, a few Old World castes are also based on invisible ancestry, rather than on genotype: the Harijans of India, the Burakumin of Japan. But such customs trace membership through one parent or the other, and are unrelated to African-European racialism.</ref> The most widely accepted explanation is that at some time in the past, Americans became so committed to the notion of "racial" purity implied by the U.S. endogamous color line that they turned their backs on the facts in favor of their odd fantasy. This is the consensus of the great majority of the scholars listed above. Examine this phenomenon in two sub-topics: first, the factual reality of Black-to-White passing; second, the literary rhetoric of Black-to-White passing.
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The Factual Reality of Black-to-White Passing

Nowadays (as of the 2000 census), between 35,000 and 50,000 young adults every year, who previously were identified by their parents as Black, switch to identifying themselves publicly as White or Hispanic.<ref>This section was adapted from "Chapter 5. The Rate of Black-to-White 'Passing'" of the book, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230, which contains the detailed citations and references. A summary of this chapter, with endnotes, is also available online at The Rate of Black-to-White 'Passing'. An excellent collection of essays advocating color line permeability (openly avowed Black-to-White passing) is available in the book, Passing for Who You Really Are: Essays in Support of Multiracial Whiteness by A.D. Powell, ISBN 0939479222.</ref> There are several ways of measuring this, but the most straightforward is simply to ask large numbers of people how they "racially" self-identify, repeat the question every few years, and then count how many changed their answer from "Black" to something else. The Departments of Labor and of Health and Human Services do precisely this (along with many other questions) in longitudinal studies meant to track life-long earnings and health, respectively, of large numbers of Americans. For example, the Department of Labor's NLS79 National Longitudinal Survey has interviewed 12,686 young men and women yearly since 1979 to measure their career progress. Each year they are asked the same hundred or so questions. Between 1979 (when they were 14 to 22 years old) and 1998, 1.87 percent of those who had originally answered "Black," switched to answering the interviewer's "race" question with either "White," "I don't know," or "other." This comes to 0.098 percent per year. Extrapolated to the Black census 2000 population of 36 million, this comes to about 35,000 individuals per year.

Another approach is to start with the 0.7 percent African admixture found in the White U.S. population today. Compared to other New World nations, the United States has been astonishingly successful at preserving two distinct genetic populations: one of mostly African ancestry, the other overwhelmingly European. All other New World nations that imported African slaves have unimodal Afro-European genetic admixture scatter diagrams. Indeed, two thirds of White Americans have no detectable African ancestry at all (other than the ancient African ancestry shared by all members of our species, of course). But one-third of White Americans do have detectable African DNA (averaging 2.3 percent) from ancestors who passed through the color line from Black to White. We can use this evidence to compute what the overall rate of U.S. Black-to-White passing must have been over the course of the past three centuries. The answer comes to about 0.1382 percent of the Black population per year. As of census 2000, this comes to about 50,000 individuals per year.

A third approach would be to use the Philadelphia rate at which European-looking children are born into the Black community (one out of every 500) and extrapolate this to the national Black yearly cohort.<ref>For detailed instructions on how to compute the rate at which European-looking children are born into Philadelphia's Black community, see Legal History of the Color Line ISBN 0939479230, p. 49-51 or The Heredity of 'Racial' Traits.</ref> This yields about 72,000 individuals per year as of census 2000. Most of these, of course, might choose not to switch.

Finally, Joel Williamson suggests yet another approach. It is based on the assumption that women are less likely than men to cross the color line permanently. Approximately equal numbers of male and female infants are born. But from age 16, millions of African-American men disappear from the census but women do not. In 2000, this came to 2.77 million individuals. Where did they go? The assumption of this method is that they redefined themselves as White. This approach yields 0.1019 percent per year or about 37,000 individuals per year as of census 2000.

