Category: Passing

  • The fascist who ‘passed’ for white The Guardian 2007-04-04 Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist Lawrence Dennis was a leading light in the American fascist movement of the 1930s. He was a fan of Hitler and a self-avowed anti-semite. Now a new book reveals that he was actually black—although even his wife didn’t know. Gary…

  • This article presents various aspects of light-skinned black people “passing” for whites by examining the 1919 case of Francis Patrick Dwyer’s suit to annul his marriage to Clara McCary Dwyer after becoming suspicious that their new baby boy had Negro blood. While Dwyer was correct, he failed to win his suit, and his wife was…

  • This article examines Henry Ossawa Tanner’s complex sense of his own racial identity. Tanner’s conflict was born of the fact that in his personal adult life he walked a fragile line between his whiteness and his blackness; in France, he systematically worked to remove race from the equation of his life. The author also identifies…

  • Don Lemon: It only takes one drop Cable News Network (CNN) In America: You define America. What defines you? 2012-01-15 Don Lemon, Anchor CNN Newsroom This piece is part of a three-part series tied to the (1)ne Drop Project. (CNN) – For years, the woman on the left in the photograph below could not be…

  • Passing as Black? Some Initial Thoughts… brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between 2010-12-17 Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology Seattle Pacific University Thomas Chatterton Williams has written an intriguing article highlighting recent trends of multiracial children “passing as black.” If I let myself go I will write a short book on this before I…

  • Skin Bleach And Civilization: The Racial Formation of Blackness in 1920s Harlem The Journal of Pan African Studies Voume 4, Number 4 (June 2011) pages 47-80 Jacob S. Dorman, Assistant Professor of African American History and American Studies University of Kansas Unlike previous scholarship on skin-bleaching advertisements conducted by scholars such as Lawrence Levine and…

  • It was the New Graduate Student Reception for my class, the first social event of my first semester in the best graduate department in my field in the country. I was full of myself, as we all were, full of pride at having made the final cut, full of arrogance at our newly recorded membership…

  • Everybody passes. Not just racial minorities. As Marcia Dawkins explains, passing has been occurring for millennia, since intercultural and interracial contact began. And with this profound new study, she explores its old limits and new possibilities: from women passing as men and able-bodied persons passing as disabled to black classics professors passing as Jewish and…

  • Peola: “There’s nothing wrong in passing. The wrong is the world that makes it necessary.” Fannie Hurst, Imitation of Life, P. F. Collier, (1933): 244.

  • The Autobiography of an Ex-White Woman: Bliss Broyard’s One Drop Mother Jones 2007-11-09 Debra J. Dickerson Suddenly, white people are fascinated by race. Good for them. Good for all of us? If you haven’t read Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, you must. No matter how well…