Mixed Race Studies

Passing Me By: African American Women and ‘Passing’ As a Film Genre

PopMatters
2011-04-08

Matt Mazur, PopMatters Contributing Editor

Caught between two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in the African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, the protagonist of the passing film is confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage.

“Life is but a walking shadow,” wrote William Shakespeare in Macbeth. In film studies, we frequently consider the extreme contrast of light and dark, of noirish chiaroscuro designs that were born from the severe German expressionist lines. These are the “shadows” that highlight the pronounced differences between black and white, between coruscation and silhouette, between good and evil. The complex interplay between these two diametrically-opposing forces is one of the most essential technical elements of a film’s design, illuminating, reflecting and projecting the subconscious and highlighting implicit narrative themes in a visual language that aids the spectator’s understanding of the art as they read it. Nowhere is this essential cinematic contrast more apparent than upon the skins of characters in films about passing—a trope in which (usually female, usually biracial African American/Caucasian) pass for white, abandoning their black heritage and otherness to reap the benefits of whiteness. The light is the positive signifier, while the dark is the negative.

Until recently, this particular leitmotif was refracted bluntly in the way race dynamics were depicted in film in general. There were “black” films and “white” films, but rarely did any movie dare to highlight what life was like for any realistic scope of biracial characters who existed in true Jungian shadow-self, caught between these two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color, be marginalized and treated like dirt, or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage. This concept was, from post-Reconstruction through the ‘60s, a much-discussed, weighty social issue, evidenced in the presence of the passing narrative in black and white art of the time, and it was brought most to social awareness in cinematic depictions, many of which proved to be financial and critical successes.

While racial passing seems outdated by today’s standards, and the very thought of a black person needing to pass for white actually smacks of racism, this essay repositions the importance of passing as a genre by looking at four key Hollywood films from the early-‘30s through the late-‘50s: two versions of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl in 1934 and Douglas Sirk in 1959), Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), and Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957). We examine how race passing has become supplanted by other more socially acceptable sub-modes of the passing narrative (for example: the quintessential passing model now largely excludes race but focuses instead on gender and sexuality), but also how the distant ancestors of race passing can still somewhat insidiously found lurking unnamed in the world of contemporary film, from the extreme popularity of a biracial actress like Halle Berry (who has been nicknamed a “black Barbie” because of the way she conforms to standards of white female beauty) to the teasing, exoticized, and even sexually-festishized presence of the racially-ambiguous Mariah Carey in films such as Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001) and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)…

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Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed”

Cooper Panel
American Literature Association Conference
San Diego, California
May 1998

James Fenimore Cooper Society

Barbara Mann, Lecturer of English
University of Toledo

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, August 1998

Natty Bumppo—Hawkeye of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales—is indelibly inscribed in the critical mind as the “man without a cross,” that prototypical “white Indian” of American literature. So accustomed are they to Natty’s “man-without-a-cross” mantra that critics take it at face value, never asking the obvious question: Was Natty really a man without a racial cross? I say, “Not a chance.” Seen against the backdrop of Native history, of which Cooper was intimately aware, Natty could only have been a mixed blood.

Now for a little primer: Modem critics tend to assume that the one-drop rule of racial identity was always in force in America, legally disallowing any wiggle room to people of racially mixed ancestry. Not so. There were in actuality three rules of racial identity, each competing with the others between 1750 and 1850: generational passing; the rule of recognition; and the rule of descent. Generational passing, the British rule under colonialism, allowed third generation cross-bloods to pass as “white,” regardless of how Native or African they might look. By 1825, racist theory was gaining ground in America, positing two new, conflicting “rules” of race, those of recognition and descent. The rule of recognition was the eye-test of identity: whoever could pass, might; while the rule of descent—the infamous “one-drop” rule—forbade passing at all times, regardless of generation or appearance. After 1825, only the rules of recognition and descent remained to vie for social control and, from 1850 on, the one-drop rule alone applied. Note that, in Natty’s lifetime, the generational rule and the rule of recognition were in force. Under either, Natty was legally “white,” even though in modem, more racist America, he would not be so categorized…