Most Americans know that Black/White intermarriage has become more common since the Loving v. Virginia (1967) Supreme Court ruling that anti-intermarriage laws are unconstitutional. And most historians know that British North American intermarriage was far more common between 1607 and 1691 than in the centuries since it was first outlawed. So it is fair to ask whether the African DNA admixture found in White Americans today is merely the result of recent intermarriage or perhaps just an echo of the intermarrying 17th century, rather than evidence of the continual, steady passing of biracials into White society in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

There are three reasons to think that the African admixture found in today's White Americans is the result of an ongoing process and not the remnant of a one-time event, either recent or long ago. First, as mentioned above, longitudinal studies show that the current rate of openly avowed Black-to-White identity-switching would suffice to yield the observed admixture only if it had always been going on.

Second, Americans tend to label first-generation children of interracial marriages as "Black." Consequently, each such child introduces a half-person's worth of White genes into the Black community. If this White-to-Black gene flow that we know has been going on for 400 years (in the form of the children of interracial unions) had not been balanced by an equal Black-to-White flow, African Americans would have visually vanished by genetic assimilation, as did the Afro-Spanish and Afro-Portuguese by 1700, the Afro-Mexicans by 1800, and the Afro-Argentines by 1900.

The third argument comes from molecular anthropology. It comes from observing linkage disequilibrium. This term denotes the extent to which European and African genetic markers are randomly scattered throughout a person's DNA. The DNA of a first-generation biracial child (a child with one European parent and one Sub-Saharan, African parent) will have African markers in large clumps, separated from equally large clumps of European markers. But with each subsequent generation of intermarriage, the African and European markers become more mixed and scattered until, after several generations, they are thoroughly mixed. A recent one-time wave of intermarriage (since the 1955-65 civil rights movement, say) would result in uniformly high linkage disequilibrium in admixed Americans (clumped markers). This is not observed. An ancient one-time wave of intermarriage—as in the seventeenth century—would result in uniformly low linkage disequilibrium in admixed Americans (scattered markers). This is not observed either. An ongoing slow but steady Black-to-White genetic leakage across the color line for 400 years would result in a distinctive pattern of linkage disequilibrium distribution (clumps of every size occurring with equal frequency). This, in fact, is what is observed.

Some people are startled by what to them seems a high rate of Black-to-White endogamous-group switching over the past four centuries, a rate that is still going on. They ask, "how can so many people falsify their paper trail and cut all family ties like that?" First, a paper trail indicating "racial" identity was a transitory phenomenon in U.S. history, lasting only from about 1880 to about 1965. Most nineteenth-century births were not recorded on civil birth certificates, just with local churches. And since Alabama ended the practice in 1991, only five states (Connecticut, Hawaii, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas) put infant "race" on birth certificates today. Some states never did so, and most stopped doing so in the late 1960s. Similarly, neither driver's licenses nor voter registration cards record "racial" identity in most jurisdictions today. This is precisely why "racial" profiling is so controversial. In Florida, for example, neither the state voter registration web site nor the Flagler County voter registration card has any entry for "race," while the Alachua County card does. The few civil records today that capture one's "race" (jobs, school matriculation, etc) are voluntary. You can check off or write in whatever you want and, with one exception (EEOC claims), nobody questions it. If you look European and claim to be White, nobody cares.

As discussed below, Americans associate Black-to-White passing with deceit or pretense. It has been considered wicked or reprehensible for over a century. And yet, as far as anyone can tell, most of the individuals who redefine themselves from Black to White or Hispanic make no secret of their partial African ancestry. They just do not feel that this trivial fact should stop them from adopting a "racial" self-identity that matches their appearance. There is no need to "cut all family ties and walk away." In fact, given that all of the methods of estimating the rate of Black-to-White passing converge on the same 0.10-to-0.14 percent per year figure, legendary tales of "cutting all family ties" and deception more likely belong to the realm of fictional "passing" novels than to the reality of America's notoriously mobile society. (Except perhaps during the Jim Crow period and, even then, apparently only Whites were deceived regarding ongoing family contact.) As Maria P.P. Root put it, "It is not uncommon that many individuals emerge out of college years with a different resolution to their racial identity than when they graduated high school."

Even during the Jim Crow wave of White-on-Black terror and oppression, it was possible for Americans to pass through the color line via the maroon communities of the Cumberland Plateau.

