Passing (racial identity)
The phenomenon of "passing" describes an individual's decision to conceal their true racial or ethnic identity and adopt another, often for acceptance, safety, or opportunity. This complex act of self-reinvention is a profound testament to how deeply societal norms can influence personal identity. It reveals the extraordinary lengths people have gone to navigate, and sometimes escape, the rigid social structures and prejudices of their time. Historically, passing in the United States was often a perilous survival strategy for Black individuals, enabling escape from slavery, segregation, and pervasive discrimination. The decision to pass was deeply personal, driven by a complex mix of fear, ambition, and a desire to uplift one's community, yet often came with the heavy cost of severed family and cultural ties. Stories of passing transcend geographical and historical boundaries, reflecting universal themes of identity, belonging, and the often-painful construction of self in the face of societal prejudice.
AI Summary
The phenomenon of "passing" describes an individual's decision to conceal their true racial or ethnic identity and adopt another, often for acceptance, safety, or opportunity. This complex act of self-reinvention is a profound testament to how deeply societal norms can influence personal identity. It reveals the extraordinary lengths people have gone to navigate, and sometimes escape, the rigid social structures and prejudices of their time.
- Historically, passing in the United States was often a perilous survival strategy for Black individuals, enabling escape from slavery, segregation, and pervasive discrimination.
- The decision to pass was deeply personal, driven by a complex mix of fear, ambition, and a desire to uplift one's community, yet often came with the heavy cost of severed family and cultural ties.
- Stories of passing transcend geographical and historical boundaries, reflecting universal themes of identity, belonging, and the often-painful construction of self in the face of societal prejudice.
The Shifting Sands of Identity
At its core, racial passing is about perception—how one is seen versus how one truly identifies. Historically, especially in the United States, it primarily described a Black person adopting a white identity to gain societal advantages or avoid severe disadvantages like racial segregation and discrimination. This often meant severing ties with their family and community, stepping into a life that was both safer and profoundly isolated.
The One-Drop Rule
For centuries, the American South codified racial identity with brutal simplicity through concepts like 'hypodescent' and the 'one-drop rule'. This meant that even a single ancestor of African descent, or 'one drop of Black blood,' classified a person as Black, regardless of their appearance or how much white ancestry they possessed. This rule legally designated many mixed-race individuals, some of whom were half white or more, as Black and thus, inferior.
A Path to Freedom: Antebellum Era
During the antebellum period, before the Civil War, passing offered a desperate route to freedom. Enslaved individuals who could pass as white might escape plantations, their perceived whiteness acting as a temporary disguise. Once free, their racial ambiguity could be a vital safeguard, lessening the chance of capture and re-enslavement. Some even used their white appearance to sue for freedom, as seen in cases like Jane Morrison.
Post-Emancipation Choices
After emancipation, passing transformed from a desperate necessity to a complex, often fraught, choice. The Black community began to view it with more mixed feelings, sometimes as a rejection. This era also saw the rise of the 'tragic mulatta' trope in literature—a mixed-race woman whose ability to pass for white paradoxically led to a life of sorrow and alienation, unable to find true belonging in either world.
Tactical Passing: Jim Crow Era
Despite the abolition of slavery, the Reconstruction era brought new forms of white supremacy, particularly through the rise of Jim Crow laws, which enforced strict racial segregation. During this period, many African Americans engaged in 'tactical passing' or '9 to 5 passing'—adopting a white identity specifically for work, education, or travel. Outside these situations, they returned to their Black lives and communities, navigating a double existence to survive.
Beyond Survival: Activism and Personal Ambition
Passing wasn't always just about personal survival; it could also serve a greater purpose. Civil rights leader Walter Francis White, who was largely European in ancestry with blond hair and blue eyes, famously passed as white to conduct dangerous investigations into lynchings and hate crimes in the Jim Crow South. He used his perceived whiteness as a shield while gathering crucial information, all while identifying strongly with the Black community he led as head of the NAACP.
For others, passing was a deeply personal choice to escape racial classification entirely. Cartoonist George Herriman, creator of 'Krazy Kat,' lived his adult life passing as white, concealing his Louisiana Creole heritage. Similarly, writer Anatole Broyard, also a Louisiana Creole, chose to pass as white in New York, seeking an independent writing career unburdened by racial labels, a decision explored posthumously by his daughter in her memoir.
Modern Reflections and Rejections
In the 21st century, the concept of passing remains controversial and is often seen as a rejection of Blackness, family, and culture. Contemporary discussions in media, particularly animation, examine 'white-passing narratives' where characters of color are depicted ambiguously. Critics argue this allows executives to sidestep genuine racial representation, portraying characters whose behavior is implicitly 'white,' rather than reflecting authentic cultural identities.