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Jean Toomer and the Politics and Poetics of National Identity

Contributions in Black Studies
A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies
Volume 7, Number 1 (1985-01-01)
Article 3
24 pages

Onita Estes-Hicks
State University of New York, Old Westbury

Jean Toomer’s place in thew world of letters rests on Cane, the author’s profound statement on the quest for African-American identity. Published in 1923, Cane was composed during a year of intense creativity which followed Toomer’s three-month stay in Sparta, Georgia in 1921, during which time he served as Acting Principal in an industrial and agricultural school. As had happened to Du Bois in rural Tennessee, in backwards, poverty-ridden, oppressive Georgia, Toomer touched base with the deep roots of Black culture under conditions which recalled the slave past. The writer celebrated that return to the foundations of Black life in Cane, charting his own adventures on southern soil, contrasting the conditions of Blacks in the North, and positing cultural/geographical tradeoffs in search of a whole, healthy Black identity. Compressed yet exhaustive, Cane would be the author’s main creative statement on African American identity. That splendid work justly merits the acclaim it received at the time of its publication and the place it now occupies in the literary canon. An experimenter in life and in letters, Cane’s author realized that Cane need not and could not be duplicated; he next focused his energies on mastering the poetics of national identity, a project which had captivated his imagination during his apprentice years. Little attention has been given to this aspect of Jean Toomer’s literary and personal life, although the author’s earliest excursions into writing centered on the challenges of national identity or what he called “the new world soul.” Additionally, Toomer intermittently wrestled with the composition of a work on national identity for over fifteen years, ultimately achieving a sterling measure of success in his magnum opus, “Blue Meridian,” published in 1936.

Even before he began composing Cane, the Washingtonian explored the poetics of national identity in a poem entitled “The First American.” This Whitmanesque fragment assayed the possibility and process of constructing an inclusive national character by merging the best racial characteristics of America’s three racial groupings-Black, Red, White. This achievement would eventuate in “The First American”-a being free of the conditions of class and color, moving American nationality from theory to fact, from ideality to actuality.

Toomer’s deep interest in the question of national identity stemmed not only from his own multi-racial heritage, but also from his early life in turn-of-the century Washington, D.C., where he was reared among a significant mulatto population, some of whom-such as the Grimkes-maintained family ties across the color line. Toomer’s grandfather, Reconstruction politician, P. B. S. Pinchback, was himself the offspring of a long and stable Black-White relationship between a wealthy southern planter, Major William Pinchback, and his emancipated slave-mistress, Eliza Benton Stewart, a woman of Indian, Caucasian, and African descent. The Pinchbacks maintained ties for over eighteen years in two different states. They had eight children, two of whom, P. B. S. Pinchback and Napoleon, were sent by the father to Gilmore Academy, a private school in Cincinnati, famed for educating the mixed children of wealthy white men and African-American women. In addition to the Pinchbacks, Jean Toomer’s racial lineage consisted of other Black-White families, a condition which prompted his concern with national identity. Caucasian in appearance, Nathan Toomer, the writer’s father, lived on both sides of the color line, while listed alternately as Black and mulatto in census data. Prior to marrying Nina Pinchback, Jean’s mother, Nathan had been married to Amanda Dickson of Augusta, Georgia. The latter was the “natural” daughter of one of the wealthiest white men in the South, David Dickson, who claimed Amanda as his child in a deathbed confession, leaving her the major portion of his considerable wealth. Following the breakup of the Nathan Toomer-Nina Pinchback marriage, Nina’s second husband was Archibald Combes, of New Jersey’s famed and historic mulatto colony, Gouldtown, which had been settled by the descendants of a seventeenth-century African named Gold or Gould and the granddaughter of the Englishman Walt Fenwick, founder of southwestern New Jersey and friend of William Penn. Either by the clerk’s perception or by their own statements, both Archibald and Nina were listed as “white” on their marriage certificate.