Many communities of mixed genetic heritage are scattered throughout the eastern United States. They are called triracial isolate groups (the anthropological term), maroon communities (the historical term), or mestizos (the sociological term). All descend from Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans who escaped involuntary labor in colonial plantations and formed their own communities on the fringes of civilization. Millions of inhabitants of the Appalachian region in the eastern US self-identify ethnically as simply "Americans" in the last census. The first comprehensive survey of these groups listed:

Today, the two largest maroon communities are the Seminoles of Florida (a corruption of the Spanish word cimarrones or "runaways"), who were not in the original survey, and the Melungeons (the only large group to have self-identified as White over the centuries, rather than as Indians).

Most of the above names were derogatory epithets given by Whites, not self-labels adopted by the maroon communities themselves, and many still consider them offensive. In making the above list, it was reluctantly necessary to use the terms found in the anthropological literature.

The maroon communities are important to the study of people switching from Black to White across the color line because they may form a "racial escape hatch". In 1971, Carl Degler coined the term “mulatto escape hatch” to describe how Brazil differed from U.S. customs. According to Degler, White Brazilians enjoy the privileges of Whiteness, including that of looking down with disdain upon Black Brazilians. According to Degler, this “colorism” resembles White American customs during the Jim Crow era. On the other hand, most White Brazilians have Black parents or grandparents and are proud to acknowledge their fractional African ancestry. This is different from White American customs during the Jim Crow era. The U.S. tradition of hypodescent made it unlikely for any non-Hispanic of known African ancestry to be socially welcomed as White during the Jim Crow era. In Latin America, in contrast, generational acculturation and assimilation took place via intermarriage. Medium-brown offspring of even dark parents were no longer “Black,” but were labeled with any of a half-dozen terms denoting class as much as skin tone. Their European-looking descendants, in turn, were accepted as White.

Something similar may have operated in the United States during the Jim Crow era through the maroon communities. (Today's Melungeons, for instance, consider themselves White but are proud of their tiny—about 5 percent—African ancestry.) Three points suggest this. First, the groups have unusually high fractions of African genetic admixture for non-Black Americans. Second, inflow into the groups from those designated "free people of color" has been steady in years past. Third, outflow to the White mainstream has also been steady.

The point is that, although the U.S. color line has been far less permeable than any other Afro-European social barrier anywhere else on earth, it has not been perfect. And so, it is a straightforward task to compute the actual rate of Black-to-White passing over the past 400 years of American history—about 0.10-to-0.14 percent per year, or 35,000 individuals per year as of the 2000 census.

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The Literary Rhetoric of Black-to-White Passing

As mentioned above, Black-to-White passing is seen as reprehensible by most Americans today, but this was not always the case.<ref>This section was adapted from three different chapters of the book, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230, which contains the detailed citations and references. They are "Chapter 15. The Invention of the One-Drop Rule in the 1830s North," "Chapter 16. Why Did Northerners Invent a One-Drop Rule?," and "Chapter 20. Jim Crow Triumph of the One-Drop Rule." Summaries of these chapters, with endnotes, are available online at The Invention of the One-Drop Rule in the 1830s North, Why Did Northerners Invent a One-Drop Rule?, and Jim Crow Triumph of the One-Drop Rule, respectively.</ref> Attitudes towards the idea of someone redefining himself or herself as White despite having been born into the Black community changed around 1840 as a consequence of the 1830s invention of the one-drop rule. (See Who is African American?) This is because the concept of passing for white is an inseparable aspect of the one-drop rule. Cultures that lack a one-drop rule lack the idea of passing for white. Indeed, the very concept of passing for white is virtually unintelligible to people who were raised outside of the United States.

In this context, passing literature refers to novels, plays, or short stories in which a European-looking character pretends to be a member of the White endogamous group but is "really" on the Black side of the color line. All three elements are essential: (1) Some African ancestry, (2) predominantly European appearance, and (3) pretense or concealment. Stories about European slaves were not uncommon, even before the Reformation. But unless the character actually has some recent African ancestry, such stories are not of interest here. Similarly, an African slave who wears a mask or otherwise disguises as European-looking in order escape captivity does not fall within our scope—only characters who look European. Finally, the tale of a European who is accepted without pretense or concealment as fully White, even though everyone around knows of the person's publicly acknowledged African ancestry (like John James Audubon or Alessandro di Medici, say) is not a tale of passing in this context.

