After reading the thread about J. Edgar Hoover’s possible Black ancestry, it got me to thinking about how much more prevalent “passing” for white must have been in the past. I’m wondering how common it was for someone to be legitimately outed (and by that I mean someone who really did have Black ancestry, not just someone who was alleged to have had some), and who might have been the last person to have this happen to them?
I’m not counting someone who learns, accidentally, that they have Black ancestry. I’m only counting someone who knew they did, and purposely tried to hide it.
As for who would count as being “Black”, I’d say use whatever convention was common in the state or area the person lived.
I’m obviously thinking of the US here, but similar occurrences in other countries might be interesting. I’d rather avoid the whole issue of Jews in Germany, though, as that could easily be the subject for another thread.
Well, if you count someone outing themselves, there’s Carol Channing. She spent her life passing for white, fearful that if her racial background became known it would hurt her Hollywood and Broadway carrers. She revealed only in 2002, at the age of 81, that her father was half black.
Not a black issue, but there was a minor controversy about Jessica Alba. Some people were saying she was deliberately concealing her Hispanic background to avoid being typecast as Latina characters.
Extraordinary. The one drop rule was a crazy, ignorant thing. Good thread as I find this subject to be very interesting. Other than In Twain’s Pudden Head Wilson I have no recollection of someone who tried to “pass”.
As an aside, my wife is bi-racial (black father, white mother) and I am white ( From Ireland). She considers our son to be white so probably explains why I find it so interesting.
I would count that. And very interesting. I didn’t know! And looking at her wikipedia page, I see that her father was “half black”, as you say, but we should keep in mind that “Black” in the US almost always indicates someone with some European ancestry. Her “Black” father could have been more European than African in ancestry and still be considered “Black”.
There’s also the famous “Iron Eyes Cody” who was the Crying Indian in those early 1970s environmental ads-- Sicilian, with no Native American ancestry.
During her earlier career Mariah Carey was cagy about her background. I imagine she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as so often happens w/ female singers.
There were quite a few Europeans posing as Indians in the 20th century. Perhaps even more famous than the Crying Indian was the world-renowned conservationist Grey Owl, who was exposed only after he died in 1938.
Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji, the sone of a British woman (probably in part descended from Eastern European Jews) and a Kenyan man of Indian (Gujarati) descent. He couldn’t get much acting work (or at least feared he couldn’t) until he changed his name to Ben Kingsley. Once he had done this, no one ever thought he was Indian until Richard Attenborough, totally ignorant of his ancestry, cast him as Gandhi because he saw him and thought that he could be made up to look a lot like Gandhi. Which turned out to be quite true.
I don’t think Kingsley was so much passing as trying to avoid being type-cast, as many actors with distinctively foreign names have done in the past. As far as I know, he made no effort to conceal his ancestry, bur just didn’t advertise it. He normally (i.e. without makeup and costuming) looks like a perfectly ordinary British man with brown eyes, and perhaps slightly harsh features (that could just be good acting).
Lena Horne was passed off as white in her early 1940’s films. She sounded white when she sang in those films.
Then in the 1960’s she suddenly got very out spoken about being black. Drastically changed her singing style and created a whole new revitalized second career.
You really need to provide a citation for this, because it doesn’t jibe with the reality I know. Lena Horne starred in all-black movie musicals in the early 1940s, and was in all-black productions on Broadway in the late 1930s. Her blackness was well-known well before the 1960s, and in fact films in which she appeared were edited with Southern sensibilities in mind. Indeed, she is admired in the black community for not passing and for standing up for civil rights throughout her career. For example, it is quite well known that she demanded better treatment of black soldiers during WWII.
Well known, that is, among people who actually know the woman’s biography.
And as far as Mariah Carey goes, she has never denied her racial background.
Writer Anatole Broyard was not “outed” while he was alive, but he was a semi-famous person whose secret history was eventually discovered.
Jennifer Beals is biracial (her father is black and her mother is Irish-American). Because of her relatively light complexion, she’s never been typecast into “black” roles.
