Passing for White

More general readers may find Cinematic Identity to be a difficult text. The volume is well grounded in the feminist and queer theories of cultural studies, but this approach is most appropriate for a book in the Theory Out of Bonds Series by the University of Minnesota Press. Cindy Patton, a professor of women’s studies and sociology at Simon Fraser University, presents a nuanced and important analysis of the post World War II Hollywood social problem genre, focusing upon Pinky (1949).

Pinky, directed by Elia Kazan, who replaced John Ford on the production, tells the story of Pinky Johnson (played by white actress Jeanne Crain), a Southern black woman passing for white while attending nursing school in the North. Falling in love with a white doctor, she retreats to the South and the grandmother (Ethel Waters) who raised her. Her grandmother, Dicey Johnson, convinces Pinky to serve as a caretaker for the cantankerous Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore). The two women eventually form a bond, and when Miss Em dies, she leaves her estate to Pinky. Relatives contest the will, but Pinky wins her court case, using the estate to establish a nursing school for young black women and abandoning her marriage to the white doctor.

In addition to the film’s engagement with the emerging civil rights movement, Patton makes the case for the crucial role played by Pinky in the history of film censorship. The film was banned in Texas due to fears that its theme of miscegenation might provoke racial unrest. This was similar to the reasoning employed to limit exhibition of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Supreme Court decisions dealing with Pinky and Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (1948) overturned the court’s 1915 Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915) ruling that photodrama was entertainment rather than information and thus subject to state censorship.

Patton argues that this redefinition of film allowed Hollywood productions such as Pinky to play a role in expanding the definition of citizenship in post World War II America—a process of identity politics, which would eventually extend from African Americans to gays and lesbians. To understand “the other,” white heterosexual Americans would be able to “pass” through the medium of film and empathize with the pain and discrimination suffered by the outsider. Patton maintains that this process coincided with the emergence of “method” acting on the screen—a style of natural performance, which became accepted in melodramas such as Pinky. Thus, through the performance of Ethel Waters as Dicey Johnson, white audiences were able to identify with the black experience of oppression and embrace the legitimacy of civil rights legislation.

While the “passing” of white filmgoers produced a more liberal reading of citizenship, Patton asserts that fundamental power relationships were not altered. Rather than perceiving the structure of American capitalism and government at fault, only individual, not societal, adjustments were necessary. Referring to the method style of acting as promoting an American view of identity politics and sense of selfhood, Patton writes, “This milquetoast humanism promotes tolerance, but understands tolerance to be the property of white, Christian males who use it to reestablish their position as the Universal from which are distinguished the particulars who need to be tolerated (Blacks, Jews, eventually women, other ethnic groups, the aged and disabled, and, arguably, gays and lesbians)” (3).

Accordingly, Patton finds the post World War II social problem film, along with the development of method acting, to be essential elements for understanding how the nation sought to expand its definition of citizenship through identify politics, but without fundamentally altering power relationships. This is a sophisticated argument based upon Patton’s grasp of critical theory as well employment of film reviews to measure the reception of Pinky at its release.

Patton also makes insightful use of the Ethel Waters autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow (1951) to examine the boundaries between white and black space in the culture. But as a historian, one would like to see more...