Free at Last?
Commentary
1992-10-01
Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences; Professor of Economics
Brown University
A formative experience of my growing-up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960’s occurred during one of those heated, earnest political rallies so typical of the period. I was about eighteen at the time. Woody, who had been my best friend since Little League, suggested that we attend. Being political neophytes, neither of us knew many of the participants at this rally, which had been called to galvanize the local black community’s response to some pending infringement by the white power structure. Although I no longer remember the offense, I can still vividly recall how very agitated about it we all were, determined to fight the good fight, even to the point of being arrested if it came to that. Judging by his demeanor, Woody was among the most zealous of those present.
Despite his zeal, it took courage for Woody to attend the meeting. Though he often proclaimed his blackness, and though he had a Negro grandparent on each side of the family, he nevertheless looked to all the world like your typical white boy. Everyone assumed as much and I had, too, when we first began playing together nearly a decade earlier, after I had moved into the middle-class neighborhood called Park Manor where Woody’s family had been living for some time.
There were a number of white families on our block when we first arrived; within a couple of years they had all been replaced by aspiring black families like our own. I often wondered why Woody’s parents never moved. Then I overheard his mother declare to one of her new neighbors, “We just wouldn’t run from our own kind.” The comment befuddled me at the time, but somewhat later, while we were watching the movie Imitation of Life on television, my mother explained to me how someone could be black even if he looked white. She told me about people like that in our own family—second cousins living in a fashionable suburb on whom one would never dare simply to drop in because they were “passing for white.” This was my earliest glimpse of the truth that racial identity in America is inherently a social and cultural, not simply a biological, construct—that it necessarily involves an irreducible element of choice.
From the moment I learned of the idea of “passing” I was intrigued (and troubled) by it. I enjoyed imagining my racial brethren surreptitiously infiltrating the citadels of white exclusivity. The fantasy allowed me to believe that, despite all appearances and despite the white man’s best efforts to the contrary, we blacks were nevertheless present, if unannounced, everywhere in American society. But I was also disturbed by the evident implication that for a black, denial of one’s genuine self was a necessary prerequisite to “making it” in American society. What “passing” seemed to say was that it was necessary to choose between racial authenticity and personal success. Also, to my adolescent mind it seemed grossly unfair that, because of my own relatively dark complexion, the option was not available to me!…
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