Toomer’s complex racial background left him sceptical of racial labels and suspicious of a social system which designated people who were palpably “white” as “black.” Like Richard Wright, who similarly could not understand why a woman of his grandmother’s “white” complexion was labeled “colored,” Toomer early in his life began seeing through the social construction of reality. Race, Toomer was convinced, was a cultural, not a biological issue. Like many light-skinned Washingtonians of his time, Jean Toomer lived on both sides of the color line, as he so chose, exploiting his own biology to subvert the caprices of color. In Washington “functional passing“-to obtain jobs, to attend educational institutions, to secure entrance to entertainment facilities-had been raised to a fine art. Jean knew many Washingtonians who passed during the day to maintain jobs and who rode “uptown to the respite of a Negro home” at the end of the day, the situation faced by Vera, the central character in the author’s short story “Withered Skin of Berries.” Mary Church Terrell, a friend of the Pinchbacks, whose daughters grew up with young Jean, reported that her daughters often utilized their white skin to purchase tickets for their “darker brothers.” Questions about race and nationality never came up at the University of Wisconsin. But before going off to college, the student had prepared himself to adopt the strategy of “functional passing,” a resource which Gunnar Myrdal noted was historically called upon by numerous light-skinned students in pre-integration America to avoid the added tensions of racial problems in university life. In New York in the twenties, Toomer, Gorham Munson recalled, gained luncheon accommodations for Charles Johnson and Alain Locke by a functional pass. Moving easily across the color line, the writer, like Lear and Cordelia, regarded himself as one of “God’s spies,” garnering data on the human condition as race distorted it. Like another famous Shakesperian character, Jean Toomer often felt “what fools these mortals be.” Seeing beyond race, he felt the nation and saw it off balance and off guard and culled his own sense of nation and national identity from hardcore experience…

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Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. Münster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]

Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies
Volume 26, Number 1 (2004)

Isabel Soto García
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia  (UNED)

In her wide-ranging and ambitious work Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies, Mar Gallego refers to W. E. B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness as “influential.” The reference is, at the very least, an understatement. Du Bois’ articulation of the African American experience, famously declared in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as straddling, or simultaneously occupying, both sides of the perceptual divide—the unremitting sense of “twoness . . . two warring ideals in one dark body (11)”—is arguably the theoretical paradigm against which twentieth century African American expressive culture, particularly written culture, has been interpreted. Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Paul Gilroy, all prominent late twentieth-century theorists of the experience of New World Africans, explicitly acknowledge an indebtedness to Du Bois. Without the Duboisian precedent, these writers would possibly not have elaborated their respective theories of call-and-response (Stepto 1979), signifying (Gates 1988) and the black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)—all theories which are predicated on notions and strategies of doubleness; one may assume they would have formulated them differently.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868, one year after the First Reconstruction Act granting, among others, the right to vote to black males in Confederate States. His formative years, then, coincided with this initial period of postbellum optimism and progressive legislation, as well as post-Reconstruction reaction, culminating in such Supreme Court rulings as the notorious “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. Where Plessy and other court decisions erected a de jure wall of containment between black and white Americans and encoded the segregationist principle, Du Bois countered with double consciousness, taking the reader as it were beyond the veil—or at least lifting it to reveal what lay on the other side. That a potential white readership be invited to partake of African American consciousness is in and of itself a radically subversive gesture. If we are given the wherewithal to experience reality as an African American (“an American, a Negro”), then Du Bois is making a brazenly transgressive proposition: an invitation to engage in a sort of literary miscegenation.

Miscegenation or, in nineteenth-century terms, amalgamation, is the transgression at the heart of a rich body of writing that coincided with the first third of Du Bois’ life and the period—Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction—that preceded the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. This fiction was coincidentally organized around the literary embodiment—the mulatto—of Duboisian double consciousness, while it similarly subverted the artificial binarism encoded in Plessy. The mulatto genre can be said to date back at least to Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s short story “Le Mulâtre” (1837), considered the earliest known work of African American fiction. William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) is held to initiate the genre by an African American writer in English. Clotel is representative of a further, related tradition, that of the passing novel, with its eponymous heroine crossing racial as well as gender lines (gender and racial passing is a frequent trope in antebellum slave narrative: see, for example, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom [1860] and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861]).