Jennifer Beals never tried to pass though. I remember the publicity when Flashdance came out. It was made clear that Beals was partly of black ancestry.
More famous than that is former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, Ward Churchill, who basically built his professional career around being Native American, in spite of probably not having any Native ancestry.
If Mariah tried to pass, she did it way, way early. I remember the first time I heard “Vision of Love” I was impressed and when I saw her picture, I said, “She looks’s black,” and someone told me her father was part black and part Latino. So if she did hide it, by the time she had her first hit, it was well known
While using that Alba? May as well try to pass for Polish-American with an O’Donnell… That sounds like the kind of stuff thought up by people who thinks that “Hispanic” equals “short, wide and brown”.
Different but related animal - in Spanish, the sentence tirar de la manta, “to pull the blanket”, means “to reveal”. I always thought it meant as in a blanket on a bed, but according to a tourist guide in Tudela (Navarra, Spain), it refers to a piece of cloth thats in the cathedral there, embroidered with names of people whose foreparents were known to have converted from Judaism (18th century IIRC). People would “pull the blanket open” to check the names. I don’t know about the sentence itself, as the source isn’t very trustworthy*, but I’ve seen the “blanket”. One of the names in it is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero :eek: - but it’s purely a coincidence, we’re reasonably sure the current president of Spain isn’t that old. I find it quite sad that Navarra was the last of the Spanish Kingdoms in expelling the Jews, and then we’d go and do something like this.
This same woman mistook the mountain goats (Capra Hispanica) on the cloisters of the cathedral for unicorns and claimed that the halls in the cathedral which people call the Sinagogue “were no such thing; they were a series of halls used by the local Jews for religious and civil ceremonies, not a temple”… One of the other people in the tour eventually asked “ok, before you said that Tudela was founded in the 10th century… now you tell us that this church here is from the 6th and that we’ll see Roman coins which were found in what appear to have been the Roman baths, which is which?” Response: “oh well, there seems to have been a market or something…”
(According to local lore and not to idiots like this one, the Cathedral was in use simultaneously albeit different rooms as Mosque, Sinagogue and Cathedral - she didn’t deny the Mosque, but failed Judaism 101 with the Sinagogue, Christianity 201 when she claimed that St Anne was St Joseph’s mom and Spanish Biology 101 with those goats) (the local patrons are St Anne and St Joachim, we’re reasonably sure we know who they were, even if their names are invented)
Again, didn’t try to pass, but the fact that Wentworth Miller (theeeeee hottest man in the world, right?) is black took me by surprise. His father is black and his mother is white. He said in an interview once that he feels stuck in between both worlds.
I think if you’re white, you’re white, and if you’re black, you’re black. I don’t like this ‘one-drop’ rule. “Passing” for something you are not is a personal matter, not a skin tone thing.
I’m half white and half black myself, and I definitely have an eye for such things. It is surprising for me when people CAN’T tell that people are mixed…Wentworth Miller is about the mixediest mixed looking guy of all time IMO.
If I am reading you right your first sentence contradicts your second sentence quite a bit. I disagree with your first one as too simplistic either way though. There is something special about race relations in the U.S. where someone would say something like that, no one ever says “If you’re Native you’re native, if you’re latino you’re latino” because they don’t contradict each other, but there must be something special about blackness or whiteness where they must be kept sacred and seperated or we don’t know how to treat those people. Just my personal observation.
I generally dislike judging others for “passing” or not, unless someone lies about a direct question about their ancestry. I could go through life and most white people wouldn’t know I am half black, but there are surprisingly few un-awkward ways to say “JUST SO YOU KNOW THOUGH I DON’T LOOK LIKE IT MY MOM IS TOTALLY BLACK GUYS” in casual conversation.
Like any other academic, Ward Churchill’s professional career was built on his academic research which, as it presumably followed the normal blind peer review process, was accepted on its merits and not on the ethnic background of its author. The idea that he used his purported Indian ancestry to bolster acceptance of his work was deemed by his university’s Research Misconduct Committee to be unworthy of investigation. At any rate, he doesn’t appear to have ever claimed that he had more than a small fraction of Indian ancestry.
