Consider an imaginary woman named Emily. She is the daughter of a man from Sweden and a woman from Kenya. Her paternal grandparents were Swedes, and her maternal grandparents were Kenyans; she knows no more of her ancestery than that. Emily has her father’s fair skin and eyes, But hair more like her mother’s (that is, dark and curly). Living in a largish city in the American south (She teaches physics at a university but has retained her Swedish citizenship ), she is generally taken to be “white”, something she neither claims nor denies. Having grown up in Stockholm and Nairobi, she feels no particular affiliation to any side in American racial politics. When new acquaintances first see a photograph of her mother, Emily is commonly informed that, despite her fair skin, she is black, and to claim otherwise is dishonest. When she says that she doesn’t feel black in the sense that Martin Luther King would have meant the term, she has been accused of “passing”.
Americans: would you say that Emily’s tractors have any point? Would you say she is “white” or “black”? “Passing”? Regardless of your personal opinion, how do you think she would be judged in your community (that is, of which “race”")?
In the Seattle area, at least, on one would give it a moments thought The concept of “passings” seems like a relic of an earlier time. My daughter are “mixed race” but I doubt anyone tries to figure out what the mixture is.
No judgement. People I call friends and whom I respect don’t give a damn about that. If Emily isn’t a jerk, she’d be warmly accepted as Emily, the person with an interesting family story.
Does Emily retain contact with her mother? She shares her mother’s photograph; does she share her history? When asked, does she say that she herself is Swedish or Swedish/Kenyan?
Passing is about deliberately covering up your ethnicity (in the past, often with good reason). As long as she is honest when asked, and isn’t trying to hide or obfuscate her background, I would not say that she is passing. I would say that for purposes of the way Americans view racial/ethnic identity, she is biracial.
Passing comes from a time when America adhered to the one-drop rule - any black ancestry at all made you black. In most parts of America today, and certainly where I live, this is no longer the case.
In the circles I socialize in, it wouldn’t make any difference, and would continue to not make any difference if she actively described herself as white. There might be some societies where she’d be expected to do the equivalent of ringing a bell and proclaiming “unclean, unclean” to let people know that she’s “not really white”, but if so, I’m glad I’m not part of one.
I would guess it depends on which part of the country, in terms of whether “passing” is considered a thing. Here on the West Coast, my kids are never questioned about their race. In Missouri, my son got called “nigger” and my daughter never heard a word. Regardless, if the topic comes up, we are upfront about who we are. We don’t pick a single race. It would be very complicated, as there are quite a few in the pot.
It’s funny, but I was just thinking about this recently. I read something about someone “passing as white” and my first thought was: Is that even a thing anymore? Or, what would even happen to you if you were outed? You’d have to explain that your ancestry is X% white and Y% black or whatever, and then everyone would say Oh, OK. Of course I live in the SF Bay Area, so maybe it depends on where you live.
If you can stretch the meaning if “community” to “websites I read”, I’ve seen the issue of skin tone brought up fairly often on The Mary Sue. I remember articles there debating if light-skin black feminists should self-exclude from conversations amongst dark-skin black feminists. Not finding any at the moment, but here is an article from another site showing that it is a thing.
Same as often, in a statement like this it actually matters than the person is imaginary.
It’s not to generally thread shit, I know you do this all the time and are a longstanding member of this forum, and I am responding. Still.
Perhaps the most real issue with regard to this question is whether people do, or who really does, any longer insist that people with any recent sub-Saharan African ancestry call themselves ‘black’ rather than mixed race or make any point of telling people anything about it. But the hypothetical invites ‘well here in CA (say) nobody would care but in AL, oh well, gee’. How do you actually know who cares in Alabama? Maybe more white people do. Maybe in both CA and AL it’s more or less equally likely black people care and white people really don’t. Which isn’t to say white people in CA or AL are/aren’t more ‘racist’ than black people, but specifically whether they think a person of recent partly African ancestry is ‘passing’ if they don’t make a big deal of being ‘black’, and that there’s something wrong with that. I think that varies by ‘race’ of observer at least as much as part of the country. But maybe not. I’d look at those things before imaginary examples.
Also it assumes there are black people and white people whereas now in the US non-black non-whites (in the normal social meaning of the term, ‘white Hispanics’ not being considered) outnumber blacks, and people without a firm racial identity are no longer a negligible %. Also we might first examine if people of ‘mixed race’ no recent part of which is ‘black’ or part ‘black’ but the other things aren’t ‘white’ are to be considered at the same time or separately?
I am not sure why you are bringing this up. The very first line of the OP says that Emily is imaginary, though the thread does have a couple of real-life mixed-race persons I know as its inspiration.
But neither of these have a Kenyan mother & Swedish father. I just picked two countries out of thin air because I knew their capital cities off the top of my head. The imaginary Emily’s situation is just to give shape to the discussion.
I specifically meant each poster’s physical community, as in their city, county, neighborhood, or state, but I don’t object to discussing virtual communities either.
