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

2. On the Margins of a Movement: Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs

39 2 On the Margins of a Movement Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs Irina Negrea I am a black American with white skin, an African American with both African and European ancestors. Thus, I live a life that is often disjointed, troubling. I also see the world in a different way. There is something about living on the margins of the race that gives me a unique view of the categories “black” and white, that presents a differ‑ ent picture of white Americans and black Americans. For my position does not allow me the luxury of thinking that the notion of race makes any sense . . . my existence unsettles expectations of “race.” —Judy Scales‑Trent, Notes of a White Black Woman Like the history of race in the United States, racial passing is usually messy, much messier than the growing body of scholarship on the phenomenon has yet addressed. Scholars such as Elaine K. Ginsberg,Wer‑ ner Sollors, and Gayle Wald, among others, have laid a sound foundation and acknowledged how passing is, in fact, a double‑edged sword: the act undermines racial categories so that white supremacists cannot claim whiteness as an exclusive property, but passing also undergirds those same racial categories by documenting how light‑skinned “blacks” who choose to live as white reify the racial boundaries that their passing exposes as socially constructed.1 In other words, passers stress the faults in the system 40 / Irina Negrea precisely by relying on and perpetuating the hegemonic power of white‑ ness: their existence as “both” gives lie to the mutual exclusivity of racial identity categories, and the fact that they choose to live as white undermines the idea of biologically determined race, but their choice to live exclusively as white still tacitly empowers (them and) the very system that would otherwise oppress them and that continues to oppress darker‑skinned family members. Furthermore, since the act of passing requires secrecy, its power to subvert racial categories is visible only when the passer is made visible, either to a community or to a reader. Because the strategy of passing itself depends upon not being visible, then, we can never know the actual number of people involved in pass‑ ing.2 However, the plethora of accounts of passing—in fiction, journalism, memoir, and film—over the last 160 years underscores its significance as a means of coping with and negotiating racial inequities and racism in the United States. Despite both its historical longevity and its continuing tenacity, the act of passing lacks clear‑cut edges or definitions. However, it is perhaps because of its malleability that the trope has survived. Indeed, underscoring the complexity and adaptability of the phenomenon is the variability we find in accounts of passing: some passers choose to pass, either for a lifetime or situationally; others find themselves passing without their own volition and as a result of circumstances beyond their control (people assume them to be white). Still others live much of their lives unaware that they are “passing.” Only after their history is revealed to them—if it is—do they have a “choice.” And, having been raised with a specific racial identity (usually white), their racial “choice” is experienced differently than someone raised with a black racial identity. Often, passers who choose to pass capitalize on their phenotypic whiteness to escape the socioeconomic discrimination and even cultural and physical violence they would potentially be subjected to as members of an oppressed group. But factors that help individuals decide to live as/become white can be material, economic, social, emotional, and/or psychological in nature. Passing also carries a different weight for differ‑ ent individuals, depending on the individual’s own unique familial situ‑ ation, the historical specificity and the assumptions about race that are functioning in society and culture at that given time, as well as on the political possibilities available at that particular moment and place. As Daniel J. Sharfstein notes in his biography of three families who crossed the color line, “The conventional understanding of passing as masquerade does not begin to approach the broad range of individuals’ experiences as they migrated from black to white” (8). Across this range, though, emo‑ On the Margins of a Movement /   41 tional “costs” usually run high. Because U.S. racial categories have histori‑ cally been exclusive (one race per person; “biracial” or “multiracial” has defaulted to “black” under the law of hypodescent—the...