What "Passing For White" Means (excerpts from various online sources)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series on the American phrase "passing for White" and the American phrase "White passing". (The "w" for "White" is often written in lower case.)

This post presents definitions of and some information/quotes about the 19th century originated United States phrase "passing for White". This phrase is commonly shortened to "passing". It is also known as "passe blanc" in Louisiana USA.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2023/02/what-phrase-white-passing-means-in.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. That post presents definitions of and some information/quotes about the contemporary United States phrase "White passing". That   2000s coined adjectival (descriptive) phrase has a different meaning that the centuries old  verb phrase "passing for White" which refers to certain actions.

The content of this post is presented for historical, linguistic, and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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EXCERPTS ABOUT "PASSING (RACIAL IDENTITY)"

These excerpts are given in no particular order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.

Excerpt #1
From https://www.proquest.com/docview/1516953542 STEPS ACROSS THE COLOR LINE Cheveresan, Cristina.  British and American Studies; Timisoara Vol. 19,  (2013): 76-85.
..."Passing" is used most frequently as if it were short for "passing for white", in the sense of "crossing over" the color line in the United States from the black to the white side [...] Though the camouflaging of aspects of one's identity is probably a human universal, racial passing is particularly a phenomenon of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. It thrived in modem systems in which, as a primary condition, social and geographic mobility prevailed, especially in environments such as cities or crowds that provided anonymity to individuals... (Sollors 1999: 247-248)."

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Excerpt #2
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity)
"Racial passing occurs when a person classified as a member of a racial group is accepted or perceived ("passes") as a member of another. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a black or brown person or of multiracial ancestry who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination.

[...]

In the United States

Passing for white

Although anti-miscegenation laws outlawing racial intermarriage existed in America as early as 1664,[1] there were no laws preventing or prosecuting the rape of enslaved girls and women. Rape of slaves was legal and encouraged during slavery to increase the slave population. For generations, enslaved black mothers bore mixed-race children who were deemed "mulattos", "quadroons", "octoroons", or "hexadecaroons" based on their percentage of "black blood".[2]

 Although these mixed-race people were often half white or more, institutions of hypodescent and the 20th-century one drop rule in some—particularly Southern⁠—states classified them as black and therefore, inferior, particularly after slavery became a racial caste.[citation needed] But there were other mixed-race people who were born to unions or marriages in colonial Virginia between free white women and African or African-American men, free, indentured, or slave, and became ancestors to many free families of color in the early decades of the US, as documented by Paul Heinegg in his Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.[3]

... Although reasons behind passing are deeply individual, the history of African Americans passing as white can be categorized by the following time periods: the antebellum era, post-emancipation, Reconstruction through Jim Crow, and present day.[5]: 4 

[...]

Passing was used by some African Americans to evade segregation. Those who were able to pass as white often engaged in tactical passing or passing as white in order to get a job, go to school, or to travel.[5]: 29  Outside these situations, "tactical passers" still lived as black people, and for this reason, tactical passing is also referred to as "9 to 5 passing."[5]: 29  The writer and literary critic Anatole Broyard saw his father pass in order to get work after his Louisiana Creole family moved north to Brooklyn before World War II."...

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Excerpt #3
From https://www.amazon.com/Chosen-Exile-History-Passing-American/dp/0674659929 A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life Paperback – March 7, 2016 by Allyson Hobbs  (Author)
"Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.

As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.

Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied―and often outweighed―these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions."....

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Excerpt #4 
From https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/8417
"The last two decades have seen a considerable increase of publications on the issue of racial passing in the United States. Some studies have examined racial passing through personal or family stories (O’Toole ; Sharfstein ; Williams). Others have sought to adopt a quantitative and synchronic approach to the phenomenon (Nix & Qian ; Mill & Stein) or to analyze how cases of racial passing were litigated in courts (Kennedy ; Gross). A number of edited volumes have recently focused on the cinematic and literary representations of racial passing in American popular culture, whereas some studies have been keen on expanding the notion by examining instances of ethnic or gender passing (Dawkins ; Gayle ; Ginsberg ; Wald ; Nerad).

