{"id":62109,"date":"2021-11-05T16:07:33","date_gmt":"2021-11-05T16:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=62109"},"modified":"2021-11-05T16:09:21","modified_gmt":"2021-11-05T16:09:21","slug":"lying-about-a-lie-racial-passing-in-us-history-literature-and-popular-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=62109","title":{"rendered":"\u201cLying about a Lie\u201d: Racial Passing in US History, Literature and Popular Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLying about a Lie\u201d: Racial Passing in US History, Literature and Popular Culture<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Journal of American Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 50, Issue 2 (May 2016)<\/a>
\nDOI: 10.1017\/S0021875816000219<\/a><\/p>\n

Sin\u00e9ad Moynihan<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of English
\nUniversity of Exeter<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

In June 2015, the parents of Rachel Dolezal<\/a>, president of the Spokane, Washington<\/a> chapter of the NAACP<\/a>, claimed that their daughter was passing as black<\/a>. While she professed to be of mixed (white, African American) racial heritage, her parents asserted that she was of white European descent, with some remote Native American ancestry. The revelations precipitated Dolezal’s resignation from her role at the NAACP and a flurry of articles about the story that were disseminated around the world on Twitter<\/a> under the \u201cRachel Dolezal\u201d hashtag.<\/p>\n

Much of the media coverage attempted to account for the fact that this story should elicit such impassioned reactions given that race has long been acknowledged as a performance. As Jelani Cobb<\/a> wrote in the New Yorker<\/em>, Dolezal had dressed herself in \u201ca fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging.\u201d This does not mean that Dolezal \u201cwasn’t lying about who she is.\u201d It means that \u201cshe was lying about a lie.\u201d Meanwhile, in the New York Times<\/em>, Daniel J. Sharfstein<\/a> pointed out that the kind of passing we saw in Dolezal’s case \u2013 passing from white to black; so-called \u201creverse passing\u201d \u2013 was not as historically uncommon as other writers had claimed. What is unusual is that Dolezal should feel the need to pass as black when there were no legal (and comparatively few social) obstacles to her forming \u201cmeaningful relationships with African-Americans, study[ing], teach[ing] and celebrat[ing] black history and culture and fight[ing] discrimination.\u201d For Sharfstein, the explanation lies in the fact that \u201cwhen blackness means something very specific \u2013 asserting that black lives matter \u2013 it follows for many people that categorical clarity has to matter, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pervasive media and public interest in the Dolezal story confirms the ongoing fascination with racial passing within and beyond the United States<\/a>, a popular interest that has its counterpart in the proliferation of academic studies of the subject that have been published in the past twenty years. The scholarly attention paid to racial passing inaugurated, arguably, by Elaine K. Ginsberg in her edited volume Passing and the Fictions of Identity<\/em><\/a> (1996) continues unabated in two recent works on the subject. Julie Cary Nerad’s<\/a> edited volume Passing Interest<\/em><\/a> is concerned with cultural representations of passing, while Allyson Hobbs’s<\/a> A Chosen Exile<\/em><\/a> grapples with its history.<\/p>\n

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

The pervasive media and public interest in the Dolezal story confirms the ongoing fascination with racial passing within and beyond the United States, a popular interest that has its counterpart in the proliferation of academic studies of the subject that have been published in the past twenty years. The scholarly attention paid to racial passing inaugurated, arguably, by Elaine K. Ginsberg in her edited volume “Passing and the Fictions of Identity” (1996) continues unabated in two recent works on the subject.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,459,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[9812,2766,2944,12120,496,6832,32294,20241,32293,6642],"class_list":["post-62109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-daniel-j-sharfstein","tag-elaine-k-ginsberg","tag-jelani-cobb","tag-journal-of-american-studies","tag-julie-cary-nerad","tag-rachel-ann-dolezal","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-rachel-dolezal-2","tag-sinead-moynihan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62109","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=62109"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62113,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62109\/revisions\/62113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}