Passing (racial identity)

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In the racial politics of North America, racial passing refers to a member of a racial group choosing to identify with a different race than that by which some might classify him. The term was used especially in the US to describe a person of mixed race heritage assimilating to the white majority.

With social changes in terms of increasing diversity and shifts in attitudes and laws in the US, "passing" in this racial sense seems to have become less needed.

Contents 1 Examples 2 Black-to-white passing 2.1 Reality 2.2 Literary rhetoric 3 Tri-racial isolates 4 Commentary 5 Footnotes 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Examples

US civil rights leader Walter Francis White (who was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and very pale skinned), the chief executive of the NAACP from 1929 until his death in 1955, was of mixed race; five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. When he investigated lynchings and hate crimes, he passed as white to gather information more freely and sometimes to protect himself in volatile environments.

Krazy Kat creator George Herriman was a Creole of partial African-American ancestry who claimed Greek heritage throughout his adult life. Other light-skinned African-Americans of mixed race, such as Fredi Washington, chose not to pass.

The writer and critic Anatole Broyard was also Louisiana Creole, who chose to pass for white in his life in New York City and Connecticut. He married a woman of European descent. In 2007 his daughter Bliss Broyard published a memoir about her father and her exploration of family mysteries entitled One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets.

In the 19th and early 20th-centuries, some African Americans claimed Portuguese, Arab or Native American ancestry, to find a way through the racial divisions of the society, especially in the South. In Louisiana people of color who passed as white were referred to as passe blanc.

In the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, people of mixed-race who married whites were defying anti-miscegenation laws in several states. Americans far removed from areas of racial diversity might think it unlikely that a woman who appeared African American would have a child who appeared white.^[1] Of course in literal terms, it would only take one white parent to make a child who looks (is able to pass as) white. There were many such examples among the children of enslaved women, who had been fathered by white slaveholders, their sons or overseers. ^[2]

In a reversal of the usual pattern, some people of European ancestry have chosen to pass as members of other races. Environmentalist Grey Owl was actually a white British man named Archibald Belaney, rather than the First Nations Canadian he claimed to be. He claimed he was half Apache and half Scottish to explain European aspects of his appearance. A similar activist was Iron Eyes Cody, who was of Sicilian descent.^{[citation needed]}

As a different contemporary example, controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill claims to be Native American. The tribe in which he claims membership says his affiliation is only "honorary".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Black-to-white passing

[edit] Reality

As of the 2000 census, it's been estimated between 35,000 and 50,000 young adults every year, who previously were identified by their parents as black, switch to identifying as as white or Hispanic. However, his statistical extrapolations are not conclusive.^[3] There are several ways of measuring this, but the most straightforward is simply to ask large numbers of people how they "racially" self-identify, repeat the question every few years, and then count how many changed their answer from "Black" to something else. The Departments of Labor and of Health and Human Services do precisely this (along with many other questions) in longitudinal studies meant to track life-long earnings and health, respectively, of large numbers of Americans. For example, the Department of Labor's NLS79 National Longitudinal Survey has interviewed 12,686 young men and women yearly since 1979 to measure their career progress. Each year they are asked the same hundred or so questions. Between 1979 (when they were 14 to 22 years old) and 1998, 1.87 percent of those who had originally answered "Black," switched to answering the interviewer's "race" question with either "White," "I don't know," or "other." This comes to 0.098 percent per year. Extrapolated to the Black census 2000 population of 36 million, this comes to about 35,000 individuals per year. But with the statistical margin of error, the true figure could be as low as zero.^{[citation needed]}

Another approach is to start with the 0.7 percent African admixture found in the white U.S. population today. Compared to other New World nations, the United States has been astonishingly successful at preserving two distinct genetic populations: one of mostly African ancestry, the other overwhelmingly European. All other New World nations that imported African slaves have unimodal Afro-European genetic admixture scatter diagrams. Indeed, two-thirds of white Americans have no detectable African ancestry at all, in part because of the many new immigrants to the country in the 19th and 20th centuries. But some argue that one-third of white Americans do have detectable African DNA (averaging 2.3 percent). Other scholars question the validity of assigning racial labels to DNA.^[4]

A third approach would be to use the Philadelphia rate at which European-looking children are born into the black community (one out of every 500) and extrapolate this to the national black yearly cohort.^[5] This yields about 72,000 individuals per year as of census 2000. Most of these, of course, might choose not to switch. Once again, though, the margin of statistical error could bring this figure down to zero.