Passing literature can exist only within a readership market that accepts the one-drop rule. Cultures (such as Hispanic or Muslim societies), where a European-looking person with an African-looking grandparent is considered legitimately White, lack passing literature (as defined by the three above elements) because they lack a one-drop rule of invisible Blackness. We shall return to this when we contrast U.S. and Mexican cinematic adaptations of Fannie Hurst's novel, Imitation of Life. The earliest non-fictional usage of the concept of passing, as defined by the above three elements (African ancestry, European appearance, pretense) was in advertisements for runaway slaves.

The earliest fictional use of the three-part concept was in the French novel Marie; ou, L'Esclavage aux États-Unis [Marie; or, Slavery in the United States] (Paris: 1835) by Gustave de Beaumont. It is apparently the first passing novel ever published. <ref>An earlier example of passing in a different sense is Bug-Jargal (1826) by Victor Hugo, whose protagonist is an unscrupulous individual who passes as different races, nationalities, professions, and social classes as expediency dictates. It resembles the 2002 Dreamworks film "Catch Me if You Can," which was a remake of the 1961 film "The Great Imposter." The novel sheds no light on U.S. Black-to-White passing.</ref> Its narrator, Ludovic, falls in love with the title character, who turns out to have a touch of African ancestry through her Louisiana Colored Creole grandparent. The novel describes the racial intolerance of the North with such lines as:

Public opinion, ordinarily so indulgent to fortune-seekers who conceal their names and previous lives, is pitiless in its search for proofs of African descent.... There is but one crime, of which the guilty bear everywhere the penalty and the infamy; it is that of belonging to a family reputed to be of color.—Though the color may be effaced, the stigma remains. It seems as if men could guess it, when they could no longer see it. There is no asylum so secret, no retreat so secure as to conceal it.

Marie is interesting because the author does not agree with his own characters. The characters are immersed in a society that enforces the one-drop rule. The author, on the other hand, considers the notion to be an inexplicable Americanism. Marie's characters are portrayed as struggling for acceptance, not as engaging in malicious pretense. The novel was written by a Frenchman and published in France for a French readership. Its tone is that of "look at the bizarre customs of those strange Americans," rather than, "look at these people pretending to be White." Nevertheless, Marie is important because it is the first literary indication that a unique and unprecedented social ideology, the one-drop rule, had recently arisen in the United States.

The first two American-written novels about passing in the above sense are Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) by William Wells Brown and The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb. William Wells Brown was a former slave and an established author who had published the autobiographical Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave in 1847. Frank J. Webb, a freeborn African-American, was a newcomer to the reading public. The two novels differ in several ways.

Clotel is about slavery. Its protagonist (Thomas Jefferson's slave daughter) escapes captivity, passes for White in the North, but then returns to the South to rescue her own daughter and dies in the attempt. Most of the novel does not focus upon the pretense of Whiteness, but is instead a pastiche of slave tales culled from the author's own experiences, hearsay, journalism, and other fiction (including the acknowledged lifting of material from The Quadroons, an 1842 novel by Lydia Mary Child that is about miscegenation, not passing). Clotel lacks the unity customary to novels and seems disjointed to the modern reader. Nevertheless, it is the first known piece of literature depicting a society that considers Blackness to be an intangible trait. It is the first to portray people (both Black and White, it turns out) who believe that a European-looking person of undetectable African ancestry is a member of the Black endogamous group nonetheless. That the book was a success is persuasive evidence that most of its readers felt the same way.

The Garies and Their Friends is about life in freedom in the North, not about slavery in the South. Although it abounds in sub-plots (more than are customary in most modern novels), it is more tightly written than Clotel and its sub-plots either illuminate or advance the main narrative. The tale focuses on passing by its title couple, and its sub-plots depict different forms of passing (accidental, deliberate, through ignorance, etc.). Although it was published four years after Clotel, The Garies and Their Friends is credited by most scholars with inventing the literary theme of passing.