Global Narratives of Passing
Australia: Concealed Heritages
The act of passing is not unique to the United States. In Australia, many Aboriginal Australians have passed as white to evade legal and social discrimination. A notable example is Edward Stirling, an early British settler and politician, who was the illegitimate son of a Scottish slaveholder and a woman of color in Jamaica, passing as Scottish to become wealthy in the colony.
Similarly, Leslie Joseph Hooker, founder of the prominent real estate firm LJ Hooker, concealed his Chinese ancestry throughout his life, even changing his birth surname. These stories highlight how deeply interwoven racial identity and social status have been in settler nations, forcing individuals to shed their heritage for opportunity.
Germany: Survival in the Holocaust
During Nazi Germany, passing as 'Aryan' or non-Jewish was a perilous means of survival for Jewish people. Those who couldn't flee or hide attempted to alter their appearance—dyeing hair blonde or even attempting to reverse circumcisions—to blend in. Edith Hahn Beer, a Jewish woman, survived the Holocaust by successfully passing as Aryan and even marrying a Nazi officer, a harrowing tale documented in her memoir.
Canada: Indigenous Identity Concealment
In Canada, stories of racial passing also emerge from Indigenous communities. Marie Lee Bandura, orphaned and believing she was the last of her people, moved to Vancouver's Chinatown and raised her children as Chinese and French. She chose to hide her Indigenous roots due to pervasive prejudice, only revealing her heritage to her daughter once, with the strict instruction never to ask again, underscoring the pain and secrecy passing often entailed.
Passing in Popular Culture
Literature: Unpacking the Complexities
The theme of racial passing has captivated authors for centuries, offering rich ground to explore identity, belonging, and societal prejudice. From Mark Twain's scathing satire 'The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson' (1894), where a slave switches her biracial baby with a white child, to James Weldon Johnson's 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man' (1912), which depicts a biracial man choosing a white life after witnessing a lynching, these stories delve into the profound costs of such a decision.
Nella Larsen's 1929 novella 'Passing' famously explores the contrasting lives of two biracial women—one who passes for white and marries into white society, and another who lives openly in the Black community. More recently, Brit Bennett's 2020 novel 'The Vanishing Half' further examines this generational impact, chronicling twin sisters, one of whom leaves her family to pass as white, highlighting the enduring relevance of these narratives.
Film: Visualizing the Divide
Cinema has brought the emotional turmoil of passing to vivid life. The classic 1934 film 'Imitation of Life,' and its 1959 remake, feature the character Peola (later Sarah Jane), a light-skinned girl who rejects her darker-skinned mother to pass as white. Films like 'Lost Boundaries' (1949) and 'Pinky' (1949) depict characters who build entire lives passing for white, only to face devastating exposure.
Modern adaptations, such as Rebecca Hall's 2021 film 'Passing'—based on Nella Larsen's novel and inspired by Hall's own family history—continue to explore the psychological weight and societal implications of this choice. These films powerfully illustrate the visual cues and social anxieties surrounding racial identity, challenging audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about perception and privilege.
Television: Interrogating Identity on the Small Screen
Television has also engaged with passing, bringing these narratives into millions of homes. In the 1968 soap opera 'One Life to Live,' the character Carla Gray was initially introduced as Italian-American before being revealed as the daughter of a Black maid, sparking national debate. Sitcoms like 'The Jeffersons' tackled the topic with a character's son choosing to pass for white while traveling in Europe.
More pointedly, Eddie Murphy's iconic 'White Like Me' sketch on 'Saturday Night Live' (1984) humorously exposed racial disparities by showing what happens when a Black man 'passes' as white. Documentaries like 'Black. White.' (2006) pushed boundaries further, using makeup to transform families across racial lines, offering a firsthand, albeit manufactured, experience of living in another race's skin and revealing ingrained biases.
Article
Passing (racial identity)
Anita Florence Hemmings, the first African-American woman of mixed ancestry to graduate from Vassar College, passed as white for socioeconomic reasons.
Passing, in the context of race, occurs when one conceals their socially applied racial identity or ethnicity in order to be perceived as another race for acceptance and other benefits. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a person of mixed race who has assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social consequences of racial segregation and discrimination. In the Antebellum South, passing as White was sometimes a temporary disguise used as a means of escaping slavery, which had become a racial caste.
United States
Passing for white
James Weldon Johnson, author of the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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.
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 had blond hair, blue eyes and 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.
Australia
Passing (racial identity)
Edward Stirling
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.
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.
Canada
Passing (racial identity)
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.