That’s great. That’s exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for!
I also think it’s easy to forget what a complicated, multi-deminsional thing “passing” was. It’s not like a person either passed or didn’t pass, as you say, although I’m sure for many it was a hope to “cross the color line” and not have to go back.
There were always “Hollywood Secrets” about White stars who supposedly gave birth to Black babies. As the stories were told, it was because a grandparent had “passed” and that tell-tale drop of Black blood had finally resurfaced.
I can’t even recall who the stories were about, LOL, but it was always a beautiful blonde starlet.
I guess the agents for the starlets were given the task of whisking the baby away, to be raised by others.
The business about “a drop of Black blood” is nonsense. Best bet, if a blonde starlet gave birth to a Black baby, she had a Black boyfriend somewhere.
Scandals were made in Hollywood about biracial couples. One of my favorite stars, Inger Stevens, took her own life because she was not able to stand up to the prejudice of a relationship with someone of another race.
~VOW
Walter White was a light skinned fair haired African American man with blue eyes who used to pass as white when he wanted to. His looks allowed him to infiltrate white society during the course of investigating lynchings in the southern United States for his book Rope and Faggot. I don’t think passing was ever really common. As someone already mentioned, to pass for any length of time you had to abandon the family and friends you grew up with. That’s a tough thing to do.
I don’t have the book at hand, but there’s a recent historical mystery by Barbara Hambly, Dead and Buried, where she notes in the afterword that in Louisiana and other places with large free black populations before the Civil War, two and three generations, descendants would be astonished to discover they had African ancestors. One notable case was a woman who, in 1985, was denied a passport because she listed herself as ‘white’, when her birth certificate listed her mother’s father as ‘black’.
There’s a wonderful novel called “Passing” by Nella Larson. I believe it was published in the 1920s.
His father was from Africa.
Vin Diesel has always been deliberately ambiguous about his ethnic background (as well as very private about most things in his life), and although it’s now known (and on his wiki) that he is indeed ‘part black’, I remember it being a contested point in the early 2000s which ended, I assume, with someone digging up definitive info on his biological dad- he’s never made a statement that I could find mentioning he has African heritage. He’s gone as far as describing himself as ‘a person of color’, but only mentions being Italian specifically.
I’d say this counts as being outed, but of course it’s not a very big deal these days.
The protagonist passes as a white literature professor and is fired/hounded from his job after saying in class that a student who has never shown up is a ghost/spook. He does not out himself as black in his own defense and dies white. His friend (I think played by Gary Sinese) shows up at his funeral and meets the deceased’s very black sister. I forget whether he told the friend he was black, but if he did, it was the only person he told. It was a very interesting movie.
Because some people got upset at his having been more properly called a “Halfrican-American”
A quick Google isn’t turning up the article or the guy’s name, but I remember reading a piece in Newsweek by (IIRC) a college professor who decided to get genetic testing done on himself to learn more about his ancestry. He was from a Louisiana Creole family and believed himself to be mostly African-American and I think had even previously written a “My Turn” piece that had something to do with being African-American. He figured the genetic testing would come back 60% African-American and 40% something else, and was curious what might be in that 40%.
Turns out he was of about 40% Native American ancestry…and about 60% European (mostly Spanish, I think). He called his mother thinking he must have been adopted, but she said she had indeed given birth to him. Eventually he figured out that several generations back his family had decided they might as well be considered black, since they had too much non-European ancestry to be considered white and some of the men in the family were involved with black women which wouldn’t have been acceptable if they had been considered white. So this professor’s ancestors were “passing” as black, and the professor himself was genuinely mistaken about his own ethnic background.
Many, probably most, African-Americans have some European ancestry. Obama isn’t unusual at all in that regard.
Black musician and author James McBride’s 1998 memoir The Color of Water describes his discovery that his “light-skinned” mother was actually a white Jewish woman from a family of Polish immigrants. From the time of her first marriage in the 1940s some family and community members knew or assumed she was white and others thought she was black, so there may have been some “meta-passing” of the type you mention going on at some points.
