{"id":61876,"date":"2021-10-20T13:28:53","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T13:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61876"},"modified":"2021-10-20T13:37:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-20T13:37:12","slug":"the-secret-toll-of-racial-ambiguity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61876","title":{"rendered":"The Secret Toll of Racial Ambiguity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Secret Toll of Racial Ambiguity<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times Magazine<\/a>
\n2021-10-20<\/p>\n

Alexandra Kleeman<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Writing
\nThe New School, New York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Rebecca Hall<\/a> Carly Zavala for The New York Times<\/em><\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rebecca Hall\u2019s<\/a> new film adaptation<\/a> of the 1929 novel \u201cPassing<\/a>\u201d has cracked open a public conversation about colorism<\/a> and privilege.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Rebecca Hall read Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> groundbreaking 1929 novel, \u201cPassing<\/a>,\u201d over a decade ago, she felt an intense, immediate attachment to it. The story seemed to clarify so much that was mysterious about her own identity \u2014 the unnameable gaps in her family history that shaped her life in their very absence, the way a sinkhole in the road distorts the path of traffic blocks away.<\/p>\n

The novel follows Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two light-skinned Black women who grew up in the same Chicago<\/a> neighborhood and shared a friendship complicated by differences in class and social status. When Clare\u2019s father died, she was sent off to live with white relatives, while Irene went on to become firmly ensconced in the vibrant Black artistic and cultural community of 1920s Harlem<\/a>, wife to a Black doctor and mother to two dark-skinned young boys. One day, while passing<\/a> for convenience on the rooftop restaurant of a whites-only hotel, Irene is recognized by a beautiful blond woman, who turns out to be Clare \u2014 who now not only lives her life as a white woman but is also mother to a white-passing daughter and married to a bigoted man who has no clue about her mixed-race heritage. The friends\u2019 reunion crackles with tension, charged with curiosity, envy and longing.<\/p>\n

When Clare asks Irene if she has ever thought about passing in a more permanent way herself, Irene responds disdainfully: \u201cNo. Why should I?\u201d She adds, \u201cYou see, Clare, I\u2019ve everything I want.\u201d And maybe it\u2019s true that the respectable, high-status life Irene has built in Harlem encompasses everything a serious woman, committed to lifting up her race, should want. But Clare\u2019s sudden presence begins to raise a sense of dangerous possibility within Irene \u2014 one of unacknowledged desires and dissatisfactions. When she sees the ease with which Clare re-enters and ingratiates herself within Black society, it threatens Irene\u2019s feeling of real, authentic belonging.<\/p>\n

Raised in England<\/a> within the elite circles of classical theater, Hall, who is 39, had her first introduction to the concept of racial \u201cpassing\u201d<\/a> in the pages of Larsen\u2019s novel. \u201cI was spending time in America<\/a>, and I knew that there had been vague, but I mean really vague, talk about my mother\u2019s ethnicity,\u201d Hall explained over the phone this spring. Her voice is calm and poised, with a warm polish to it, and she tends to speak in composed paragraphs. Over the year that we had corresponded, Hall hadn\u2019t been acting much and had instead spent time writing screenplays from the Hudson Valley<\/a> home that she shares with her daughter and her husband, the actor Morgan Spector<\/a>. \u201cSometimes she would intimate that maybe there was African American ancestry, or sometimes she would intimate that there was Indigenous ancestry. But she didn\u2019t really know; it wasn\u2019t available to her.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Rebecca Hall\u2019s new film adaptation of the 1929 novel \u201cPassing\u201d has cracked open a public conversation about colorism and privilege.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,8,6462,20],"tags":[32144,240,87,2640,8894,28879,2327,13109],"class_list":["post-61876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-alexandra-kleeman","tag-colorism","tag-nella-larsen","tag-new-york-times","tag-new-york-times-magazine","tag-rebecca-hall","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61876","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=61876"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61881,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61876\/revisions\/61881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}