{"id":38810,"date":"2014-12-12T21:35:43","date_gmt":"2014-12-12T21:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38810"},"modified":"2018-01-06T21:27:55","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T21:27:55","slug":"racecraft-stories-of-racial-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38810","title":{"rendered":"Racecraft: Stories of Racial Passing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racecraft: Stories of Racial Passing<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>
\n2014-12-05<\/p>\n

Lucy McKeon<\/strong><\/a>, Writer and Photographer
\nNew York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

THE VERY NOTION of racial \u201cpassing\u201d<\/a> implies a test. Those who believed clear racial categorization was possible might test for race by measuring physical traits to indicate \u201cblood purity\u201d: slight physical traits that could be identified, such as the half-moon of a nail bed or the whites of ones eyes. In apartheid South Africa<\/a>, the \u201cpencil test<\/a>\u201d was devised: categorizing people based on whether a pencil would remain or fall from their hair. Physical markers were used to fix and control whole futures.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhite people were so stupid about such things,\u201d says Irene, the narrator of Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> Passing<\/em><\/a> (1929). \u201cThey usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth.\u201d<\/p>\n

To pass the faulty test of white scrutiny is not difficult; Larsen\u2019s Passing<\/em>, and other 18th to 20th century fiction and 20th century film, work to demonstrate that categorization by race relies on arbitrary rules and unsound logic \u2014 proving, in other words, the falsely naturalized or socially constructed nature of \u201crace\u201d itself. As Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs<\/a> reminds us in her recent cultural history A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/em><\/a>, the gains and losses of racial passing \u2014 when someone from one racial group \u201cpasses,\u201d or is accepted, as another \u2014 were historically contingent, like \u201crace\u201d itself. Indeed, one\u2019s semblance could rarely be taken as trustworthy evidence. \u201cSkin color and physical appearance were usually the least reliable factors,\u201d writes Hobbs, \u201cwhereas one\u2019s associations and relationships were more predictive\u201d of who was deemed white and who was not. If white people can\u2019t actually tell who is white and who isn\u2019t, whiteness is exposed as simply the external perception of being white \u2014 the privilege, power, and civic membership afforded to someone recognized as such. This is white supremacy in practice.<\/p>\n

Michael Yudell\u2019s<\/a> Race Unmasked<\/em><\/a> examines the history of the concept of biological race \u2014 in large part tied to the history of genetics, which \u201cat its founding was inseparable from eugenics theories\u201d \u2014 in order to show that race is \u201cneither a static biological certainty nor a reflection of our genes. Instead, race is a historical and cultural phenomenon.\u201d We\u2019ve known this, of course. But Yudell\u2019s recent book provides scientific documentation of the process of \u201cracecraft,\u201d a term coined by Karen Fields<\/a> and Barbara Fields<\/a> in their 2012 book by the same name<\/a>: the \u201cmental terrain\u201d where our deep and pervasive belief in race as meaningful is conjured, then ritualized into reality. \u201cRace\u201d comes to explain social effects like poverty, as witchcraft might explain failing crops. What\u2019s real is not \u201crace,\u201d but the ideology of racism: the belief in \u201crace\u201d as a tool with which to rationalize cause and consequence.<\/p>\n

In this way, while both fictive and biographical representations of passing demonstrate the absurdity of \u201crace,\u201d they also emphasize the very real effects of racial categorization. From the point of view of those passing, Hobbs writes,<\/p>\n

race was neither strictly a social construction nor a biological fact. The line between black and white was by no means imaginary; crossing it had profound, life-changing consequences. Race was quite real to those who lived with it, not because of skin color or essentialist notions about biology, but because it was social and experiential, because it involved one\u2019s closest relationships and one\u2019s most intimate communities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Passing, in other words, demonstrates how \u201crace\u201d is both socially constructed and, as experienced, extremely meaningful.<\/p>\n

Hobbs focuses on the experience of great loss in her cultural history of passing. As she points out, \u201cHistorians and literary scholars have paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white than to what was lost by rejecting a black racial identity.\u201d But \u201cracial passing is an exile, sometimes chosen, sometimes not.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

THE VERY NOTION of racial \u201cpassing\u201d implies a test. Those who believed clear racial categorization was possible might test for race by measuring physical traits to indicate \u201cblood purity\u201d: slight physical traits that could be identified, such as the half-moon of a nail bed or the whites of ones eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[9812,6358,1873,17726,18716,18707,18708,14582,18715,3414,87],"class_list":["post-38810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-barbara-fields","tag-barbara-j-fields","tag-jess-row","tag-john-howard","tag-karen-e-fields","tag-karen-fields","tag-los-angeles-review-of-books","tag-lucy-mckeon","tag-michael-yudell","tag-nella-larsen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38810","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=38810"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55545,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38810\/revisions\/55545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}