Ruth McBride Jordan died in 2010 at the age of 88, so she may be the answer to the OP’s question about the most recent practitioner of cross-racial “passing” publicly revealed as such.
Bolding mine.
Odd. I had never known until now that being born in Wichita, Kansas automatically disqualified you from being African-American. You’d think I might have learned that little factoid somewhere along the line…
The mixed-race main character in the novel tries hard to camouflage her African-American ancestry at first, but eventually discovers that she loses a part of herself by trying it. “You don’t know, you can’t realize how much I want to see Negroes,” she tells a friend, explaining her decision to quit trying to pass as all white.
Nella Larsen had a white (European–Denmark, I think) mother and a black (Caribbean) father. I’m not aware that she ever tried to pass as white (not aware that she didn’t, either), but in any case she knew whereof she spoke.
I haven’t seen the film but it’s based on a very good novel by Phillip Roth, of the same name.
There’s definitely some truth to this in regards to white and black American racial perceptions being different. Black people are usually much more accepting about blackness based on background, whereas in my experience whites tend to consider you what you look like, and what your actual background is with much less importance.
Also I notice that white Americans are just less perceptive about mixed people in general. I can count the number of times in my entire life a white person has correctly guessed that I am half black, and many refuse to believe me when told so, but I am not surprised when a black person knows that I am black, and am quite surprised when a black person disbelieves me, it’s quite uncommon. I think whites don’t devote as much time to this type of thinking because they are the majority, but that is just my guess. I would bet white South Africans are better at picking up partial whiteness and blackness than American whites just because they are a minority and race is something they have to think about more.
The first time I ever saw Mariah Carey I assume she was what I would call “black”, which does not mean I think she is straight out of Africa, just at least partially a decendent of African American slaves.
From what I’ve heard his mother didn’t know his father’s ethnic background, just that he wasn’t white.
I did a double-take on reading Annie’s post too, but I think that what she meant is that “African-American” is usually assumed to signify more or less “descended from black ancestors long established in North America, esp. from ancestors who were slaves in the pre-Civil War US”. Obama, of course, doesn’t fit that description, since his black ancestors on his father’s side were never resident in North America and his North American ancestors on his mother’s side weren’t black.
In another sense, of course, you can’t get much more “African-American” than being the US-born child of a parent who is African by birth. In that sense, “African-American” is analogous to, say, “Irish-American” or “German-American” or “Turkish-American”, which is a standard designation for US-born children of Irish or German or Turkish immigrants.
Unless, of course, Annie was just making a joke and we’ve both been whooshed to death.
Some Italian lastnames are Spanish in origin. Some Spanish lastnames are Italian in origin. Shocking, I know, it’s not like we have any common history or have spent more than 2000 years moving back and forth.
This might be one of those unsubstantiated things that we take for granted as being true, but I’ve read that “back in the day”, some white employers would hire black people to spot “passers”. Like, if you were checking in at a hotel, a bellhop would be checking you out, looking for certain signs. I can believe this happened, but I can also see a lot of these spotters looking the other way. It just seemed too risky, with no incentives. If you guess correctly and the passer is tossed out the door, well, you’ve just enabled the oppressor. If you guess incorrectly, you’re in major trouble.
I agree with you that black people, especially those with a heap of ambiguous-looking people in their family, seem to be able to see things that white people do not. I’ve never heard a black person say, “Hey, I didn’t know you were black!” They may assume I’m “mixed”, but the blackness has never been denied. Confused white people sometimes swear they didn’t know. That to me is very strange, but I don’t think they are lying.
And what about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson?
Reading his biography, it seems his upbringing was heavily slanted towards his Polynesian heritage, so I could see how he wouldn’t identify as being Black, in the American sense of the term.
Does he hide the fact that his father had African heritage, though? I thought it was well known, even if he doesn’t spend much, if any, time dwelling on it.