 Yet, in this flurry of publications, Allyson Hobbs’s A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, is a valuable contribution that distinguishes itself as the first full-length historical monograph to comprehensively tackle and complicate this sensitive and emotionally charged topic. This ambitious study is a revised version of Hobbs’s 2009 dissertation in history which she defended at the University of Chicago.

 A Chosen Exile historicizes the practice of racial passing in the United States, by outlining, from the period of slavery to the early 1970s, how fair-skinned Blacks, whom the author designates as “racially ambiguous individuals”, managed to navigate the troubled waters of race undetected. In keeping with the findings of her predecessors, Hobbs confirms that the main reason that motivated racial passing was social advancement. Hobbs however differentiates herself from other scholars who have, according to her, paid far more attention to the benefits derived from passing as White instead of focusing on what she deems is a more fundamental and hitherto neglected aspect of the practice, namely, that by leaving their colored relatives or friends behind, passing translated into a loss of intra-racial sociability and, to some extent, the loss of one’s self. A Chosen Exile is underpinned by two intertwined objectives : a historical examination of the personal motivations behind racial passing and a simultaneous assessment of the consequences of rejecting one’s “black racial identity” (11) ­— an act Hobbs qualifies as being tantamount to a racial exile.

Hobbs dismisses our commonly held assumptions about a lack of archival evidence that would limit our understanding of the phenomenon of racial passing. She manages to piece together a general history of racial passing in the United States by relying on a set of disparate primary and secondary sources such as private letters, family histories, newspaper advertisements, novels, as well as correspondence between authors and their publishers. By mining such a wide array of sources, Hobbs successfully manages to shed light on a practice that was meant to remain hidden.

[...]

Chapter 1, “White is the Color of Freedom”, focuses on the history of passing before the general abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865. The implementation and rigid enforcement of the one-drop rule which accompanied the legal codification of racial slavery, provided that an individual’s legal status — bond or free, free white or free person of color —would be predicated on any visible or known black lineage. Hobbs argues that, during slavery, racial passing was, first and foremost, a means to escape bondage rather than a desire to deny one’s black ancestry. Hobbs identifies the 1820s as a turning point after which “passing as free gave way to the phenomenon of passing as white” (42) — a shift she attributes to the increasing tightening of the socio-racial order. Building on Ariela Gross’s work on the performative nature of race and race litigations during the antebellum period, this chapter reveals how light-skinned slaves sought to challenge their enslavement in courts on the grounds that they were unlawfully held in bondage. As racial passing raised concerns about racial purity and miscegenation, the whole white community, by means of popular juries and witnesses, policed racial boundaries in the courts. Yet, as race could not always be determined by physical inspection, racially ambiguous individuals were expected to meet a number of requirements to be considered white. Demonstrating behaviors or enjoying rights which were commonly associated with white people such as voting, being articulate, literate or well-dressed, influenced the jury’s decision to assign, or deny, an individual the white racial (and legal) status. Hobbs concludes this aptly titled first chapter by arguing that miscegenation ultimately undermined the socio-racial hierarchy as light-skinned offspring took advantage of the prejudicial association of servility with black skin. To illustrate her point, Hobbs provides the reader with striking examples of fair-skinned slaves, such as Ellen Craft or Henry Bibb, who were able to simply walk off to freedom by assuming the “airs of importance” of their white masters.”…

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Excerpt #5
From https://m.facebook.com/Alexgenealogy/photos/passe-blanca-common-saying-in-my-south-west-louisiana-family-is-pass%C3%A9-blanc-whic/1012350265451672/#:~:text=%22Passe%20Blanc%22-,A%20common%20saying%20in%20my%20South%2DWest%20Louisiana%20family%20is,a%20better%20opportunity%20in%20life.

