"Passing" and the American dream

As long as there's white privilege, as long as there's racism of the "but would you let your daughter marry one?" variety, passing will exist and "so what?" won't be the most frequent reaction to it. Offensive racial ideologies are like roaches: Just when you think you've eradicated them, they crop up again and your apartment looks just the way it did a week ago. Until we come up with a magical race-equalizing version of Raid, black-to-white passing won't, practically speaking, have its last stand.

Neither will it vanish, theoretically speaking. Here's where things get slippery: Though it seems to undermine essential racial categories -- when someone who looks white isn't white, then who is? -- passing ultimately reinforces them, because talking about passing from one race to another assumes that there are distinct races to pass in and out of. Despite her well-meaning claims about the elusive qualities of identity, Kroeger serves up a title as essentialist as they come: "When People Can't Be Who They Are" insinuates that there's indeed a true self, a certain racial "are" whom passers can't "be." Most of her subjects, usually in the process of finding a racially appropriate mate, ultimately locate this "are" and thus settle into a "true" self, much as old-school passing figures did.

Kroeger, hip to passing paradoxes, tries to find an out by tinkering with the definition of "passing," which produces another mess: If passing is race-based, and race, as progressive minds know, doesn't actually exist, then no one can be a passer; if passing is about identity-shifting more generally, then everyone is a passer. So Kroeger distinguishes passing from everyday identity-shifting by claiming that only a passer doesn't "recognize the persona she assumes as her own." But this isn't fully convincing, and neither is the lip service she pays to the artificiality of race.

Any truly anti-essentialist framework must embrace a technical truth: Despite the legacy of the "one-drop rule," someone who's both black and white is passing for black as much as he's passing for white. "The Human Stain" sidesteps this issue because Coleman's parents are both defined as black, but Coleman's white ancestry is written all over his face -- so why can't he claim it?

"The Human Stain," like "Passing," ultimately can't buck the essentialist conventions of the passing story. Not only does it begin with tragic death for the passer -- his punishment? -- but the film is described by Benton as modern-day Greek tragedy. And what is Greek tragedy if not didactic, eager to render retribution to those who hubristically overstep natural boundaries? The film employs almost every stock element in the classic passing-narrative book, most notably a long-suffering black mother who -- standing in for the African-American race -- endures the sting of her son's rejection.

So essentialism wins out in the end. It does in my classroom, too: With their proclivity for statements about being "essentially" black or "really" white, my students -- wise and insightful in so many respects -- remind me that claims about how racially progressive we've become are overstated and optimistic. So does another recent letter to the Times, which asserts -- in terms to make racial theorists cringe -- that "being black is not something you can teach or mimic ... it's simply who you are."

We like our solid selves. How, after all, does one actually live in a racial free-for-all, a world in which all identity is (to quote Samira Kawash's study of passing) "not what we are but what we are passing for"? Even Harvard race guru Randall Kennedy, whose "Interracial Intimacies" argues for a choose-your-own-race approach (he calls it "free and easy entry into and exit from racial categories"), admits that such a world could produce "some racial fraud, or even a considerable amount of it." Such a world also runs contrary to our passion for security, for the type of identity comfort zone that even Kroeger's shifting subjects stake out in the end.

More than anything else, today's passing fad is about the gulf between theory and practice. Yes, race is dead and passing passed with it -- but no, they're not. Academic jive about race as a "disproved" concept is, well, jive; good old Race, rigid and old-hat, lives on in our hearts and minds. Slay something -- blackness, whiteness, Latino-ness -- in concept and you haven't slain it in the flesh.

So where does the solution lie? For "The Human Stain," in language. The film is structured on the struggle of blocked writer Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's alter ego, played with understated pathos by Gary Sinise). Nathan finds his story in Coleman; he finds it, then, in passing. To clean the human stain of racism -- to out that damned spot -- is to make narrative about it. Talking is the cure.

Thing is, that produces yet another paradox: The more we talk about the end of race (or of passing), the more it thrives in our discourse and thus in our consciousness. The article you're reading, which objects to our fixation on race, ironically perpetuates this same fixation. Does this mean we -- I -- ought to shut up? That's a tall order, considering that the subject is as eternally hot (if not quite as steamy) as Ben and J.Lo.

It's also a tall order because we hold dearly to at least one Freudian tenet: In knowledge lies healing, and analysis extricates us from quagmires, racial and otherwise. It's hard to dispute that -- but as contemporary chatter about race and passing makes clear, it's also easy to overstate it. The wisest move is the most obvious one: Take talk with more than a few grains of salt. Keep theorizing about the passing of passing -- as Kroeger, Roth and others do -- and hope that time will make theory and practice, the real and the ideal, better bedfellows.

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