Finally, Joel Williamson suggests yet another approach. It is based on the assumption that women are less likely than men to cross the color line permanently. Approximately equal numbers of male and female infants are born. But from age 16, millions of African-American men disappear from the census but women do not. In 2000, this came to 2.77 million individuals. Where did they go? The assumption of this method is that they redefined themselves as white. This approach yields 0.1019 percent per year or about 37,000 individuals per year as of census 2000. The statistical margin of error once again could bring this figure down to zero. This methodology was refuted on additional grounds in the 1940s by several scholars, who argued that the number of Negroes "passing" from 1930 to 1940 was very small, probably less than 2,600 per year.^[6]

Mixed marriages have become more common as US society has become more diverse. And most historians know that in British North America, interracial marriage was far more common between 1607 and 1691 than in the centuries after it was first outlawed. So it is fair to ask whether the African DNA admixture found in white Americans today is merely the result of recent intermarriage or perhaps just an echo of the intermarrying 17th century, rather than evidence of the continual, steady passing of biracials into white society in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

There are three reasons to think that the African admixture found in today's white Americans is the result of an ongoing process and not the remnant of a one-time event, either recent or long ago. First, as mentioned above, longitudinal studies show that the current rate of openly avowed Black-to-White identity-switching would suffice to yield the observed admixture only if it had always been going on.

Second, Americans tend to label first-generation children of interracial marriages as "Black." Consequently, each such child introduces a half-person's worth of White genes into the Black community. If this White-to-Black gene flow that we know has been going on for 400 years (in the form of the children of interracial unions) had not been balanced by an equal Black-to-White flow, African Americans would have visually vanished by genetic assimilation, as did Afro-Mexicans by 1800.

The third argument comes from molecular anthropology. It comes from observing linkage disequilibrium. This term denotes the extent to which European and African genetic markers are randomly scattered throughout a person's DNA. The DNA of a first-generation biracial child (a child with one European parent and one Sub-Saharan African parent) will have African markers in large clumps, separated from equally large clumps of European markers. But with each subsequent generation of intermarriage, the African and European markers become more mixed and scattered until, after several generations, they are thoroughly mixed. A recent one-time wave of intermarriage (since the 1955-65 civil rights movement, say) would result in uniformly high linkage disequilibrium in admixed Americans (clumped markers). This is not observed. An ancient one-time wave of intermarriage—as in the seventeenth century—would result in uniformly low linkage disequilibrium in admixed Americans (scattered markers). This is not observed either. An ongoing slow but steady Black-to-White genetic leakage across the color line for 400 years would result in a distinctive pattern of linkage disequilibrium distribution (clumps of every size occurring with equal frequency). This, in fact, is what is observed.

Some people are startled by what to them seems a high rate of Black-to-White endogamous-group switching over the past four centuries, a rate that is still going on. They ask, "how can so many people falsify their paper trail and cut all family ties like that?" First, a paper trail indicating "racial" identity was a transitory phenomenon in U.S. history, lasting only from about 1880 to about 1965. Most nineteenth-century births were not recorded on civil birth certificates, but rather with local churches. Only five states (Connecticut, Hawaii, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas) put infant "race" on birth certificates today. Some states never did so, and most stopped doing so in the late 1960s. Similarly, neither driver's licenses nor voter registration cards record "racial" identity in most jurisdictions today. This is precisely why "racial" profiling is so controversial. In Florida, for example, neither the state voter registration web site nor the Flagler County voter registration card has any entry for "race," while the Alachua County card does. The few civil records today that capture one's "race" (jobs, school matriculation, etc) are voluntary. One can check off or write in whatever you want and, with one exception (EEOC claims), will face virtually no scrutiny.

