Races: PassingPosted in Articles, Media Archive, Passing, Social Science, United States on 2010-01-28 22:51Z by Steven |
TIME Magazine
1947-10-20
Greying, blue-eyed Walter White, for 16 years executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has a skin so light that he frequently has to explain that he is, in deed, a Negro. Last week, in the Saturday Review of Literature, Propagandist White talked openly about a subject many Negroes are careful to avoid: the Negro who lives secretly as a white man. Wrote he : “Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear — people whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration. Nearly every one of the 14 million discernible Negroes in the United States knows at least one member of his race who is ‘passing‘ — the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as whites… Often these emigrants achieve success in business, the professions, the arts and sciences. Many of them have married white people… Sometimes they tell their husbands or wives of their Negro blood, sometimes not…”
Read the entire article here.