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Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies [Review]

African American Review
Volume 38 (Winter 2004)
pages 720-723

Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies. Hamburg: Lit Verlag Munster, 2003. 214 pp.

Zhou Yupei

Until very recently, novels of passing that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance had been viewed as either assimilationist or collaborative with racist ideology. Mar Gallego’s Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an opposing view by providing a detailed account of the subversive and parodying strategies employed in novels by four representative and controversial African American writers: James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset. Gallego considers these authors’ parodying strategies as responses not only to social realities but to the idea of double consciousness and other literary traditions.

Gallego’s book opens with a rereading of Du Bois’s theory of “double consciousness” that reveals both the positive and the negative perspectives contained in the theory and connects it with the motif of passing. The positive refers to the notion of the “third self,” which results from the union of an African American ethnic identity and an American national identity, a notion that implies the possibility of a society in which African culture and American culture co-exist. The negative refers to the metaphor of the “veil,” which means the distorted and stereotypical image imposed upon African Americans, a metaphor that may produce negative duplicity in African American life. Gallego’s account of these contradictory perspectives achieves a dual purpose. First, it explains Du Bois’s inner conflict between his realistic conception of American society and his idealistic notion of double consciousness. Second, it alludes to the multiple and indeterminate character of double consciousness and links this notion to the Yoruba tradition of Esu-Elegbara, in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. locates the “Signifying Monkey,” and finally the idea of double-voicedness central to Bakhtin’s theories of “heteroglossia” and “dialogization.” Such connections expose the parodying nature of double consciousness in spite of the inner conflict contained in it. Gallego’s reading of the notion of double consciousness constitutes a reasonable starting point and a convincing rationale for Gallego’s argument that the novels of passing under study respond in a complex way to double consciousness and strategically hide their negative attitudes toward racism under the cover of various means of seemingly cooperative representations. Gallego also lays out a theoretical framework of exploration in his subsequent chapters, each of which locates a writer’s parodying strategies in the historical context of the representation of African Americans and in the literary context of the genres of Western literature employed and subverted by the writer.

To incorporate issues of race and gender, Gallego also identifies in the first chapter double consciousness with the feminist notion of “divided identity,” designating, as Mary Hairston McManus does, the latter as “double double consciousness.” Reviewing earlier African American feminist criticism, Gallego concludes that this discourse involves “the subversion, inversion or variation of other discourses that marginalize African American women.” This summary anticipates his statement that the characterization of Larsen’s and Fauset’s mulatta figures of passing also involves the subversion, inversion, or variation of other racist or sexist discourses in literary tradition.

Each subsequent chapter is devoted to one of the four authors. In chapter two, Gallego argues that James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) innovates the tradition of slave narratives by endowing it with subversive and ironic overtones, and revises Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness by calling into question the negative perspective of the theory. For Gallego, Johnson’s novel represents a new stage of the narrative tradition that traces its origin to Equiano’s “integrated narrative,” which integrates different voices, and Douglass’s “generic narrative,” which makes the narrator eventually dominate the different voices integrated by the narrative. Johnson uses such techniques as duality of voices, control over the narration, fictionalization of the narrative “I,” and rhetoric as a mask for subversion, techniques often found in either Equiano or Douglass. With these techniques Johnson effectively but trickily conveys his ironic and multivocal vision and makes his narrator successfully write himself into the text. The connection discovered by Gallego between Johnson’s text and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk leads to the conclusion that Johnson’s novel negates both the positive image of the “Talented Tenth” and the idealistic possibility of a “third self.” Gallego states that Johnson’s representation of the phenomenon of passing questions cultural and racial categories and promotes heterogeneity. With abundant historical and textual evidence, Gallego defines Johnson as an important African American writer who initiates a model for the depiction of the mulatto condition and anticipates other novels of passing in the following decade…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Lit Verlag Munster
2003
224 pages
ISBN 3-8258-5842-1

Mar Gallego, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of Huelva (Spain)

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an insightful study of the significance of passing novels for the literary and intellectual debate of the Harlem Renaissance. Mar Gallego effectively uncovers the presence of a subversive component in five of these novels (by James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset), turning them into useful tools to explore the passing phenomenon in all its richness and complexity. Her compelling study intends to contribute to the ongoing revision of the parameters conventionally employed to analyze passing novels by drawing attention to a great variety of textual strategies such as double consciousness, parody, and multiple generic covers. Examining the hybrid nature of these texts, Gallego skillfully highlights their radical critique of the status quo and their celebration of a distinct African American identity.

Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

University of North Carolina Press
December 2011
336 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 15 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3508-1

Marvin McAllister, Assistant Professor of English
University of South Carolina

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video “Dangerous.” In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of “whiting up,” in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial identities.

Not to be confused with racial “passing” or derogatory notions of “acting white,” whiting up is a deliberate performance strategy designed to challenge America’s racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to black bodies—creating unexpected intercultural alliances even as it sharply critiques racial stereotypes. Along with theater, McAllister considers a variety of other live performance modes, including antebellum cakewalks and contemporary stand-up comedy by solo artists such as Dave Chappelle. For over three centuries and in today’s supposedly “postracial” America, McAllister argues, whiting up has allowed African American performers first to appropriate artistic products of a white imagination and then to fashion new black identities through these “white” forms, therefore enhancing our collective understanding of self and other.

Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Angelo Robinson, Associate Professor of English

“Am I Black or White? Am I Straight or Gay? CONTROVERSY?”  Since its founding, and long before recording artist Prince penned these lyrics in the 1980s, America has been a space and a place demanding and mandating polarized definitions of race and sexuality. This course will examine the reasoning behind and ramifications of these dichotomies from the Colonial Period to the present in genres that include literature, film, and music.  We will also explore how these binaries affect people who identify as biracial and bisexual.

This discussion-based course requires intensive reading, viewing, and listening and will foster your critical thinking and analytical writing.  Topics of discussion will include the “one-drop rule,” the slavery debate, miscegenation, racial passing, segregation, integration, interracial desire, and sexual passing.  Special attention will be given to individuals who and organizations that refuse to follow racial and sexual dictates. Authors will include Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Adrienne Rich, E. Lynn Harris, and Barack Obama.

Book explores racial identification

The Post and Courier
Charleston, South Carolina
2011-04-24

Karen Spain, legal writer based in Nashville

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White. By Daniel J. Sharfstein. Penguin. 416 pages.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, “The Invisible Line” is a fascinating history of how three mixed-race families migrated across the color line and changed their racial identification from black to white.

The Gibsons, wealthy mulatto landowners in Colonial South Carolina, were white Southern aristocrats by the time of the Civil War.

The Walls, slave children freed by their white father, became respected members of the black middle class before giving up their prominence to “become” white.

The Spencers, hardworking Appalachian farmers in eastern Kentucky, spent almost a century straddling the color line.

The three intricately woven genealogies reveal an America where race has never been as simple as black or white. In rugged environments where survival meant relying on neighbors for security, commerce and marriage, it was easier to assume everyone was the same than to draw impenetrable distinctions between the races…

Read the entire review here.

NHUM3031 Passing: (Re)Constructing Identity

The New School
Fall 2009

Tracyann Williams, Instructor

Passing: (Re)Constructing Identity: “Passing,” a term traditionally used to describe fair-skinned Blacks posing as whites, is, in fact, part of a broader cultural phenomenon that has its origins in the pursuit of “the American Dream.” For the sake of economic comforts, racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse individuals submerge certain aspects of their identity in order to “pass” into the community of “whiteness.” Passing comes with obvious advantages, but for some, great personal sacrifice. We read Helen Fremont’s memoir detailing the ethnic (and religious) journey taken by her parents, Nella Larsen’s multilayered novel Passing, and Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of gender-crossing jazz musician Billy Tipton. We examine how particular individuals become white while whiteness remains unattainable by others. We draw on “whiteness studies,” an interdisciplinary field that decenters hegemonic markers connected to white dominance, and through this lens, we explore the racial, ethnic, and sexual biases embedded in our culture that have propelled individuals to reinvent themselves. At the dawn of the 21st century, these biases are supposedly less potent. We test this assumption by examining passing in the contemporary context.