Most of the individuals who redefine themselves from black to white or Hispanic make no secret of their partial African ancestry. They just do not feel that this trivial fact should stop them from adopting a "racial" self-identity that matches their appearance. There is no need to "cut all family ties and walk away." In fact, given that all the methods of estimating the rate of black-to-white passing converge on the same 0.10-to-0.14 percent per year figure, legendary tales of "cutting all family ties" and deception more likely belong to the realm of fictional "passing" novels than to the reality of the USA's notoriously mobile society.

[edit] Literary rhetoric

As mentioned above, Black-to-White passing is seen as reprehensible by most Americans today[], but this was not always the case. Attitudes towards the idea of someone redefining himself or herself as White despite having been born into the Black community changed around 1840 as a consequence of the 1830s invention of the one-drop rule. (See Who is African American?) This is because the concept of passing for white is an inseparable aspect of the one-drop rule.

In this context, passing literature refers to novels, plays, or short stories in which a European-looking character pretends to be a member of the White endogamous group but is "really" on the Black side of the color line. All three elements are essential: (1) Some African ancestry, (2) predominantly European appearance, and (3) pretense or concealment. Stories about European slaves were not uncommon, even before the Reformation. But unless the character actually has some recent African ancestry, such stories are not of interest here. Similarly, an African slave who wears a mask or otherwise disguises as European-looking in order to escape captivity does not fall within this scope—only characters who look European. Finally, the tale of a European who is accepted without pretense or concealment as fully White, even though everyone around knows of the person's publicly acknowledged African ancestry (like John James Audubon) is not a tale of passing in this context.

Passing literature can exist only within a readership market that accepts the one-drop rule. Cultures (such as Hispanic or Muslim societies), where a European-looking person with an African-looking grandparent is considered legitimately White, lack passing literature (as defined by the three above elements) because they lack a one-drop rule of invisible Blackness. We shall return to this when we contrast U.S. and Mexican cinematic adaptations of Fannie Hurst's novel, Imitation of Life. The earliest non-fictional usage of the concept of passing, as defined by the above three elements (African ancestry, European appearance, pretense) was in advertisements for runaway slaves.

The earliest fictional use of the three-part concept was in the French novel Marie; ou, L'Esclavage aux États-Unis [Marie; or, Slavery in the United States] (Paris: 1835) by Gustave de Beaumont. It is apparently the first passing novel ever published.^[7] Its narrator, Ludovic, falls in love with the title character, who turns out to have a touch of African ancestry through her Louisiana Colored Creole grandparent. The novel describes the racial intolerance of the North with such lines as:

Public opinion, ordinarily so indulgent to fortune-seekers who conceal their names and previous lives, is pitiless in its search for proofs of African descent.... There is but one crime, of which the guilty bear everywhere the penalty and the infamy; it is that of belonging to a family reputed to be of color.—Though the color may be effaced, the stigma remains. It seems as if men could guess it, when they could no longer see it. There is no asylum so secret, no retreat so secure as to conceal it.

In Marie, the author does not agree with the views of his own characters. The characters are immersed in a society that enforces the one-drop rule. The author, on the other hand, considers the notion to be an inexplicable Americanism. Marie's characters are portrayed as struggling for acceptance, not as engaging in malicious pretense. The novel was written by a Frenchman and published in France for a French readership. Its tone is that of "look at the bizarre customs of those strange Americans," rather than, "look at these people pretending to be White." Nevertheless, Marie is important because it is the first literary indication that a unique and unprecedented social ideology, the one-drop rule, had recently arisen in the United States.

