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Just over a decade after the conditional abolition of slavery in the US, laws were passed in many states prohibiting black people from using the same public accommodations as whites. Known as Jim Crow laws, they stipulated the demarcation of “separate but equal” spaces. That much is well-known, even if it remains important to underscore the sense in which racism – both here and in Australia – coincided with and was shaped by egalitarianism. There is more to be said about this but, for the moment, some notes on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), as a prelude/footnote to a longer/later discussion on ‘passing.’

In 1892, the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Separate Car Act picked Homer Plessy to do just that. It did so on the grounds that Plessy looked white enough to buy a ticket to the whites-only section of the railway carriage but, since he was nevertheless designated as an “octoroon” (one-eighth black) under the racial classificatory schema of the time, his presence in that space was illegal. In other words, Plessy’s task was to pass as white at the ticket counter, publicly declare his fractional African ancestry on the train, get arrested, and subsequently challenge his arrest.

As it turned out, the court upheld the laws.

Passing signals a discrepancy between (legal) classification and visible markers – it is that variance which affords someone the opportunity to move (pass) in spaces or in ways the former denies.

In that sense, the Committee’s logic was both deft in its illustration of the ambiguities inherent in any binary codification of race (specifically that which was founded on the scientific racism of blood fractions and inheritance) and yet, ultimately, conservative.

It did not challenge segregation (or racism) so much as reinforced the individual strategy of those who looked ‘white enough’ to evade the conditions of blackness. Plessy v, Ferguson both foregrounded that strategy of passing and, in its wake, became the grounds for strengthening the link between the identification of race and the racialised typologies of skin, hair, eyes, lips, etc.

In 1929, Nella Larsen published Passing.

In the introduction to the 2003 edition, T. M. Davis writes:

“Passing,” the movement of a person who is legally or socially designated black into a white racial category or white social identity, is one of the far-reaching consequences of Plessy v. Ferguson. Although passing to escape chattel slavery and later retaliatory strictures against freed people occurred throughout the nineteenth century, after the Plessy decision inequities along racial lines became so blatant […] that increased numbers of light-skinned, visually white women and men, legally declared “Colored” or “Negro” and summarily relegated to second-class citizenship, crossed the racial divide to become white. […] the aftermath of Plessy was a more segregated society with two classes of citizens, each of which was more cognizant of the rights, benefits, and priveliges denied blacks and granted whites.

Ironically, passing to escape containment was possible precisely because Jim Crow codes and discrimatory practices emanated from a white perspective of a black “other,” an objectively racialized individual who was not white, shared no visible features of a white person, and therefore was defined in terms of “difference from.” Yet as African Americans had recorded in oral and written narratives from the period of enslavement onward, people of African descent constituted one of the most diverse and racially mixed groupings of any people in the United States. Inevitably, a significant number of this vast group could be characterized by their lack of “difference from” white Americans.

More ….

Julie Cary Nerad, “Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper,” American Literature 75.4 (2003):

The blackness of unintentional passers exists in a genealogical past—in a legal complication that exposes the artificiality of racial constructions by first naming a white person black, then reinstating that person’s sociological racial identity. […] these unintentional passing novels show that from Reconstruction through the rise of Jim Crow segregation, race sometimes was a matter of choice and that such choices were governed not just by an individual’s personal desire for socioeconomic gain but by her present sense of identity and her family’s racial identification.

Stephen Knadler, “Traumatized Racial Performativity: Passing in Nineteenth-Century African-American Testimonies,” Cultural Critique 55 (2003):

the politics of race and passing as it functioned within key nineteenth-century African-American fictional testimonies.

Nineteenth-century African-American literature is scarred with images of racial violence, but rarely do we read these stories as “traumatized texts,” or as texts that have an incompleteness, an inner principle of incoherence, and an ongoing dissociation in their nar-ratives of racial identity. 3 Particularly, nineteenth-century African-American novels such as Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, which deal with issues of “passing,” have been canonized as stories of transgression more than of trauma. In highlighting the increasing critical attention given stories of passing, Elaine Ginsberg in her introduction to Passing and the Fictions of Identity summarizes the way they have become almost universally equated with subversion: “the positive potential of passing [is] a way of challenging [racial] categories and boundaries. In its interpretation of the essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing has the potential to create a space for creative self-determination and agency” (1996, 16). Although critics such as Gayle Wald have argued against too simplistic a celebration of passing narratives, especially as they interact with and reinscribe other gender and class-based “naturalized identities” (2000, 8-10), the recent critical views assert that passing is about overturning “identity categories” and differ only in their valuation of the possibility, or desirability, of such passing. As a logical extension that passing exposes the artificial boundaries of race, Walter Benn Michaels and Samira Kawash have thus refigured passing as less a resistance strategy than a trope that defines the very process of all identity formations (and thus makes the popular notion of passing impossible). Since one cannot deviate from an identity that was never natural, passing, Kawash argues, is “the only way in which a subject can take up a position of identity in terms of race. All race [End Page 64] identity is, in this view, the product of passing” (1996, 70). Or, as Michaels asserts in a more remonstrative tone, “the discourse of race is the discourse of people who can pass but who do not wish to” (1998, 130).

[…] the naïveté within our own historical moment’s utopian fantasy of the voluntary passing away of racial identities, as if all racial performances could be reduced to self-conscious transgressive parodies and were not, at least for many early African-American writers and many people today, a struggle to find a story and a witness to remake and heal the self.

