Seeing Race in Modern America

8. Passing

166 C H A P T E R E I G H T Passing U nlike the boldfaced racial masquerade, racial passing—historically , the dark body blending, without any remark or notice, into whiteness—offers nothing on the surface to see. Where the masquerade exposes its layers—spotlighting the gap between the false surface and the deeper real—racial passing refuses such attention, and substitutes the surface for reality, a sleight-of-hand substitution that makes it difficult to see the passing body up close. In order for the passing body to be visualized, then, it must reveal itself, either through testimony or through the discovery of interior biological “proof.” The body is never marked clearly; if it were, the attempt at passing would fail. A racial masquerade clamors for our attention, while, hidden in plain sight, masked by a perfect subterfuge , the passing figure leaves little trace, ethnologically or otherwise , of the passing. George Schuyler’s richly satirical, 1931 classic, Black No More, focused on a New Negro scientist who, through some magical formula, could turn jet-black skin into fairest white. Once the process was complete, there would be no physical sign whatsoever of a person’s blackness. In Schuyler’s tale, the chance for anyone in Harlem, no matter their hue or shade or class, to permanently and fearlessly cross the color line prompted many African Americans to become “pork-colored.” The resulting chaos—as troubling for the lightskinned New Negro elite as it was for the architects of Jim Crow— encouraged white supremacists to begin a forensic accounting of the slaveholding past to determine—now that skin color was no longer a reliable metric of race—who rightly deserved privilege. The muchanticipated results of that investigation, which showed surprising mixture even in older white families, led some to flee to Mexico, where such mixed heritage would presumably be no impediment to social progress. Throughout the novel, one gets the sense of racial Passing 167 orchestration and social commitment, as if the passage into whiteness through scientific alchemy was deliberately intended to destabilize the order of things, and as if those who had recently departed blackness were still dedicated to maintaining their previous friendships and solidarities.1 Schuyler’s novel was a satirical entry into a rich debate about how, precisely, to determine who was black in an age of deception, movement , and mixture. But it was also a challenge of sorts to the conventional wisdom. It was a clever attempt, for instance, to offer a passing narrative that refused racial ambiguity as the sole access point to some supposedly different, and discrete, white experience. It represented a cheeky rebuke of the mulatto elite, and especially of W. E. B. Du Bois, who, rendered in fiction, was given the extraordinary name Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard. And it was a critique of the idea that racial passing was the logical extension of “the genteel performance ” of this African American elite, and that only the very best and very lightest, or the luckiest, should be granted the chance to become, performatively, white. Passing, as Schuyler and others defined it, is an act of artifice and illusion, a trompe l’oeil performance that foregrounds one set of racial figurations and displaces another. In one form or another, racial passing has been an object of academic attention for decades, first as a biological problem in need of social scientific study, and then as a genre form in African American literature. When framed in racial terms, to pass is to deceive. It is to shield the supposed racial truth, to take advantage of presumed misperception, and to present a carefully constructed racial illusion. In any given moment, not everyone can perform such artifice. Passing is a possibility only for those imagined to be visually liminal, physically ambiguous, and guileful. The passing body, in turn, is a problem precisely because its racial markers cannot, by available measures, be tracked, and its difference cannot be calculated with surface facts. The details are hidden —either masked by clothing, shrouded by the performance, or inscribed on the bones. In the history of racial sight, passing is the thing not seen. A national fixation for well over a century, passing is a consequence of generations of debate about racial mixture that have produced new bodies outside of old categories, and that have fostered the very idea of the body that can cut, like the shamefully hidden consequence of some unforgiveable crime, straight across [3.144.35.148...