The first two American-written novels about passing in the above sense are Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) by William Wells Brown and The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb. William Wells Brown was a former slave and an established author who had published the autobiographical Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave in 1847. Frank J. Webb, a freeborn African-American, was a newcomer to the reading public. The two novels differ in several ways.

Clotel is about slavery. Its protagonist (Thomas Jefferson's slave daughter) escapes captivity, passes for White in the North, but then returns to the South to rescue her own daughter and dies in the attempt. Most of the novel does not focus upon the pretense of Whiteness, but is instead a pastiche of slave tales culled from the author's own experiences, hearsay, journalism, and other fiction (including the acknowledged lifting of material from The Quadroons, an 1842 novel by Lydia Mary Child that is about miscegenation, not passing). Clotel lacks the unity customary to novels and seems disjointed to the modern reader. Nevertheless, it is the first known piece of literature depicting a society that considers Blackness to be an intangible trait. It is the first to portray people (both Black and White, it turns out) who believe that a European-looking person of undetectable African ancestry is a member of the Black endogamous group nonetheless. That the book was a success is persuasive evidence that most of its readers felt the same way.

The Garies and Their Friends is about life in freedom in the North, not about slavery in the South. Although it abounds in sub-plots (more than are customary in most modern novels), it is more tightly written than Clotel and its sub-plots either illuminate or advance the main narrative. The tale focuses on passing by its title couple, and its sub-plots depict different forms of passing (accidental, deliberate, through ignorance, etc.). Although it was published four years after Clotel, The Garies and Their Friends is credited by most scholars with inventing the literary theme of passing.

Clotel and The Garies and Their Friends are similar in that they were the first successful novels published by African-Americans, and yet they are almost universally ignored in Black studies departments today. This is because, as suggested above, their ideology is repellent to most modern African Americans. None of the characters who engage in passing in these two novels feels any guilt or remorse for the act. Some (usually delicate Victorian females like Clotel herself) sincerely want to be accepted as White. Others (usually defiant self-sacrificing Victorian men) consider it a justified deceit upon an unjust society. Modern critics see the characters' lack of guilt as a symptom of a "psychology of imitation and implied inferiority," and that it reveals the authors' "unconscious desire to be white" and "unabashed allegiance to Anglo-Saxon lineage." According to M. Giulia Fabi, the characters' lack of guilt "have had crippling repercussions on [the novels'] reception among scholars of African American literature to this day."

U.S. attitudes towards Black-to-White passing changed after the Civil War. The number of "passing" novels written by African-Americans soared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Although often set in the lower south, they were almost invariably written by northerners and, in contrast to antebellum passing novels, they invariably portray endogamous-group switching as morally reprehensible.

Among these are: Passing, a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen about a light-skinned African-American woman posing as white (ISBN 0-14-243727-1). (See Nella Larsen for a discussion.) Jessie Redmon Fauset's novel Plum Bun of the same year and Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel Imitation of Life featured similar plots to Passing, and the latter was made twice into successful films by Universal Pictures, first in 1934, and later in 1959 (more about this later). Recent passing narratives include Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain (ISBN 0-375-72634-9) (2000) and Scott Turow's Ordinary Heroes.

To be sure, some characters, such as Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen's Passing, seem comfortable with their position on the White side of America's endogamous color line, but in the end, they receive their comeuppance for their transgression. (Students love to debate whether, in Passing's final dramatic scene, Clare accidentally fell to her death from the sixth-floor window, jumped in suicide, or was pushed by Irene Redfield, the heroine who refused to pass.) As one scholar explains it, "Passing for white has long been viewed as an instance of racial self-hatred or disloyalty. It is predicated, so the argument goes, on renouncing blackness—an 'authentic' identity, in favor of whiteness, an 'opportunistic' one."

