Any particular reason you only want to hear from Americans? Passing isn’t exclusively an American phenomenon.
I don’t think anyone can really glibly pass through life in America without thinking about their own racial makeup or feeling like they are keeping a secret if they never tell anyone they have African ancestry. I mean, these days we talk about race constantly. BLM and Trump and terrorism and all that. I don’t quite find it believable that anyone would accuse someone of passing using that word but it would come up. For example, she might be exposed to the racist rants of white people who think she’s a sympathetic listener. Conversely she might be accused of racial appropriation if people see any hint of her African heritage – a decoration in her office or a garment. Or she would mention her childhood years in Nairobi and people would ask why she was there and she would have to tell them, well, I AM AFRICAN SEE. It just takes intent to hide your past and then it does seem curious. But the word passing feels wrong.
The last time I saw the word “passing” used was in relation to a transgender person who had begun hormone therapy young.
Minus any further context, that’s what I would assume someone was talking about if they said the word in a sentence about someone I didn’t know.
I don’t see any intent on Emily’s part. And I don’t like the idea that we have to submit to racism and pick a ‘side’ here. I’m not ‘white’, nobody is, it’s just a perception of others, and one we should be fighting against. Broomstick said Emily would be considered ‘mixed race’ as was Barack Obama, except almost everyone considered Obama to be ‘black’, that’s what racism does to our culture, the definitions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ aren’t just two sides of the same coin. I can certainly see why people considered to be ‘black’ don’t like the way this works, they want people who also get the short end of this deal to be in solidarity with them, but everyone needs to be able to reject these concepts and live their lives according to the ideal of seeing people as individuals and not a member of some artificially declared group.
I would consider her biracial, and I think most of my community would as well, if they knew about her mother. I wouldn’t consider her to be passing, because from what we’ve been told, she’s simply living her life and not doing anything to conceal her background. I would think it was strange if she said she didn’t feel black, although my feelings might change if she elaborated, depending on what her explanation was.
We don’t live in an ideal world, we live in this one, with history and cultural baggage. It’s like if you go to a restaurant and order a salad and everyone else orders lobster and they want the tab divided equally. Nope, it doesn’t work that way.
Racism makes some people only eat salad but pay the price of lobster in order to lower the price of lobster for the others.
Eh. I only bring up having a black great-great-grandfather in addition to my mom’s family being 1/2 Latino to shock/refute people who irritate me by insisting my ancestry must be 100% Irish because I have red hair, fair skin, and blue-green eyes - that sort of insistency deserves to be taken down a peg. Other than that I rarely think about it, and don’t worry about how a lack of relevancy to other conversations is akin to keeping it a secret.
The idea of “whiteness” is a completely fabricated concept, but it carries social validity nonetheless. Even though it shouldn’t. There are no such thing as races. What there are, are phenotypes. Phenotypes are the combinations of facial features and skin tone that are passed down through genetics. From each part of the world, different phenotypes might predominate in some geographical regions, but they inevitably wind up mixing a lot because, surprise surprise, humans like to mix their genes.
There are a bunch of different phenotypes and you can go down the rabbit hole of studying them, although you have to remember that a lot of the taxonomy comes from earlier times when various anthropologists truly believed that these phenotypes represented different “races.” They thought there was such a thing as, for instance, an “Alpine race.” Well, if you averaged out all my genetic ancestry, by cross checking the genome with a database of other people, you’d find me right around the region of the Alps. And surely enough, if you look up Alpine phenotype, my facial appearance isn’t far off from that example.
But once it gets into the territory of saying that one phenotype looks better than another…or worse, has inherently superior mental characteristics…you’re into the bullshit part of it.
All there are, are phenotypes, and they mix and blend because people like to do the activity that leads to that happening. So new phenotypes are constantly being created. And the individual described in the OP is just that…a new, unique phenotype of her own. Not part of a “race”.
I addressed the question specifically to Americans because we are so het up about race, racism, and the black/white dichotomy. I don’t I’ll oppose persons from other countries chiming in.
One of my non-fave things to hear: *“Really, Puerto Rican? You look White.” *:rolleyes: Honey, your eyesight is just fine. Yes, I ***am ***phenotypically Caucasian. Means jacksquat WRT ethnocultural identity.