Not necessarily shares it actively, she could just have family pictures where they can be seen. I don’t show people pics of my family but if they come to my house or look at my computer’s screensaver, they will see them.
That’s got different meanings in Sweden and in the US. In the US it refers to ancestry, in Sweden to nationality. By the OP she has Swedish nationality but nothing is said of Kenyan: if she doesn’t have it, calling herself Swedish/Kenyan would be something she’d be unlikely to think of doing. Not because she’s trying to hide her ancestry, but because ancestry does not equal nationality.
Or biological sex. And the ethnical issues don’t only affect people with Subsaharian ancestry.
I’ve had Americans tell me both that I couldn’t be Hispanic and that I couldn’t be white*. I’ve also been berated for “not waving my flag” (showed ID), for not putting my hand over my heart (showed ID), told to skip a legally-required step at immigration because according to the customs officer I was American (the maroon passport said officer kept refusing to look at disagrees). My Dominican friends were told they could not be Hispanic, they were African-American (uh, not an American citizen); same for immigrants from Africa who felt that if they identified themselves as African-American in official forms they were lying, because for them the term implies nationality while y’all actually use it about ancestry/looks. My Afroamerican friend’s Moroccan wife was white when she was with him, brown when by herself. And so forth. Has this changed since I last lived in the US? Yes; for starters, the last time I lived there, y’all were still having convulsions because a dark-skinned golf player refused to call himself African-American saying that denied 3/4 of his grandparents; now people can say biracial or multiracial without fainting. The question is, how much has it changed in different locations? How much has it changed in a college town in the South? Does the answer vary depending on whether the college in question happens to be Georgia Tech or Bob Jones? I expect the answer to the last question to be “oh God yes”.
Then again, I’ve also had people in multiple countries tell me girls couldn’t be engineers; like any other country, the US has a specific set of prejudices, but it’s definitely not the only country where prejudices are found in the wild.
The whole topic of race (while important, no doubt) has become IMO too focused on what people imagine other people think, or even what they think they ‘should’ imagine other people think in order to be ‘right thinking’ themselves. It’s just become a particularly bad topic to base discussions on imaginary things IMO. In the relevant part about people accusing this person of ‘passing’ is based on reality, just give that reality as the example, I would say. Whether the various pieces of the person’s heritage are Swedish, Dutch, Kenyan or multi generation African American, or you don’t know is comparatively irrelevant.
I don’t really understand the concept of ‘passing’ in this context. Being ‘black’ is not an innate characteristic, if it has any meaning it would be that a person has lived their life being considered ‘black’ in their environment, or would be considered so by others now. I thought ‘passing’ meant such a person with light enough skin to ‘pass’ as a ‘white’ person to avoid being treated as a ‘black’ person. I can understand how others considered ‘black’ may look askance at that because it’s not maintaining solidarity with their peers. Since Emily has never been considered to be ‘black’ by herself or others, and you don’t say she considers herself to be ‘white’, then what does ‘passing’ mean here?
To be honest, I live in a place where race just doesn’t get discussed at all. I’m not presenting that as a good thing, BTW: I think it’s largely because of a lack of diversity in the area.
Online I admit I’ve not heard anything about passing except in a historical sense. And I would argue that what Darren Garrison is bringing up is a different phenomenon. It’s not that the lighter skinned women “pass” as whit. It’s that there is an idea that darker skinned people face more racism than lighter skinned people, even if they are the same race.
So, my online experience is that the phenomenon of “passing” is no longer a thing.
Based on a recent US president who had a Caucasian mother and a Kenyan father… Emily would be considered either “mixed race” or “black” in the US. A certain number of bigots would need to use the fainting couch over the matter. Certain white bigots, the sort who use the term “mud races”, would have issues with her black ancestry. Certain black bigots would have issues with her relatively light skin and perceived privileges, or so I gather - in general, they’re not the sort of people who speak to me directly. Most of us, though, probably wouldn’t get riled up about it and would be happy to refer to Emily either as “Emily Johansson” (or whatever her last name is) or, if ethnicity is pertinent to the conversation, however she chooses to be referred to.
But yes, race and ethnicity is still a complicated issue in the US. I’ve been told I’m not white because I’m half Jewish, and people have expressed puzzlement at pictures of my grandmother who had some Asiatic facial features (because the Mongol hordes rampaging across Asia and Europe left a few bastards in their wake, who then went on to have children of their own), but for all practical purposes I’m white because that’s what I look like, that’s what I was raised as, and that’s how people perceive me to be. Until some of them find out my background ethnicity, then all of a sudden it’s “I KNEW IT!” Uh… no you didn’t, because now you’re suddenly treating me differently. But most people just shrug and say “oh, that’s interesting” and go on to other topics.
There was that woman, Rachel Dolezal, who got people really upset because she was passing as black for awhile, but that’s different than Emily Johansson because Rachel deliberately hid and lied about her past. Emily isn’t hiding or lying about anything.