The oddity is that class mobility and mobility among ethnic groups is a fundamental component of the "American Dream." If anything, the early twentieth century—the time of Horatio Alger stories and the assimilationist "melting pot" paradigm—saw heightened enthusiasm towards self-improvement. The notion of the "self-made man" was a fundamental component of the "American Dream." In point of fact, Americans born into the Black endogamous group were mobile. Black-to-White endogamous group mobility was and is a hallmark of American society. As explained above, the step has been taken by one African-American youngster out of every thousand in every year of the nation's history.

One would therefore expect critiques of the passing novel genre to notice that authors' hostility to group switching actually denigrates acceptance and embraces intolerance. As one scholar puts it, "The paradoxical coexistence of the cult of the social upstart as 'self-made man' and the permanent racial identification and moral condemnation of the racial passer as 'imposter' constitutes the frame within which the phenomenon of passing took place." The fact is that, since the turn of the 20th century, scholarly interpretations have almost universally supported the authorial consensus that switching from an African-American ethnic identity to, say Irish-American, Italian-American, or Hispanic, is akin to treason. As one exceptional analyst puts it, "Though assimilation is hardly an uncontested component of ethnic identity, the assimilated ethnic rarely faces the kind of hostility—either within the narrative itself or in the critical discourse surrounding it—faced by the passing character." As an educator of the time wrote in her diary, "the unwritten law was that Negroes should form a solid unit against the white man. ... Passing over to whites was regarded as betrayal."

The hatred and revulsion towards passing that was expressed by both Blacks and Whites of the early twentieth century is thought-provoking. You would think that color-line permeability would be embraced and encouraged by those wishing to oppose U.S. racialism. As one scholar puts it, "Understood in [the light of history], passing offers a problematic but potentially legitimate expression of American individualism, one that resists segregation's one-drop logic and thereby undermines America's consciously constructed ideology of racial difference." Apparently, however, this has not been the case in the United States since the Civil War.

Attitudes towards Black-to-White passing are different in other countries due to the lack of an endogamous color line. For example, the 1948 Mexican film "Angelitos Negros" was also a remake of Fannie Hurst's passing novel Imitation of Life. As mentioned above, the novel was filmed twice in the United States, in Imitation of Life (1934 film) with Claudette Colbert and again in Imitation of Life (1959 film) with Lana Turner. The 1948 Mexican version more closely reflects pre-one-drop attitudes that were common in the antebellum lower South, in the upper South and the North before 1829, and in other countries today. The U.S. versions of the film, in contrast, reflect the one-drop rule, which appeared in the North after 1830.

Angelitos Negros was directed by Joselito Rodríguez, starring Pedro Infante, Emilia Guiu, and Rita Montañer. The plot centers on a woman (Guiu), who does not know that she is actually the daughter of the maid (Montañer), who is visibly of part-African ancestry, and the wealthy European-looking landowner. Born blonde, she is brought up as the patron's daughter and never told the truth. Infante plays a famous, typically swarthy, Hispanic-looking singer who marries her. The crisis comes when their daughter is born with African features. She blames him and rejects the child. He raises the child on his own with the help of an Afro-Cuban female friend. In the end, the mother learns the truth of her own ancestry and the family is reconciled. According to Afro-Mexican director and scriptwriter Rodriguez, whose own daughter plays the child, the plot is based on the Fannie Hurst novel Imitation of Life.

Comparing Angelitos Negros with either U.S. version of Imitation of Life reveals why "passing" novels are unintelligible outside of the United States. In the American version of the story, the crisis comes when the "Sarah Jane" character faces a society (including her mother) who insist that she is "really Black." Her desperate attempts to re-define herself as White (she looks completely European, after all), drives her apart from her friends and family. The movie sees her as denying her "true heritage." After her mother's death she apparently comes to understand that she must be true to her "race," and abandon her life as a White woman to live among Blacks. This, in the United States, is presumably a happier ending than "living a lie," as one character puts it. The one-drop rule propaganda inherent in such an assumption belies all rational and quantifiable notions of racial classification.

