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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
These days we're supposed to think race doesn't matter. But as "The Human Stain" and a raft of recent writing makes clear, we're just as fascinated by its slippery boundaries as ever.
Nov 4, 2003 | Every now and then, cultural and social critics fashion an axiom that's flippant, succinct and thus darling enough to render its truth value irrelevant. Such is the case with a phrase coined by culture-mongers in the 1960s that's finding new currency today: "Passing is passé."
"Passing" is shorthand for "racial passing," and "racial passing" means people of one race (generally African-American) passing for another (usually white). Anybody who's surprised that there's a shorthand terminology for what might seem a pretty unlikely scenario will be more surprised that the phenomenon, with its lengthy history in American culture, isn't all that unusual. Some of the earliest stories about passing reach back to the 19th century, when slaves -- like Ellen Craft, who penned a mesmerizing slave narrative -- used their light skin to escape, and novelists from Mark Twain to Charles Chesnutt mined the subject for their oeuvre.
Passing was a much-hyped subject during the Harlem Renaissance, which produced a plethora of rich fiction about it: Nella Larsen's "Passing," Jessie Fauset's "Plum Bun," Walter White's "Flight." The subject had its Hollywood heyday; melodramatic passing flicks from the '30s, '40s and '50s include "Pinky," "Lost Boundaries" and two big-screen versions of "Imitation of Life" (the latter version, directed by Douglas Sirk, probably still delights the Kleenex industry).
But along came the '60s. And with it, Black Power and other ideologies that made the saga of passing -- and the act of passing itself -- soppy, weak-kneed and thus unhip. Passing was passé, critics said, because racial pride was where it's at. Whether prophecy or prescription, their words proved accurate, for a while, at least: The subject never vanished from public or private sectors, but it did step aside for a hot minute or two.
"Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are"
By Brooke Kroeger
Public Affairs
288 pages
Nonfiction
That hot minute is over. Passing, these days, is anything but passé. This week Anthony Hopkins, neither a black man nor a Jew, saunters onto the big screen to play a black man passing as a Jew in the long-awaited screen version of Philip Roth's "The Human Stain." Last month, journalist Brooke Kroeger's collection of case studies, "Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are," earned solid reviews and prompted a National Public Radio program on passing. Brent Staples recently penned a series of New York Times editorials on the subject.
All this is the crescendo of a passing wave that's been approaching for several years now: In the late '90s, two highly touted novels -- Danzy Senna's "Caucasia" and Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist" -- featured passing plots, and as race-based memoirs became practically the only memoirs worth publishing, real-life passing narratives (like poet Clarence Major's "Come by Here: My Mother's Life") resurfaced on shelves.
This passing renaissance -- no pun intended -- represented something rare: A trend that germinated in the ivory tower was trickling down to the masses (not, as is usually the case, vice versa). It began in the mid-'90s, with cultural-studies academics who gave renewed attention to passing narratives, got them reissued in snazzy Penguin editions, and wrote occasionally readable, theoretical books about them. The best of these was a 1996 Duke University Press anthology, "Passing and the Fictions of Identity," which Kroeger -- who's clearly done her academic homework -- cites.
Kroeger cites it because this anthology, like her book and "The Human Stain," embodies racial passing, new-millennium style: Among other things, it isn't limited to black-as-white. "Passing puts us in touch with the wondrous ability each person has to create and recreate the self," Kroeger writes. Her book includes blacks passing as white, yes, but also a gay man passing as straight, a white woman passing as black, and a Jewish Latina (her richest subject, because it encompasses the theoretical trinity of race, class and gender).
There's passing that Kroeger aptly deems "good-guy adventuring," which is really just disguise: Frank Abagnale in "Catch Me If You Can," or Joshua Clover, a poet whose writing persona was Jane Dark -- Village Voice music critic, feminist and high-lowbrow aficionado. Kroeger offers a sketch of passing's progressive arc: "from inadvertent passing to passing for fun to passing part time or full time to passing all the way or breaking the cycle at any point."
Kroeger's broad definition of passing is really too broad, however, so broad as to render the term almost meaningless. Refusing to allow for historical differences between forms of passing, her definition also isn't precise enough: Though Jane Dark's public "outing" may have ruffled few feathers, the public fuss over the young "Latino" writer Danny Santiago's 1983 memoir "Famous All Over Town" (Santiago was really a white man named Dan James), or Binjamin Wilkomirski's 1994 Holocaust memoir "Fragments" (Wilkomirski was neither a Jew nor a survivor), proves that even in the literary world, not all passing is equal. We have long guarded the gates into some identities more closely than others.
But even without its necessary distinctions -- between passing that's based on physical traits (black-white) and passing that isn't (gay-straight), between the slippery categories called "ethnicity," "race" and "nationality" -- Kroeger's definition gestures toward an America that's finally giving due attention to racial binaries other than black/white. It's in line with the sort of passing narratives making rounds nowadays: gender passing in "Boys Don't Cry" and "The Crying Game," Jewish-Gentile passing in the 1990 film "Europa, Europa" and books like Stephen Dubner's "Turbulent Souls," Susan Jacoby's "Half Jew" or the 2000 anthology "Suddenly Jewish." Name the category -- Latina? Italian? Senior citizen? -- and odds are someone's written about passing for it.
