{"id":58599,"date":"2019-07-29T00:07:15","date_gmt":"2019-07-29T00:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58599"},"modified":"2019-07-30T14:46:12","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T14:46:12","slug":"passing-in-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58599","title":{"rendered":"Passing, in Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Passing, in Moments<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Topic Magazine<\/a>
\nIssue No. 25, Journeys<\/a>
\nJuly 2019<\/p>\n

Mat Johnson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The uneasy existence of being black and passing for white.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was 12, my Aunt Margaret told me, \u201cYou got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don\u2019t know you\u2019re colored, don\u2019t tell them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aunt Margaret was black, but if you said \u201cblack\u201d and not \u201ccolored,\u201d she would go off on you. I was black too\u2014still am\u2014but I look white. Or I look whitish; it depends on the viewer. My father\u2019s white and my mother is black, but high yellow and racially ambiguous. Though my mom insisted I was black too, I found a strong argument against that every time I looked in the mirror. And I grew up cut off from my extended black family, which just added to that feeling of disconnection. Sometimes I\u2019d tell other kids I was black, and until they saw my mom, they wouldn’t believe me.<\/p>\n

One time I told Aunt Margaret, \u201cNobody at school knows I\u2019m black\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cColored.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNobody at school knows I\u2019m colored.\u201d<\/p>\n

She looked at me like I\u2019d lost my mind. That\u2019s when she said it, holding one of my flaccid brown curls in her hand like it was a piece of gold. \u201cYou got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don\u2019t know you\u2019re colored, don\u2019t tell them!\u201d<\/p>\n

At 12 years old, I thought Aunt Margaret was confused. I thought her response was antiquated, ridiculously old-fashioned, like how she insisted on using the word \u201ccolored\u201d instead of \u201cblack.\u201d I thought it was cute. I thought it was funny.<\/p>\n

At 19, radical as all undergraduates should be, I thought that, despite how much I loved Aunt Margaret, that she was a color-struck sellout for telling me to live my life as a white man. That, in essence, she was encouraging me to abandon my roots, to reject the black community, in exchange for complete access to white privilege.<\/p>\n

At 49, I think she told me what she told me because she loved me. Because she\u2019d been black in America for 80-some years and she didn\u2019t want me to have to endure the way she did. That she wanted the safety of whiteness for me. That she wanted me to thrive, but also to have the full force of America\u2019s wind at my back, instead of getting hit with it head-on.<\/p>\n

That Aunt Margaret was expressing what generations of black mothers sometimes told white-appearing children, particularly boys: escape from blackness for your survival.<\/p>\n

(And, also, she was color-struck.)…<\/p>\n

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

The uneasy existence of being black and passing for white.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[2938,16585,5427,5466,2367,9754,1996,2355,87,29603,30078,6786,895],"class_list":["post-58599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-adrian-piper","tag-albert-johnston","tag-anatole-broyard","tag-carol-channing","tag-fannie-hurst","tag-fredi-washington","tag-jean-toomer","tag-mat-johnson","tag-nella-larsen","tag-p-b-s-pinchback","tag-topic-magazine","tag-walter-francis-white","tag-william-l-andrews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58599","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=58599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58600,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58599\/revisions\/58600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}