In the Mexican version, no such issue ever arises. They are all Mexicans of varying degrees of genetic admixture, as most Mexicans are European and Amerindian. The crisis comes when a predominantly European-looking couple has a predominantly African-looking child. The plot plays out as a crisis of social status, not one of personal identity. The movie's theme, of course, is the colorism in Mexican society that makes a dark-complexioned, usually from Amerindian ancestry, child less welcome than a blonde, blue-eyed child. But no character ever questions his or her personal identity. They are all Mexicans. Everyone in the story knows and accepts that they are all of mixed heritage.

Other recent passing narratives include: The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black by Gregory Howard Williams, and Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White by Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone are other non-fiction books on the topic.

Pinky was a 1949 Academy Award-winning film on the topic. Black Like Me is an account by journalist John Howard Griffin about his experiences as a Southern white man passing as a black in the late 1950s. Rock band Big Black released a song regarding this subject called Passing Complexion on their 1986 album Atomizer. The 2000 TV movie A House Divided told the story of a mixed-race woman who was light-skinned enough to pass, but whose mother was a black slave. When the woman's white father attempted to will his property to his mixed-race daughter, the family ran afoul of local laws forbidding property ownership by blacks. 2004 the Wayans brothers featured in the movie White Chicks two black policemen who go undercover as two rich white girls, and are accepted by the white people they come into contact with, including the girls' friends.

In November 2005, Ice Cube and Emmy Award winning filmmaker R. J. Cutler teamed to create the six-part documentary series titled Black. White., which was broadcast on cable network FX. Two families, one black and one white, share a home in the San Fernando Valley for the majority of the show. The Sparks, who are black and hail from Atlanta, Georgia and their son Nick are transformed from black to white at the end of the show, while the Wurgel’s and their daughter Rose are transformed from white to black. "I'm really excited to be a part of a show that explores race in America," Ice Cube said. "'Black. White.’ will force people to challenge themselves and really examine where we stand in terms of race in this country". The show premiered in March 2006.

[edit] Tri-racial isolates

Many communities of mixed racial heritage are scattered throughout the eastern United States. They are called tri-racial isolate groups by anthropologists. Members often claimed to have Indian and European ancestry, although some also were identified in early years as Portuguese or Arab to explain physical characteristics that made them look different from mostly European neighbors. Myths arose about their origins, including links to Turks, the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke, and early Native American tribes. Most of the stories were fantasies.

Extensive research in the late 20th century in original colonial records has documented genealogies and migration patterns of many ancestors of these peoples. In work that has won awards, Paul Heinegg found that most were descended from African Americans free in Virginia during the colonial period. Free African Americans, also called "free people of color" in early 19th century censues migrated to frontier areas in 18th century Virginia and other areas of the Chesapeake Bay Colony. Like their neighbors of European descent, after the Revolution they migrated into North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, and often further west. In frontier areas they appeared to have been accepted by neighbors and were not as bound by racial divisions as in the plantation settlements. He found that 80 percent of the people listed as "other" or "free Negroes" and "free people of color" in North Carolina in censuses from 1790-1810 were descended from African Americans free in Virginia during the colonial period. Those were born mostly of relationships freely chosen between white women, free or indentured servants, and African or African American men, indentured servants, free or slave. Such relationships indicated the fluid nature of society before slavery became a defined as a lifelong racial caste. Because the women were white, their children were born free.^[8]

Early scholars of such groups thought they descended from Europeans, Africans who escaped from slavery, and Native Americans who formed their own communities on the frontiers. The first comprehensive survey of these groups was made in 1948 and listed the following: ^[9] listed:

• The Wesorts of southern Maryland;
• The Issues (referring to free Negroes of longstanding, now called Monacans) of Amherst and Rockingham Counties, Virginia;
• The Croatans (since 1953 called Lumbees) of Robeson County North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia;
• The Melungeons of the Southern Appalachians, centered on Hancock County Tennessee;
• The Brass Ankles, Redbones, Red Legs, Turks, and Marlboro Blues of South Carolina;
• The Cajuns of Alabama and Mississippi; and Acadians and Creoles of Louisiana);
• The Redbones of Texas and Louisiana;
• The Guineas, West Hill Indians, Cecil Indians; and
• The Jackson Whites of the Ramapo Mountains of New York and New Jersey, the only group that originally formed outside the South.