As to the example: Emily’s not “passing” since the identity she assumes and presents is not “White American”, it’s “Swedish”. It’s third-party observers who slot that into the “White” checkbox, unsolicited and unconsulted.
I believe that is the point of the case example: that although Emily has always identified as simply Swedish, there will be third parties who will insist on looking upon this as an act of choosing the easy way out in American race culture, as opposed of it simply being a matter of that this is the person’s own *national *identity. Notice the setting of the example: she is in a university in a city in the US South. So probably in the university and in that big city community it is not an everyday thing, but there will be still enough people for whom racial identity per the American construct is still enough of an issue and who, though Emily is *not *trying to “pass”, are themselves already preconditioned to the concept of “passing” as being a thing that describes the situation.
Truth. There are Mexicans, and people from points south, who look like they could pass in anywhere from Germany or Italy to Ireland. It gets even more ridiculous when people start talking about “looking Jewish.” My mom’s maternal side of the family are blonde and all look like they could have been from northern Germany or natives of the Baltic region (which is where their actual genetic ancestry comes from, as per the DNA test.) Yet they are Jewish. Someone once told my mom, “you’re Jewish?! No, it can’t be! You must have had a nose job.” This was not a joke, it was said in earnest. For fuck’s sake!
You think you’re het up?
In that case - her detractors have no point, she’s neither “black” nor “white”, but biracial. No, she’s not “passing”, and in my community, while she wouldn’t be considered one of us (South African Coloured is a set of loosely related cultures, not just biracialism) she’d certainly be accepted (see: Noah, Trevor)
I wouldn’t try to argue anyone of out of their racial identity, but the above is rather eye rolley. It implies that American racial constructs came from black activists, rather than evolved from centuries of history. It sounds like something Hillary Banks would say, which is to say, pretty shallow and ignorant.
If you don’t identify as black because your African ancestry is phenotypically unapparent AND neither you or your close loved ones have been affected by racial prejudice or the legacy of racial oppression, then it would not be surprising if that affected how you self identified. But I would find it surprising that someone with a black Kenyan mother would be in this camp, and not just because the odds are slim she’d be phenotypically indistinguishable from your average white Swedish. Has she never been the recipient of stares and weird comments when out in public with her mother and father together, or treated like an oddity when friends and love interests discover the truth? Has she never heard white racists talking shit about black people and understood that they are talking about her as much as any other impure mudperson? Experiences like this have a way of impressing upon you what race people associate you with and that race is not white, it’s black.
I thinking passing in a racial sense is an outdated concept unless someone is deliberately hiding their heritage. But that doesn’t mean all rationales for claiming or not claiming a certain identity are immune from judgement.
That depends. Will Emily try to invoke her White Privilege?
Okay, this is a completely serious question.
There have been, in history, people who had sub-Saharan African ancestry and were born into African-American culture, but had phenotype looking predominantly European. The most striking example is probably Walter Francis White (no relation to “Heisenberg”) who identified and was accepted as a black man.
If there was someone who had that physical appearance AND the same ancestry, BUT grew up adopted by a “white” family, would that individual be accepted if he were to identify as African-American?
If the answer to THAT question is “yes,” then the next one is: would it be acceptable for me, who is almost entirely of Alpine, Hellenic, and Baltic, European descent, and look it, to identify as African-American if I were adopted by a black family?
These are all interesting questions and as American culture changes demographically, they are going to become more and more relevant.
“Hicksville”, Ark. has no racial issues??
This question is very broad. Accepted by whom? And under which circumstances would his racial identity even need to come up?
If you’re an ambiguously black person, you never have to go around announcing what race you identify as. People will assume you’re black because that’s what your phenotype marks you as.
Likewise, if you’re a fair skinned, blonde haired person, people are going to assume you’re white. They will make that assumption unless your volunteer that you aren’t. But generally there are not that many occasions when volunteering such info comes naturally. Aside from public figures who are regularly doing interviews and having their background pried into, most people don’t even need to make their racial identities an issue.