Clotel and The Garies and Their Friends are similar in that they were the first successful novels published by African-Americans, and yet they are almost universally ignored in Black studies departments today. This is because, as suggested above, their ideology is repellent to most modern African Americans. None of the characters who engage in passing in these two novels feels any guilt or remorse for the act. Some (usually delicate Victorian females like Clotel herself) sincerely want to be accepted as White. Others (usually defiant self-sacrificing Victorian men) consider it a justified deceit upon an unjust society. Modern critics see the characters' lack of guilt as a symptom of a "psychology of imitation and implied inferiority," and that it reveals the authors' "unconscious desire to be white" and "unabashed allegiance to Anglo-Saxon lineage." According to M. Giulia Fabi, the characters' lack of guilt "have had crippling repercussions on [the novels'] reception among scholars of African American literature to this day."

U.S. attitudes towards Black-to-White passing changed after the Civil War. The number of "passing" novels written by African-Americans soared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Although often set in the lower south, they were almost invariably written by northerners and, in contrast to antebellum passing novels, they invariably portray endogamous-group switching as morally reprehensible.

Among these are: Passing, of a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen about a light-skinned African-American woman posing as white (ISBN 0142437271). (See Nella Larsen for a discussion.) Jessie Redmon Fauset's novel Plum Bun of the same year and Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel Imitation of Life featured similar plots to Passing, and the latter was made twice into successful films by Universal Pictures, first in 1934, and later in 1959 (more about this later). A recent passing narrative is Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain (ISBN 0375726349) (2000).

To be sure, some characters, such as Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen's Passing, seem comfortable with their position on the White side of America's endogamous color line, but in the end, they receive their comeuppance for their transgression. (Students love to debate whether, in Passing's final dramatic scene, Clare accidentally fell to her death from the sixth-floor window, jumped in suicide, or was pushed by Irene Redfield, the heroine who refused to pass.) As one scholar explains it, "Passing for white has long been viewed as an instance of racial self-hatred or disloyalty. It is predicated, so the argument goes, on renouncing blackness—an 'authentic' identity, in favor of whiteness, an 'opportunistic' one."

The oddity is that class mobility and mobility among ethnic groups is a fundamental component of the "American Dream." If anything, the early twentieth century—the time of Horatio Alger stories and the assimilationist "melting pot" paradigm—saw heightened enthusiasm towards self-improvement. The notion of the "self-made man" was a fundamental component of the "American Dream." In point of fact, Americans born into the Black endogamous group were mobile. Black-to-White endogamous group mobility was and is a hallmark of American society. As explained above, the step has been taken by one African-American youngster out of every thousand in every year of the nation's history.

One would therefore expect critiques of the passing novel genre to notice that authors' hostility to group switching actually denigrates acceptance and embraces intolerance. As one scholar puts it, "The paradoxical coexistence of the cult of the social upstart as 'self-made man' and the permanent racial identification and moral condemnation of the racial passer as 'imposter' constitutes the frame within which the phenomenon of passing took place." The fact is that, since the turn of the 20th century, scholarly interpretations have almost universally supported the authorial consensus that switching from an African-American ethnic identity to, say Irish-American, Italian-American, or Hispanic, is akin to treason. As one exceptional analyst puts it, "Though assimilation is hardly an uncontested component of ethnic identity, the assimilated ethnic rarely faces the kind of hostility—either within the narrative itself or in the critical discourse surrounding it—faced by the passing character." As an educator of the time wrote in her diary, "the unwritten law was that Negroes should form a solid unit against the white man. ... Passing over to whites was regarded as betrayal."

The hatred and revulsion towards passing that was expressed by both Blacks and Whites of the early twentieth century is thought-provoking. You would think that color-line permeability would be embraced and encouraged by those wishing to oppose U.S. racialism. As one scholar puts it, "Understood in [the light of history], passing offers a problematic but potentially legitimate expression of American individualism, one that resists segregation's one-drop logic and thereby undermines America's consciously constructed ideology of racial difference." Apparently, however, this has not been the case in the United States since the Civil War.

