The complexities of passing

Chaning G, Joseph - Rachel Dolezal—the disgraced former head of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP—with her fake frizzy hair and fake tan complexion, saying on national television that she chooses to “identify as black,” though none of her immediate ancestors were.

Her decisions, though bizarre, problematic and maybe even dangerous, raise important questions for me about race, as an idea and as an experience, in our country. Some of those questions are for Dolezal herself, and will probably never be answered, like: “Why are you really doing this?” Other questions are for myself and for society at large, like: “What is this social construct we call race?” and “Will there ever be a time—as Haile Selassie famously put it—when the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes?”

Science tells us that race is not a biological reality but a socially constructed one. (After all, humans came from Africa and all of us can probably trace our ancestry to someone, however distant, who would be considered black in modern times.) And because race is a social construction, many of our daily perceptions and experiences of it are based on what we see. When you or I—or the police—look at someone like Michael Brown or Eric Garner or Rekia Boyd or Rachel Dolezal—we assign them a racial category and treat them accordingly.

In her work for the NAACP, Dolezal was black as long as the people around her agreed that she was, just as we collectively agree that rectangular strips of paper and flat, circular bits of metal are money. Since her outing by relatives, Dolezal is not black so long as society chooses not to see her that way anymore. But it is undeniable that Dolezal did for some time successfully pass for black....
We may feel that race is immutable, but history has proved it to be an amorphous and constantly shifting idea.

For Daniel Sharfstein, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University, “what defines who is white and what defines who is black has always changed over time.”

Until 1895, he told me in an interview, “you could be black in North Carolina and walk across the border and be white in South Carolina”—because of the states’ differing legal definitions of blackness.

As a bevy of scholars has noted, race passers have a long history in the United States, including whites who passed for black. In some instances, the passers were white journalists who went undercover, posing as black to investigate racism in the South. Those investigations are described at length in Pulitzer Prize winner Ray Sprigle’s 1949 book “In the Land of Jim Crow” and John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book “Black Like Me.”

But there are many other examples.

“We can go back 200 years and find white women who swore they were African-American so they could marry black men without fear of persecution,” Sharfstein said. Later, during the Harlem Renaissance, he noted, the white wife of the conservative black journalist George Schuyler said she had found it was just easier for her and the other white women she knew in interracial marriages to say they were light-skinned.

In “Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line,” Martha Sandweiss, a professor of history at Princeton University, writes about Clarence King, a 19th-century white geologist and explorer from a prominent family in Newport, R.I., whose father was a wealthy trader. King lived for years as James Todd, a black railroad worker, in order to pursue a common law marriage with an African-American woman named Ada Copeland, who learned her husband’s secret only as he lay dying.

But Sandweiss makes a distinction between what King did, at a time when there were laws that prescribed racial boundaries, and what Dolezal has done.

“We need to think really differently about passing in the past as opposed to identity appropriation or identity shifting that we see now,” she told me. “Now we no longer have those legal lines.”

Instead, “the categories that are being transgressed are social and they are cultural,” she said. “They are lines that lots of people intuitively think they understand”—and thus they believe they “have a right to police who crosses in and who crosses out.”

Some researchers—like Marcia Alesan Dawkins, a communications professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg and the author of “Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity”—have argued that passing is something we all do.

“Everyone passes in some form or another,” Dawkins told me, “whether it’s in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, religious or political affiliation, sexuality, age, class, nationality, ability or state of mind.”

But in Dolezal’s case, “passing represents both a profound creativity and lack of creativity on her part,” she said. “The creativity comes from creating a believable persona. ... The lack of creativity is that in order to fight racism she clings to the very ideas about race and identity politics that contribute to the problem—that biological race exists and that it’s race, rather than a racist cultural, political and economic system that makes people different.”

According to her research, Dawkins added, people pass either because they want to achieve some important goal or to, paradoxically, become the person they feel they truly are. For Dolezal, both factors seem to be in play.

Perhaps what is most perplexing about her choice, though, is that it seems so unnecessary.

“In many ways, this feels like the ultimate throwback,” Sharfstein said. “In 2015, it’s beyond debate that white people can form meaningful relationships with African-Americans. They can study and teach black history and black culture, and they can raise black children without any reason for them to feel compelled to claim they are African-American. … You can find countless white people who have sacrificed all kinds of things, including their lives, without having to make the choices she has made.”

Though the racial categories may arguably matter less than they once did, for millions of Americans, social and cultural lines still remain vitally important. The point is illustrated, in part, by a 2014 analysis of the census forms of 168 million Americans. In the study, the Pew Research Center found that more than 10 million people had checked different racial or Hispanic-origin boxes in the 2010 U.S. census than they had checked in the census 10 years prior. In particular, the study showed, Hispanic Americans are increasingly identifying themselves as white.

“The data provide new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish, who were not universally considered to be white…,” Nate Cohn wrote in The New York Times. “The data also call into question whether America is destined to become a so-called minority-majority nation, where whites represent a minority of the nation’s population. Those projections assume that Hispanics aren’t white, but if Hispanics ultimately identify as white Americans, then whites will remain the majority for the foreseeable future.”

MORE