{"id":63861,"date":"2022-05-16T19:38:33","date_gmt":"2022-05-16T19:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63861"},"modified":"2022-05-20T15:24:12","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T15:24:12","slug":"the-burdened-virtue-of-racial-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63861","title":{"rendered":"The Burdened Virtue of Racial Passing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Burdened Virtue of Racial Passing<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Boston Review<\/a>
\n2022-05-13<\/p>\n

Meena Krishnamurthy<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
\nQueen\u2019s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
A still from Rebecca Hall\u2019s<\/a> film Passing<\/em><\/a>, based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen<\/a>. Image: Netflix<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Though a means of escaping and undermining racial injustice, the practice comes with own set of costs and sacrifices.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> 1929 novel Passing<\/em><\/a>, adapted by Rebecca Hall<\/a> and distributed on Netfli\u00adx last fall, Clare Kendry\u2014a light-skinned Black woman\u2014decides to pass as white<\/a>. Clare grows up poor in Chicago<\/a>; after her alcoholic father dies, she is taken in by her racist white aunts. When she turns eighteen she marries a rich white man who assumes she is white. Clare makes a clean escape until, some years later, she runs into her childhood friend, Irene Redfield, at a whites-only hotel; Irene, it turns out, sometimes passes herself, in this case to escape the summer heat. The storyline traces their complex relationship after this reunion and ends in tragedy for Clare.<\/p>\n

Hall\u2019s film adaptation joins several other recent representations that dramatize the lived experience of passing. The protagonist of Brit Bennett\u2019s<\/a> best-selling novel The Vanishing Half<\/em><\/a> (2020), for example, decides to start passing as white in the 1950s at age sixteen after responding to a listing in the newspaper for secretarial work in a New Orleans<\/a> department store. Much to her surprise, after excelling at the typing test, Stella is offered the position; her boss assumes she is white. Initially Stella keeps up the ruse just to support her and her sister, but passing also becomes a way for her to escape the trauma of her father\u2019s lynching<\/a> and the prospect of her own…<\/p>\n

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

Though a means of escaping and undermining racial injustice, the practice comes with own set of costs and sacrifices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1196,8,6462,6941,26,20],"tags":[32839,2938,9812,11064,33536,27360,88,27885,33534,21089,21088,3611,31930,87,33535,28879,33533,28260,6786,1929,1052],"class_list":["post-63861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-usa","tag-a-j-baime","tag-adrian-piper","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-boston-review","tag-desmond-jagmohan","tag-ellen-and-william-craft","tag-ellen-craft","tag-gunnar-myrdal","tag-jesse-routte","tag-john-roland-redd","tag-korla-pandit","tag-lisa-tessman","tag-meena-krishnamurthy","tag-nella-larsen","tag-paul-a-kramer","tag-rebecca-hall","tag-the-boston-review","tag-walter-f-white","tag-walter-francis-white","tag-walter-white","tag-william-craft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63861","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=63861"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63883,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63861\/revisions\/63883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}