Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010

11. Consuming Performances: Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure

283 11 Consuming Performances Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure Meredith McCarroll The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production. —Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” For I found the greatest difficulty for a Negro writer was the problem of revealing what he truly felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel. —Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act In “The New Black Aesthetic” (1989), novelist and scholar Trey Ellis writes about “cultural mulattoes” who are phenotypically black but are culturally white enough to “navigate easily in the white world” (189).1 Employing terms at home in the concurrently rising multiracial move‑ ment, he writes: “Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cul‑ tural mulatto, educated by a multiracial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world. . . . We no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people or black” (235). Central to Ellis’s optimism 284 / Meredith McCarroll regarding cultural mulattoes is his presumption of agency from within a hybrid borderland of black and white. The new cultural mulatto, unlike mulattoes of the past, would arguably have the ability to cross borders and speak freely from, as Arjun Appadurai phrases it, an “imagined world.” They would function as—in Ellis’s terms—“thriving hybrids” instead of “neutered mutations” (201) that history had made them to be.They would, in other words, easily inhabit the transgressive realm of a “third race.”2 Over the last few decades, theorists such as Paul Gilroy, Arjun Appadurai, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Donna Haraway have imagined such a transgressive space between boundaries as well as a subject position from within the margin that maintains sufficient agency and vocality to disrupt the seem‑ ingly natural dichotomy in which two sides (here, black and white) depend upon one another to exist.3 However, although these cultural mulattoes would define themselves outside of the traditional binaric racial system, they would not—as the term itself suggests—fall outside of the history of race in the United States.4 Indeed, even to use the phrase “cultural mulatto” is to evoke the history of (genetic) mulattoes in America, and to reclaim their often tumultuous social position(s).5 In its echoing of the term tragic mulatto, the cultural mulatto also awakens the never‑quite‑sleeping monster of miscegenation and, along with it, the troublesome issue of racial passing. Racial passing, of course, has a long and varied history. In her reading of Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Passing of Grandison,” Martha J. Cutter summarizes this history nicely:“[F]rom a historical perspective the term ‘passing’ has such plasticity of meaning that it can connote a whole range of behaviors and ideolo‑ gies that may be complicit or subversive, enslaving or freeing, hegemonic or transgressive” (note 1, 48). A more specific, if generic, understanding of the term, however, situates it within the historical black/white racial dichotomy: “ ‘Passing’ is used most frequently, however, as if it were short for ‘passing for white,’ in the sense of ‘crossing over’ the color line in the United States from the black to the white side” (Sollors 247).6 In this most common form, passing relies on both the subject’s intent and the audience’s reception.That is, the passing subject needs both the phenotypic ability and, in any intentional act of passing, the desire to be read as white, while the audience must read or interpret that person’s performance as an embodiment of whiteness, usually without being aware that an act of interpretation has even occurred. The interpretation of the performance relies upon a belief in essentialized blackness and whiteness, categories separated by a racial line that can be crossed, regardless of whether that Consuming Performances /   285 crossing is understood as a transgression, a betrayal, a crime, a joke, or a liberation. Because of Jim Crow segregation, passing from black to white often historically provided literal access to de jure white (physical and cultural) spaces; however, in exchange, passers usually forfeited their asso‑ ciation with blackness and with black spaces for that access.7 Theoretically, post–Jim Crow, entering into a once racially sanctioned space is easier: without...