Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture

Introduction

1 Introduction When do white people lose their whiteness? Consider four scenarios: In his Picture of Slavery, published in 1834, George Bourne describes the case of a seven-year-old white boy who is stolen from his parents and “tattooed, painted and tanned. Every other method was also adopted which wickedness could devise, to change the exterior appearance of the unfortunate creature, into one uniform dark tinge. In this wretched and forlorn condition, he grew up to maturity; driven, starved, and scourged, like the coloured people with whom he was forced to associate.” Twelve years later, Bourne continues, the boy is stolen again, this time from his enslaved state by “some friends of freedom ,” who return him to his grieving parents.1 A Virginia legend from the same era tells of a wealthy planter’s unruly mulatto son who is transported to New Orleans, where he is to be sold by a white half-brother who looks much like him. They embark on the steamer handcuffed together, but during a powerful storm the legally black son manages to steal his brother’s handcuff keys and declare himself the master and his white brother the slave. The white gentleman’s protests go unheeded and he is sold into slavery as a black man by his half-brother—who is said to have enjoyed himself with the profits.2 Almost one hundred years later, in 1946, Josephine Schuyler, white wife of the black writer George Schuyler, publishes an article in the Negro Digest titled “Seventeen Years of Mixed Marriage” in which she discusses her marriage to George and the relationships of her white friends who also have black partners. I began wondering when white people started getting white—or rather, when they started losing it. —Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go 2 INTRODUCTION In order to avoid conflict, she writes, most of these interracial couples “find it simple to explain that the paler member of the union has distant Negro ancestry , and under the American ‘one-drop’ theory, their marriage is accepted.”3 Finally, in 1954 Memphis a young musician hurries into a local radio station for an impromptu on-air chat. His rendition of “That’s All Right, Mama”— which would have been labeled a “race record” ten years before but had since been designated “rhythm and blues” (and would soon be called “rock ’n’ roll”)—has been heating up the airwaves, and the public is eager to hear from this rising star. Midway through the interview, the DJ asks a seemingly simple question: “Which high school did you attend?” The musician’s response, “Humes High,” is a revelatory moment. In an age of segregation, this answer did what the boy’s singing and his manner of speech did not: it “outed” Elvis Presley as a white man. These scenarios all involve what is sometimes termed the “reverse racial pass,” which Philip Brian Harper has defined as “any instance in which a person legally recognized as white effectively functions as a non-white person in any quarter of the social arena.”4 In this book I explore such cases of “lost whiteness.” I look at American narratives about white people who either envision themselves or are envisioned by others as being or becoming black. Historical anecdotes feature prominently in my project, but I am most interested in narratives about white passing: short stories, novels, films, autobiographies, and pop culture discourse. While I recognize that different genres use varying mediums, an interdisciplinary approach makes it possible to plot the patterns of a narrative that works its way through myriad facets of American culture. I tap into the ideologies—the conceptions of racial identity—that shore up narratives of white passing, and which are manifest in all aspects of culture from the high to the low, the aural and the verbal to the visual. I am not concerned with whether whites “succeed” in passing—whether they fool anyone; in fact, I would argue that the enterprise of trickery, of “fooling our white folks,” as Langston Hughes described black passing, is not a vital component of white passing.5 Nor do I see white passing as necessarily motivated by what Carlyle Van Thompson describes as “strategy for survival and even socioeconomic investment.”6 Instead, I am interested in the moments of slippage in which whites perceive themselves, or are perceived by others, as losing their whiteness and “acquiring” blackness. Harryette Mullen asserts that “rather than ‘passing for’ white[,] . . . passing individuals actually become...