I’m curious who these acquaintances are and what has triggered this weird accusation. I know it doesn’t matter to the questions posed in the OP, but it just seems like an unrealistic detail. I sincerely doubt all new acquaintances tell her this. But I can totally believe that over the course of her life in the States, a few acquaintances have asked her pointed questions about her identity and a very small minority of these acquaintances have intimated she’s a liar.
I say that it is always rude to question someone about how they feel. Emily is perfectly entitled to feel however she wants to feel about her identity. And a person listening to her express herself is perfectly entitled to feel however they want to feel about it. But it is wrong for a person to tell Emily she shouldn’t feel the way she feels. As long as Emily isn’t standing on a soapbox patting herself on the back for being above the racial politics fray, then other people should just let her be.
I would “say” she’s what she identifies as, if we must say anything. But I can see where I might be tripped if I’m ever called to describe her appearance in the most efficient way possible. When I’m describing a person by their physical appearance, I usually mention their apparent race (black, white, Asian, Indian, etc.) along with more precise descriptors (light-skinned, brown-skinned, blond-haired, short, tall, fat). If she looks white but tells me she doesn’t see herself that way, I would probably leave out the racial descriptor to respect her wishes. But if I don’t know anything about her other than she looks white to my eye (like this woman), I’d probably describe her as “White girl with the kinky dark hair”. Would I be wrong? If we accept the premise that race is a social construct then, no, I would not be wrong.
Would I see her the same way she sees herself? I don’t know for sure, but probably not. Assuming she has kinky hair texture but a face that doesn’t have telltale signs of recent African ancestry (like the face of the biracial woman whose picture I just linked to), I’d probably initially lump her in the category “white person with flava”–the category that I tend to reserve for pale-skinned folks of the Mediterranean/Levant/Semitic persuasion. If her facial features do suggest some “Mother Africa” at first glance, then I’ll likely peg her as “biracial” or “light-skinned black person”. And this assessment would be unlikely to ever change.
I give everyone permission to define themselves the way they want to be defined because we are ultimately talking about social/cultural labels–and anyone is free to find kinship in the social and cultural groups that resonate with them. But this “permission” doesn’t obligate me to do anything other than to show proper respect towards them. It doesn’t mean I have to scrub my mind of my own definitions.
I don’t think she’d be accused of passing as long as she is honest about her ancestry. If people ask her about her background (“Where did you grow up?” “Where are parents from?”) and she responds with a factual non-answer (“I’m from the planet Earth, just like my parents”, then I could understand someone thinking she has issues with regard to her identity (though I think it would be more charitable to assume she is tired of this kind of questioning, given how frequently racially ambiguous people are subjected to these questions). If she tells outright lies about her ancestry, then the charge of “passing” is appropriate.
In my family, I don’t think she would be judged negatively or positively just for saying she doesn’t feel white or black…as long as that person is sufficiently “white passing”. If Emily just looks like your run-of-the-mill light-skinned black person (there are a lot of us in my family), then there might be some internal eye-rolls and some mildly critical under-the-breath utterances like “come on now” from a few folks. But I think the fact that she wasn’t born and raised in the US would make her indifference understandable and thus not all that interesting of a discussion topic. However, if the same sentiment was expressed by someone in our family, there would probably be a lot of disappointment, not gonna lie.
Yep.
In the local Jewish Community here in my county the Conservative rabbi is from Argentina so… surprise… looks a bit Hispanic and speaks English with a Spanish accent. And the executive director of the Jewish Federation is from Ethiopia and people look at her and say… “Jewish…? But she’s black!” Yes, yes she is. She is both.
There’s two competing notions here. First, the notion that there is a “Jewish look” - while some European Jews have features associated with the two main groups of European Jews a lot of them don’t - which leads to the second notion, that absolutely terrifies some people… Jews can look like anyone! :eek:
Thanks to companies like 23 and me and the others we are also now seeing that a LOT of people have recent African ancestry, even if they’re pale skinned and paled haired; and a LOT of people have Asian ancestry who don’t “look Asian”, and OMG! - a lot of of us have Neanderthal and Denisovan genes!!! Those last two aren’t even H. sapiens!
I keep hoping everyone will finally grasp the notion that there are no purebred humans, we really are all mutts, but I won’t hold my breath over it.