Catherine Rottenberg, “Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire,” Criticism 45.4 (2003):

desiring to approximate blackness, as it comes to be defined by this regime, means disidentifying with the dominant norms, can be dangerous, and can sometimes even lead to death

Pamela L. Caughie, “Passing as Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 12.3 (2005):

as Johnson has argued in her essays on Hurston—the recognition that in the eyes of others, even in one’s own eyes, perhaps, one may be precisely that, or at least that the difference one insists on may be so subtle as to be negligible. While many cultural critics are concerned with what my colleague Chris Castiglia calls “psychic blackface,” that is, the phenomenon of whites wanting to be and identifying with blacks or Indians, my concern is with the corollary phenomenon of whites not wanting to be identified with other whites engaged in similar efforts to identify across racial lines, as in “I don’t want to be Carl Van Vechten.” It is a phenomenon that I have explored in terms of “passing.” […]

Passing as white is, of course, how modernists would have understood the term. But even in this, its first cultural sense, passing is far more complicated than the notion of wearing a mask or of assuming a fraudulent identity would suggest. In his New Yorker essay, “White Like Me,” on the life and writings of Anatole Broyard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reconceives passing as a modernist phenomenon. Gates describes Broyard (fig. 1), a well-known book reviewer for the New York Times, who was born a Negro in 1920 and later passed as white, as a man obsessed with modern culture and modernist literature. “The thematic elements of passing,” Gates writes, “fragmentation, alienation, liminality, self-fashioning—echo the great themes of modernism.”5 Passing in this sense—passing as white—is often seen as fraudulence or betrayal, as a sin against authenticity. Yet authenticity, Gates says, is “among the founding lies of the modern age,” a Romantic fallacy rejected by modernists.6 Extrapolating from Gates’s reading, we could argue that it was not so much that Broyard lived a lie as that he refused to live a conventional fiction.

Passing in the modernist period was more than a literary theme, and as a social practice, far more complicated than its common definition would suggest. Passing came to signify the dynamics of identity and identification in the modernist period—the social, cultural, technological, and psychological processes by which a subject comes to understand his or her identity in relation to others. Passing—actual and imaginary, conscious and unconscious—at once produced profound shifts in thinking about the boundaries of identity and aroused ambivalence about those shifting, unstable borders.

Yet the notion of passing as fraudulence and deception remains dominant today, despite the modernist erosion of such binary thinking. […]

Two highly publicized trials in the 1920s, one in the U.S., the other in Britain, not only epitomize the public’s fascination with passing at that time, but evidence its emerging sense of identity as something one acquires rather than something one is. In 1924 Alice Jones (fig. 3), daughter of a working-class couple, married Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, son of one of New York’s leading families. Their different class status was enough to make the marriage headline material, as Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone note in their book on the Rhinelander trial, Love on Trial; however, the disclosure a month after the wedding that Alice was “colored” prompted a media frenzy. The public trial in 1925 over Leonard’s annulment suit was covered by newspapers across the country and in England and was the first occasion of the use of photojournalism. An actress was hired and photographed reenacting the partial disrobing of Alice Jones before a sequestered judge and jury in an effort to provide “ocular evidence” of her race to determine what Leonard could have been expected to know and when.8 Yet the legal arguments supposedly meant to determine Alice’s race ended up exposing the slipperiness of racial categories, even as both sides employed racial as well as gender stereotypes to make their case. The prosecution’s star witness, for example, was Al Jolson, the most famous blackface performer of the day. “The image of Al Jolson next to Alice and George Jones [her father],” write Lewis and Ardizzone, “drew into sharper focus the impossibly thin line separating blacks and whites in America, and the anxiety that closeness produced.”9 In the end, the trial threw into strong relief popular beliefs about racial distinctions. As an editorial in the Messenger put it, when it comes to race as well as sex, “deception is the rule.”10 The cover of the Messenger, with its masthead, “The World’s Greatest Negro Journal,” for that month (December 1925) illustrates just how ambiguous race may be, and how unreliable “ocular evidence” can be (fig. 4).

Four years later in Britain, Colonel Victor Barker, alias Valerie Arkell-Smith (fig. 5), was tried for perjury in 1929 for passing as man. In this case, the identity of her sex was not in dispute, nor was her sexuality the legal issue, even though she was married to a woman. The perjury trial centered on what we now call gender identity, raising questions about how to classify this anomalous woman. The spectacle of the closely cropped Arkell-Smith, forced to wear a dress throughout the trial, testifying that she had always felt herself to be a man before a male judge wearing a gown and a wig of curls, must have struck witnesses even then as perverse—and this at a time when the androgynous fashions of the day and the “New Woman” were arousing anxiety over what were thought to be clear-cut sex differences. As Laura Doan points out in her article on this trial, “Passing Fashions,” from which this photo is taken, “The whole point of twenties fashion was that no one knew for sure” one’s gender or sexual preference.11 “No age,” Virginia Woolf wrote in the same year as the trial, “can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own.” […]

The trials and the Zuni ritual raise the question of whether identity is ever anything other than a performance. In presenting an image of oneself to others, “there is finally no getting away from the stage,” writes Finkeilkraut (IJ, 172). The point is brought home in this famous image of Josephine Baker (fig. 7). In this musical production, The Chocolate Dandies (1924), Baker is passing as black insofar as blackface performance brings out the performativity rather than the authenticity of blackness. As Eric Lott writes, blackface performance stages racial categories; it produces blackness and whiteness as racial identities to be assumed, making a spectacle out of racial difference and keeping blackness “on display and up for grabs.”