Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The extent to which elite universities like Columbia worked to keep black students outside their walls makes the accomplishments of Columbia’s hailed “first” black graduates even more impressive, as these students existed within institutions that found identity through racialized exclusivity. That being said, James Parker Barnett’s story highlights a problem with these narratives of “firsts”, not only within Columbia University, but at historically white institutions across the United States. As mentioned above, Columbia’s refusal to admit black students into the University created the conditions that encouraged black students to pass as white, and James Parker Barnett may be a case of just that. However, the only reason we know about James Parker Barnett was because he was caught. There were high levels of racial mixing occurring in the United States through the 1850s when Barnett was expelled from P&S [School of Physicians and Scientists], and estimates about the frequency of racial passing are contentious. Walter White, a famous fair-skinned black man who passed as white while doing investigative work for the NAACP, estimated that “approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear” into white society every year”.⁵² Roi Ottley, a famous African-American journalist in the early 1900s, claimed that there were approximately five million white-passing black people with forty to fifty thousand passing into whiteness every year.⁵³ While these men lived in the early to mid-1900’s, well past Barnett’s time, their research proves that racial passing had become increasingly common as African descendants continued to mix with those of white ancestry. I argue that this information lends itself to the idea that it was highly unlikely that Barnett, if indeed passing, was the first nor the last black individual to pass as white at Columbia University before it officially began accepting black students. How then, can the university endeavor to honor the “first black” students at Columbia if it has no way of knowing the identities of black passers who, by racial standards of the time, were the first graduating students of African “blood”?

Ciara Keane, “Blurring the Lines: James Parker Barnett, Racial Passing, and Invisible Early Black Students at Columbia University,” Columbia University and Slavery, 2018. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/blurring-lines-james-parker-barnett-racial-passing-and-invisible-early-black-students.

In the Place of Clare Kendry: A Gothic Reading of Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2012-03-09 17:58Z by Steven

In the Place of Clare Kendry: A Gothic Reading of Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2011
pages 143-157
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0024

Johanna M. Wagner
Maastricht University

Feeling her colour heighten under the continued inspection, she slid her eyes down. What, she wondered, could be the reason for such persistent attention? Had she, in her haste in the taxi, put her hat on backwards? Guardedly she felt at it. No. Perhaps there was a streak of powder somewhere on her face. She made a quick pass over it with her handkerchief. Something wrong with her dress? She shot a glance over it. Perfectly all right. What was it?

—Nella Larsen, Passing

In a book where the protagonist prides herself in knowing who she is, the final question in the epigraph above is indicative of Irene Redfield’s willful self-ignorance. It is also a reasonable question readers have had about the protagonist and her relationship with the notorious Clare Kendry. What was it between the two women that in the end warrants Clare’s demise? The answer to this question lies somewhere within Irene’s need for ontological certainty—sureness in the knowledge of her own being—that begets security in every aspect of her life. Irene’s security is based on, among other things, stasis. When we meet her, Irene has already meticulously defined and secured her concepts of race and sex and relegated them to their respective compartments in her psyche, never to be revisited. For revisiting either of these ideas would surely breach the serene outlook she entertains about her life. It is her resolve to maintain security that drives the action of the novel and will illuminate what it “was” in Clare that incites such anxiety.

On the roof of the Drayton, unsure of why she elicits a stranger’s scrutiny, Irene responds to the stubborn stare by inspecting herself, mentally running through a list of possible reasons for this unsettling attention (Larsen 149). Her mind whirls as she attempts to pinpoint what it is about her appearance that might be worthy of this penetrating gaze. It is not until after she has exhausted the list of possible material/physical anomalies that she finally resolves to ignore the woman and “let her look!” (149). Ironically, however, foreshadowed by her heightening “colour,” at length Irene suspects “it” may be something less visual, less tangible than her hat, makeup, or dress: “Gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar. She laughed softly, but her eyes flashed. Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” (150). This early scene is indicative of Irene’s incongruous character. She prides herself in her bourgeois participation toward racial uplift, and yet race does not cross her mind until there is no other alternative. It is a remarkable juxtaposition between the title of the novel Passing, which implies race as no less than the major theme, and the absentminded protagonist who pinpoints the issue only after she has ruled out all else. It is no wonder criticism of Passing has struggled with its importance. Because Irene’s interest in race proves sparse and erratic, the reader may resist its significance to the novel, and certainly to Irene, altogether.

Ambiguity surrounding the issue of race is not the only thing vague in Larsen’s novel. The book has a penchant for opacity: the unreliable narrator, the conflation of protagonist with antagonist, the shocking and uncertain ending; critics have been flustered by this murkiness since its publication. For example, in his 1958 book The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone dismisses the novel as Larsen’s “less important” one, preferring Larsen’s other work Quicksand (101). His dismissive attitude is illustrated through his irritation by certain structural features in Passing. For Bone, “a false and shoddy denouement prevents the novel from rising above mediocrity” (102). Hoyt Fuller has similar concerns; in his introduction to the 1971 publication of Passing, he asserts that Larsen’s “deliberate scene setting” is reminiscent of a “mediocre home magazine story teller” (18). Because these critics position the work within the realm of the “typical” passing novel (Bone 101) and presume the tragic mulatto mythto explain any social or psychological issues, themes such as “race” are relegated to the background of their criticism while their interests in convention and composition are foregrounded…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Callaloo, Johanna M. Wagner, Johanna Wagner, Nella Larsen

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In the Place of Clare Kendry: A Gothic Reading of Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

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