{"id":23768,"date":"2012-06-16T02:04:02","date_gmt":"2012-06-16T02:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23768"},"modified":"2012-06-16T16:07:23","modified_gmt":"2012-06-16T16:07:23","slug":"%e2%80%9cpassing%e2%80%9d-and-the-american-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23768","title":{"rendered":"\u201cPassing\u201d and the American dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPassing\u201d and the American dream<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Salon Magazine<\/a>
\n2003-11-03<\/p>\n

Baz Dreisinger<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

These days we’re supposed to think race doesn’t matter. But as “The Human Stain<\/a>” and a raft of recent writing makes clear, we’re just as fascinated by its slippery boundaries as ever.<\/em><\/p>\n

Every now and then, cultural and social critics fashion an axiom that\u2019s flippant, succinct and thus darling enough to render its truth value irrelevant. Such is the case with a phrase coined by culture-mongers in the 1960s that\u2019s finding new currency today: \u201cPassing is pass\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPassing\u201d is shorthand for \u201cracial passing<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cracial passing\u201d means people of one race (generally African-American) passing for another (usually white). Anybody who\u2019s surprised that there\u2019s a shorthand terminology for what might seem a pretty unlikely scenario will be more surprised that the phenomenon, with its lengthy history in American culture, isn\u2019t all that unusual. Some of the earliest stories about passing reach back to the 19th century, when slaves \u2014 like Ellen Craft<\/a>, who penned a mesmerizing slave narrative \u2014 used their light skin to escape, and novelists from Mark Twain<\/a> to Charles Chesnutt<\/a> mined the subject for their oeuvre.<\/p>\n

Passing was a much-hyped subject during the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>, which produced a plethora of rich fiction about it: Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> \u201cPassing<\/a>,\u201d Jessie Fauset\u2019s<\/a> \u201cPlum Bun<\/a>,\u201d Walter White\u2019s<\/a> \u201cFlight.\u201d The subject had its Hollywood heyday; melodramatic passing flicks from the \u201930s, \u201940s and \u201950s include \u201cPinky<\/a>,\u201d \u201cLost Boundaries\u201d and two big-screen versions of \u201cImitation of Life<\/a>\u201d (the latter version, directed by Douglas Sirk, probably still delights the Kleenex industry).<\/p>\n

But along came the \u201960s. And with it, Black Power and other ideologies that made the saga of passing \u2014 and the act of passing itself \u2014 soppy, weak-kneed and thus unhip. Passing was pass\u00e9, critics said, because racial pride was where it\u2019s at.<\/em> Whether prophecy or prescription, their words proved accurate, for a while, at least: The subject never vanished from public or private sectors, but it did step aside for a hot minute or two.<\/p>\n

That hot minute is over. Passing, these days, is anything but pass\u00e9. This week Anthony Hopkins, neither a black man nor a Jew, saunters onto the big screen to play a black man passing as a Jew in the long-awaited screen version of Philip Roth\u2019s \u201cThe Human Stain<\/a>.\u201d Last month, journalist Brooke Kroeger\u2019s collection of case studies, \u201cPassing: When People Can\u2019t Be Who They Are,\u201d earned solid reviews and prompted a National Public Radio program on passing. Brent Staples<\/a> recently penned a series of New York Times<\/em> editorials on the subject…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPassing\u201d and the American dream Salon Magazine 2003-11-03 Baz Dreisinger These days we’re supposed to think race doesn’t matter. But as “The Human Stain” and a raft of recent writing makes clear, we’re just as fascinated by its slippery boundaries as ever. Every now and then, cultural and social critics fashion an axiom that\u2019s flippant, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[2710,8110,11067],"class_list":["post-23768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-baz-dreisinger","tag-philip-roth","tag-salon-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}