Most of the above names were labels given by whites or blacks, not self-labels created by the communities themselves. Some members have considered such nicknames offensive.

The isolated mixed-race communities are important to the study of people's moving from black to white across the color line because they may have formed a "racial escape hatch". In 1971, Carl Degler coined the term "mulatto escape hatch" to describe how Brazilian customs differed from those in the U.S. According to Degler, white Brazilians enjoyed the privileges of whiteness, including looking down on black Brazilians. This "colorism" resembled that of white American supremacy in the South during the Jim Crow era. On the other hand, many white Brazilians have black parents or grandparents and are proud to acknowledge their fractional African ancestry.

In Latin America, generational acculturation and assimilation took place via intermarriage. Medium-brown offspring of even dark parents were no longer "black," but were labeled with any of a half-dozen terms denoting class as much as skin tone. If their descendants were European-looking, they were accepted as white.

This was somewhat similar to the growth of a mixed-race Creole class in Louisiana, especially in New Orleans before the US purchased the territory. Creoles were often educated, and many became wealthy property owners. Beautiful young Creole women often became the official mistresses of white French colonists, who provided settlements for them and their children in a system known as plaçage.

Certainly there were also generations of many mixed-race people in the American South. In the later 18th and 19th century, they were often the children of white fathers and enslaved women, among the most famous or notorious were the slave children of Thomas Jefferson and his father-in-law.

During the Jim Crow era, in the white attempt to regain social dominance after the Civil War, they created more strict legal divisions and separation between whites and blacks. As under slavery, relationships often went in terms of power, such as Strom Thurmond's affair as a young man with his family's black maid who had his daughter. He provided support and for his daughter's education, but kept her a secret during his long life of supporting segregation and states' rights.

[edit] Commentary

According to anthropologist Scott Malcomson, such beliefs are nonsensical.^[10] Only a number of genes encode for the handful of physical traits that Americans consider "racially" important (skin tone, hair curliness, nose width, and the like).^[11] Many studies have demonstrated that many of those genes are submerged or can even vanish in just two or three generations, producing physically European-looking individuals in many features even from biracial parents.^[12] A "mismatch" between U.S. popular culture and what some consider "genetic reality" is of interest to a few anthropologists and historians, and claim it is not commonly found in other societies.^[13][14] The most widely accepted explanation is that at some time in the past, racist Americans became so committed to the notion of "racial" purity implied by the U.S. endogamous color line that they turned their backs on the facts in favor of an outmoded belief system that supported this commitment.^{[citation needed]} This phenomenon can be examined in two sub-topics: first, the factual reality of Black-to-White passing; second, the literary rhetoric of Black-to-White passing.

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] See also

• High yellow
• Hypodescent
• One-drop rule
• Passing (ethnic group)
• Passing (social class)
• Passing (sociology)
• Population Registration Act
• Pencil test
• Coloured
• Race and genetics
• Mestee
• Multiracial
• Miscegenation
• Amalgamation (history)
• Melting pot
• Wigger

[edit] External links

• Passing for White - interviews with African-Americans about personal experiences and strained relationships with relatives
• Living a Double Life - stories of mixed-race Americans who pass as white, Jews who pass as Gentiles and gays who pass as straight
• The Passing of Anatole Broyard - the life story of a famous African-American writer who passed as white for most of his life
• Racial Passing - definitions and examples, history, famous cases and a summary of the theme in works of fiction
• Lucky Brown Cosmetics - early 20th century social pressures to pass as white, taken from the labels of cosmetics
• [1]- artwork that deals with a family history of African Americans passing for White.