Mixed Race Studies

Forced to pass and other sins against authenticity

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
pages 17-32
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571486

Kerry Ann Rockquemore

According to the identity commandments, passing is a sin against authenticity. Thou shall not pretend to be something that you are not. Men should not pretend to be women, married people should not pretend to be single, and black people should not pretend to be white. We all fit into some neat conglomeration of social categories and it’s just too confusing if we can’t take people at face value. Racial passing has a particular hold on our collective imagination because we assume that individuals belong to one, and only one, biologically defined racial group. This assumption disallows the possibility of being “mixed-race” and has historically necessitated elaborate rules and regulations order to classify what folks really are. The one-drop rule, a uniquely American norm that reflects our particular history of racial formation, dictates that people with any black ancestry whatsoever are black. Given the explicit racial hierarchy in the U.S., racial passing has always referred to a person who was really black pretending to be white.

As a woman who is black by self-definition, white by phenotype, and biracial by parentage, I am often perplexed by our limited conception of passing in post-Civil Rights America. Because we persist in assuming that race is a biological reality and not a social construction, passing continues to be conceptualized as voluntary; uni-…

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In‐and‐out‐of‐race: The story of Noble Johnson

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
pages 33-52
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571487

Jane Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts

Noble Johnson’s story is a very American story, a story more typical than we have historically wanted to admit. It is the story of race loyalty and race betrayal, of family belonging and disconnection. It is a mysterious story of disappearance, a chronicle of the way a public person became a “missing person.” His is also the story of someone who was more than one—a sort of man with a thousand faces and a range of identities. We claim him as an important African American while acknowledging that he chose to think of himself and to live in terms of other equally raced categories during different portions of his long life.

The case for owning his African American heritage was continually made to Johnson by his brother George in correspondence during the later years of his life. George’s history is one of deep affiliation with the African American community. A booster for black enterprise from his years as a real estate agent in the all-black town of Muskogee, Oklahoma, in his later years George started a black entertainment clippings service in Los Angeles, where he moved from Omaha, Nebraska, in 1926. But the glory for George was in the formation, in 1916, of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, a business made possible by Noble Johnson’s Los Angeles connections but also George’s industrious work building a distribution…

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“Makin a way Outta no way:” The dangerous business of racial masquerade in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1 (2005)
pages 79-104
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571489

Carlyle Van Thompson, Acting Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York

Early in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Clare Kendry Bellew and Irene Westover Redfield (the light-skinned and middle-class black female protagonists) are both passing for white in Chicago at an elite and segregated restaurant atop the Drayton Hotel during the horrid heat of August. Here, in this coincidental meeting of two childhood friends, Irene and Clare have a conversation about the possibility of permanently assuming a white identity. Irene, who only passes sometime, superciliously relates her reason for not permanently passing herself off as white: “‘You see Clare, I’ve everything I want. Except, perhaps a little more money'” (1929, 190). in contrast, Clare responds: “‘Of course…that’s what everybody wants just a little more money, even the people who have it. And I must say I don’t blame them. Money’s awful nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, ‘Rene, that it’s even worth the price'” (1929, 190). Larsen reveals that economic security is a critical concern in the lives of these middle-class black women. Despite the vulnerabilities of revelation, Clare adamantly believes that the monetary and social advantages of passing for white surpass the disadvantages. Class, as inflected by gender within the nexus of race, con-…

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