A few words on the subject of race . . .

2. A few words on the subject of race . . . The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks You can’t just point out my people by skin color . . . Zora Neal Hurston, Dust on the Tracks People don’t mix races; they abandon them or pick them. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby Now people choose their identities. Now people choose to be Black. They used to be born Black. That’s not true anymore. Toni Morrison, Interview in Essence Race consciousness is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men. Zora Neal Hurston, qtd in Gates, “Writing Race”

3. A Definition of passing . . . • to employ deception in order to participate in an activity or organization which would not be permissible if the truth were known

4. Who’s Passing for Whom? • In the late 1940s, several “race” experts put out estimates on the numbers of black passers in the U.S. Sociologist Dr. John H. Burma conservatively suggested that while some “110,000 blacks lived on the white side of the color line, . . . [only] 2,500 – 2,700 passed annually. Walter White, a light-skinned black writer, author of, among many other things, “Why I Remain a Negro,” estimated that “annually about 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear into white society.” Roi Otterly, in “Five Million U.S. White Negroes” declared that 40,000 passed annually.

5. Pre Emancipation Passing Literature: • Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860, reprinted 1969), by William Craft. • Clotel or The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the U.S. by William Wells Brown.

6. Anglo Saxon Clubs of America • In “Racial Passing,” Randall Kennedy describes the birth of “Anglo Saxon Clubs of America.” The clubs wanted to extend Jim Crow segregation laws and focus on “ferreting out passers, especially those with children who attended public white schools.” In addition, they fought for legislative dictates narrowing the definition of whiteness and for tighter controls to oversee the issuing of marriage licenses. Kennedy reports that “Anglo Saxon clubs wanted Virginia to take additional steps to purify its white population, but were thwarted finally by opponents who maintained that, unless restrained, the clubs exacting racialism would lead to a situation in which some of the leading white families of the state would have to be reclassified as colored – indeed, a situation in which few “real” white people would be left” (160).

7. Economic Discrimination: • Adrian Piper, in an essay relating her personal experiences of being repeatedly taken for white even though she never wanted to pass, maintains that being black in America is a “social condition more than an identity. . . . Racial classification in this country functions to restrict the distribution of goods, entitlements and status as narrowly as possible, to those whose power is already entrenched” (qtd in Zackodnik 45). • According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s [1] current population survey, black men earn a median salary of $30, 409, to white men’s $38, 869. Black men earn, on average, 22% less per year than white men. The figures are even more unequal in the comparison of black women to white men.

8. All Men 37, 339 (100%) Men White 38,869 (100%) Black 30,409 (78%) Asian & Pacific Islander 40,946 (105%) Hispanic 24,638 (63%) All Women 27,355 (73%) Women White 28,080 (72%) Black 25, 117 (64%) Asian & Pacific Islander 31,156 (80%) Hispanic 20,527 (52%) 2000 Median Annual Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers

9. Passing Literature – Legal Cases: • Alice Jones against Leonard Kip Rhinelander filed in New York 1924. • Anna D. Van Houten against Asa P. Morse filed in 1890 in Massachusetts.

10. Investigating the Morality of Passing : • Jesse Fauset’s Plum Bun • William Dean Howells Imperative Duty

11. Passing for Economic Gain • Jesse Fauset’s Plum Bun • Vera Caspary’s White Girl • James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

12. Choosing Not to Pass –Racial Loyalty • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola LeRoy • Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal • Unlike those novels in which characters choose to pass, Angel More, in Plum Bun and Solaria Cox inThe White Girl, for example, and then are destined to a life of suffering, Iola’s choice is characterized as noble and worthy. She is rewarded with happiness and fulfilling work because she chose race loyalty over personal gain.

13. Xavier Pic’s Letter: . . . My wife was a good Ojibway woman and now my dear dauter Sidonie has married a Frenchman, . . . and while I am proud of negroes, they are such a brave passionat people, the Southern States have made a curse of life to the dark people and I do not want to have Sidonie or her children to be known as blacks and to suffer as my people do suffer there and planely told they are beasts. I ask for her little ones only a chance. So please always refer to me now as French. I’m getting a little old for wilderness work and my purposes are almost done and do not want to think of my grandchildren under the lash, so please do not say anything about my color and how black it is . . . Though Indian ladies seem to admire the color very much and all the warriors say I am first white man ever come to their country. Mes estimes les plus distinguees Xavier Pic

14. What is a Race Traitor? “Someone who is nominally classified as white, but who defies the rules of whiteness so flagrantly as to jeopardize his or her ability to draw upon the privileges of white skin.” Race traitors “make it impossible to pretend that all those who look white are loyal to the system of racial oppression.” – Noel Ignatiev

15. Toni Morrison’s short story – “Recitatif” • In Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” no easy answers are available to questions about the benefits of passing. In fact, the point of the story is for the reader to figure out who is passing for whom. Morrison’s story opens with two girls meeting each other in a public foster care institution. When they meet, one girl says about the other “It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning – it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race” (243). But we never find out which woman is which race.

16. Essentialist and Constructivist Positions on Race • “For the essentialist the body occupies pure, pre-social, pre-discursive space. The body is real, accessible, transparent; it is always there and directly interpretable through the senses. • For the constructionist, the body is never simply there, rather it is composed of a network of effects continually subjected to sociopolitical determination.” (Fuss qtd. in Hunter, 301).

17. The Effects of Reading Passing Literature . . . Passing literature encourages readers to focus on the constructed nature of race and race relations and creates the possibility for the generation of more race traitors like Vestal Kingsblood. If we can normalize the idea that racial identity and racial relationships in our culture are flexible and fluid rather than fixed and pre-determined, we are more likely to undertake the task of working to shift them away from privileging whites and towards justice and quality for all members of the human race.