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π D Practicing Problematization resignifying race Performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘transcendence’ of contemporary relations of power, but a di≈cult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure. —Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter Racial passing ‘unsettles’ because it challenges accepted beliefs that race is stable and fixed, transparent and visually embodied. The act of passing represents a dissonance between the external racial signification of skin and the supposed internal racial truth that is made to inhere in blood. To pass-as-white is to tactically redeploy power, an action facilitated by an ambiguous body or a body that can be visually verified as white; it is to defy racial ascription and prescriptions . Eddie Murphy’s Saturday Night Live sketch, ‘‘White Like Me,’’ parodies race and seems to suggest that passing—this embodied defiance—might be the answer to America’s race problems.∞ First aired in 1984, the sketch shows African American Murphy conducting a mock-serious experiment where he transforms himself (with the help of ‘‘the best makeup people in the business’’) into Mr. White in order to ‘‘go underground and actually experience America’’ on the streets of New York, ‘‘as a white man.’’ The audience sees him prepare for his role backstage and hears that he learned the tropes of whiteness by watching ‘‘lots of Practicing Problematization 125 Dynasty,’’ reading Hallmark cards, and studying how white people walk (‘‘their butts are real tight’’). Ready to enact whiteness, he enters the white world: he goes into a convenience store where the white owner tells him to take a paper for free; we see him on a bus with other whites who, after the last black passenger has disembarked, celebrate by breaking out into the song ‘‘Life is a Cabaret’’ and, finally, he enters the Equity National Bank where the white loan o≈cer gives him a huge sum of money despite his having no collateral, no credit, and no identi- fication, and tells him: ‘‘Pay us back any time. Or don’t. We don’t care.’’ Murphy highlights here both what George Lipsitz (1998) has called a ‘‘possessive investment in whiteness’’—where white people secure their stakes in an advantaging system—and what Cheryl Harris (1993) has marked as the social and economic benefits that accrue to white skin and status. Murphy ends the sketch, however, with a warning: I’ll tell you something. [Pan to Eddie’s black buddies applying white makeup.] I’ve got a lot of friends, and we’ve got a lot of makeup. So, the next time you’re huggin’ up with some really super, groovy white guy, or you met [sic] a really great, super keen white chick, don’t be too sure. They might be black. This ‘‘don’t be too sure’’ resonates as a threat to notions of whiteness as pure and impenetrable and, as seen in previous chapters, it declares that whiteness is not an essential possession or expression of internality but an enactment that can be appropriated by those discursively defined as being ‘outside’ its parameters . But while passing may undercut systems of inequality through granting the individual access to white racial privilege, it also works to undercut itself. It is predicated on the imperative to not be detected and, as such, the threat it represents cannot be registered. Murphy’s sketch may indeed hold more radical potential for unsettling race than undetected acts of racial passing, for the excessive or hyperbolic production of white identity holds the potential to expose race as artifice. Then again, the sketch can simply be read as an excessive visible performance and, as a consequence, be discursively discounted as a farce. Due to these reasons, passing does little to disturb dominant economies of race: it generally reinscribes the black/white binary, meaning that it does not rework racial categories. The limited potential in passing-for-white is also evident in the fact that not everyone can do it. As this is the case, this chapter asks: if you can’t pass-foranother and if passing itself has such circumscribed possibilities, how might race be reworked? How can racial agency be conceived beyond that form provided by a disjunction between the body and the enactment of race? For the purposes of this chapter more broadly...

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