Attitudes towards Black-to-White passing are different in other countries due to the lack of an endogamous color line. For example, the 1948 Mexican film "Angelitos Negros" was also a remake of Fannie Hurst's passing novel Imitation of Life. As mentioned above, the novel was filmed twice in the United States, in 1934 with Claudette Colbert and again in 1959 with Lana Turner. The 1948 Mexican version more closely reflects pre-one-drop attitudes that were common in the antebellum lower South, in the upper South and the North before 1829, and in other countries today. The U.S. versions of the film, in contrast, reflect the one-drop rule, which appeared in the North after 1830.

"Angelitos Negros," was directed by Joselito Rodriguez, starring Pedro Infante, Emilia Guiu, and Rita Montañer. The plot centers on a woman (Guiu), who does not know that she is actually the daughter of the maid (Montañer), who is visibly of part-African ancestry, and the wealthy European-looking landowner. Born blonde, she is brought up as the patron's daughter and never told the truth. Infante plays a famous, typically swarthy, Hispanic-looking singer who marries her. The crisis comes when their daughter is born with African features. She blames him and rejects the child. He raises the child on his own with the help of an Afro-Cuban female friend. In the end, the mother learns the truth of her own ancestry and the family is reconciled. According to Afro-Mexican director and scriptwriter Rodriguez, whose own daughter plays the child, the plot is based on the Fannie Hurst novel Imitation of Life.

Comparing Angelitos Negros with either U.S. version of Imitation of Life reveals why "passing" novels are unintelligible outside of the United States. In the American version of the story, the crisis comes when the "Sarah Jane" character faces a society (including her mother) who insist that she is "really Black." Her desperate attempts to re-define herself as White (she looks completely European, after all), drives her apart from her friends and family. The movie sees her as denying her "true heritage." After her mother's death she apparently comes to understand that she must be true to her "race," and abandon her life as a White woman to live among Blacks. This, in the United States, is presumably a happier ending than "living a lie," as one character puts it. The one-drop rule propoganda inherent in such an assumption belies all rational and quantifiable notions of racial classification.

In the Mexican version, no such issue ever arises. No one in the film is "really Black" or "really White." They are all Mexicans of varying degrees of genetic admixture. The crisis comes when a predominantly European-looking couple has a predominantly African-looking child. Something like this happens about once out of every eight thousand births in Spain and with slightly higher frequency in Mexico. The plot plays out as a crisis of social status, not one of personal identity. The movie's theme, of course, is the colorism in Mexican society that makes a dark-complexioned child less welcome than a blonde, blue-eyed child. But no character ever questions his or her personal identity. They are all Mexicans. Everyone in the story knows and accepts that they are all of mixed heritage.

Other recent passing narratives include: The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black by Gregory Howard Williams, and Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White by Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone are other non-fiction books on the topic. Also in non-fiction, Black Like Me is an account by journalist John Howard Griffin about his experiences as a Southern white man passing as a black in the late 1950s.

Pinky was a 1949 Oscar Award-winning film on the topic.

2004 the Wayans brothers featured in the movie White Chicks two black policemen who go undercover as two rich white girls, and are accepted by the white people they come into contact with, including the girls' friends.

Rock band Big Black released a song regarding this subject called Passing Complexion on their 1986 album Atomizer.

The 2000 TV movie A House Divided told the story of a mixed-race woman who was light-skinned enough to pass, but whose mother was a black slave. When the woman's white father attempted to will his property to his mixed-race daughter, the family ran afoul of local laws forbidding property ownership by blacks.

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Ability

In the disabled community, Passing describes those with "invisible disabilities" who can pass for able-bodied: for example those with autism, hearing impairments or depression-spectrum illnesses, as compared with those who have facial disfigurements, motor impairments (cerebral palsy) or paraplegia.

There is a certain amount of rivalry between passing and non-passing groups in the various communities. Disabled persons who can pass are viewed as having advantages that those who don't pass do not have -- less discrimination and public attention. This can lead to a view that they are not "properly disabled." Conversely, in many parts of the world, funding and care is less available for invisible disabilities. For example, Medicare in the U.S. provides much less funding for mental than physical disabilities.

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Footnotes

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See also

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