"Passing" and the American dream

So what to make of this passing fad? Here's the simplest explanation: It goes hand-in-hand with new-and-improved notions about race and identity. Passing "upends all our tidy little methods of recognizing and categorizing human beings," writes Kroeger, and "makes us wonder what exactly makes an identity authentic, or if and how authenticity matters."

Bingo: In the context of race, "authenticity" and "identity" have truly begun to unravel. This began when biologists, finding more variations than commonalities among so-called races, debunked race altogether. First for the highbrow and then for the masses -- increasingly informed that multiracialism is our destiny, glimpsing the "new face of America" on the cover of Time -- race became the emperor's new clothes. The public imagination slowly began coming to grips with an idea voiced half a century ago by Walter White, the blond-haired, blue-eyed "black" man who once ran the NAACP: "We do not see color. We think it."

Nothing embodies this notion -- race is an idea, not a physical truth -- like passing. If color is thought and not reality, why, after all, can't a blue-blooded Welshman named Hopkins play Coleman Silk, American black-cum-Jew? And why can't Wentworth Miller, an actor of mixed heritage, play the young Silk? More broadly, why should someone whose father is black and mother is Jewish, who looks "white as snow" (as Coleman's mother describes him), be bound to any single race?

He shouldn't. And that -- insist Kroeger's book, Benton's film and most other contemporary passing narratives -- is precisely what separates new-school passing stories from old-school ones. Back in the Jim Crow days, Nella Larsen or Douglas Sirk delivered punishment -- usually death -- to passers, whom we were meant to believe had overstepped "natural" boundaries. Sure, passers offered a revolutionary moment or two, a scene in which they radically questioned rigid racial lines. But in the end, melodramas like "Showboat" and "Pinky" upheld such categories. Passers were deemed to be essentially black, via the slavery-era "one-drop rule," and the scene in which they owned up to this one drop was their moment of undoing and the narrative's climax.

According to Kroeger, the contemporary passer's unmasking doesn't produce this sort of tear-jerking drama. "It usually provokes some surprise, no doubt some gossip," she writes, "but then what ordinarily follows is a big 'So what?'" Savvy postmodern minds -- critical of race as a category and thus too sophisticated for its unyielding distinctions -- empathize with and often champion passers, Kroeger argues. We don't chastise them for committing the great sin of denying some true, essential self; what's a "true self," anyway?

Kroeger's point -- her "so what?" -- is at the heart of "The Human Stain," which -- like Roth's novel, first conceived during the '50s but set in the '40s and the '90s -- is really two stories sewn together. One is a traditional passing narrative of the American 1940s, when a young Coleman Silk breaks his mother's heart by electing to pass for white and date Steena Paulson, the very embodiment of white womanhood (Danish and Icelandic -- do they come any whiter?). Upon discovering that she's fallen in love with a "black" man who only looks white, a shocked Steena tearfully exits the film and Coleman's life.

The unraveling of this love story is set in deliberate contrast to that of the other film embedded in "The Human Stain." Set in the contemporary moment and thus pervaded by our modern-day dysfunctions (race-, class- and gender-related), this film is a May-December romance between Coleman and Faunia Farley, played by a Nicole Kidman who looks more emaciated than ever (representing her frailty, perhaps? Her un-bootylicious whiteness?). Though viewers never witness Faunia's reaction to Coleman's confession about his past and his race, the film's opening scene -- Faunia resting peacefully on Coleman's shoulder -- establishes her reaction as indeed somewhere along the lines of "so what?" The point is obvious, but Coleman's sister spells it out for us: "Nowadays it's hard to imagine that anyone would do what Coleman felt he had to do."

Via different mediums and different tones -- "Passing" has moments of uplift while "The Human Stain" is all tragedy -- Kroeger and director Benton are really making the same point: Passing is passé not as a topic, but as an activity. At a time when we've supposedly reconsidered race and outgrown Jim Crow-era racism, there's no reason to pass anymore. The impetus for producing movies and books about passing is thus to insist on a paradox: We ought to talk about passing again in order to assert that it's a dead issue. Passing, the thinking goes, isn't passé as a subject -- precisely because it is passé as a course of action.

But there's the rub. Can we really suggest that passing has passed, a casualty of older-and-wiser theories about race?

Tell that to the woman who, empathizing with one of Staples' New York Times editorials, described growing up in "a 'passing' family" and had her letter published under the heading "Black, White and in Pain." Tell it to some of my blunt college students, who deem the benefits of passing alluring as ever ("Hell, I would if I could," one of them sighed after class, speaking with more than a measure of envy about a passing co-worker). To say that passing is passé is to say that racism, which produces passing, is passé. And that's one of the Great American Fantasies.

Next Page: My students remind me that claims about how racially progressive we've become are overstated and optimistic

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