Facebook post by Barbara Escontrias,  Sept. 15, 2015
"A common saying in my South-West Louisiana family is “Passe-Blanc” which means to pass for white.”

In my research I’ve discovered several relatives in my family who have passed for White to have a better opportunity to live. I saw this movement through the years of the census where they moved from Mulatto to White once they moved from Louisiana to places such as Denver, Oklahoma, California, etc.  I couldn’t imagine the way these people may have felt of to leave their love ones behind to get a certain job and to live in a certain area to have a more peaceful life than to deal with the oppression and racism of the Jim-Crow South….

Many of those who passed for White hardly corresponded with family once they moved away because of fear of being exposed. If they married someone White they probably did all they could to hide the true facts that defined who they were. Words probably couldn’t explain all the pain, turmoil, and insecurity these people had to live with…"
-snip-
Comment from this article's discussion thread:

Marvine Yvette White, 2015

Mygrandfather was killed in Camden, Arkansas in 1968 for passe Blanc.  He left Louisiana to have a better life  He owned a garage and had a very prosperous business. Someone in Louisiana ratted him out and three white guys jumped him and killed him" 

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Excerpt #6
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXvfe29KVO8
1. Michele Bradley, 2023
...".My grandfather was 1 of 13 siblings. He had a sister who left MS in 1913 ( she was 17 y.o., he was 11 y. o.). He said they never saw her again until 1939 when their Mother passed away. She'd apparently built a whole other life for herself  "passing" in WI of all places. We assumed she passed as White, but it was later discovered that she actually changed her name & passed as mixed (White/Native American). She married a white man but they never had any children.  IDK how she came to know of their Mother's passing, but my grandfather & a few other siblings believed she kept in touch w/ someone in Pontotoc - but not her family. My grandfather rarely spoke of her, but when he did it was always laced w/a type of sadness: "She did what she had to" or "she wasn't built for the hard life we had to put up with." It makes me a little sad (& angry) to think about her & the family, cut off from each other. Not having those ties, sharing the joy & pain, being a soft place to fall; such a high price to pay all because of racism/ white supremacy."
-snip-
"MS" = Mississippi

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2. E. Cole, 2023
"I grew up in the South. My parents were both African American; and so I am, too - proudly.  My parents both fought against discrimination during Jim Crow. However I remember a photograph on our wall at home of what definitely looked like a white woman.  I recall wondering who that white woman was and why was she hanging in a beautiful frame in our house.  I learned much later that the woman was my grandmother.  I never had the privilege of meeting her as she died before I was born; but I learned that she married a man - my grandfather who I also never met - and who was born into slavery.  He and his family escaped their enslavement near the end of the Civil War.  My grandmother and grandfather met and married after that. But I also learned that my grandmother had 3 brothers each of whom passed into the white world never to be seen again as far as I know.  I remember that when I heard about them, I judged them.  "Why would you want to turn your backs on this great African heritage?", I wondered.  With time, I have come to judge them less and less, because I was not in their shoes and could not possibly imagine how hard it was for them.  I do, however, think of my grandmother in the highest regard.  She could have done the same thing, but she chose the truth and the beauty of who she was."

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3. stillnotdoneyet, 2023
"In my Jamaican immigrant family passing was the most controversial and unacceptable thing a family member could do. It was common knowledge if you chose to do it, you would not be welcomed back. Don't send letters, don't come to funerals don't send wedding gifts, or even a birthday card, they would be returned. My grandmother's sister was turned away from their mother's funeral at the church door. Her brother and his wife day passed. Which means they were white at work and black at home. That was the most common form of passing in New York, but to live as white all the time was just not accepted as respectable to middle class black families back then. They saw it as a thing the poor who didn't know better did.

Colorism passing as classism. We from time to time get a white family member who will contact us looking for answers. However we have found that being part black in the abstract is normally as much blackness as they can really deal with on a day to day basis. Whiteness in reality is too valuable for them to really want to adjust their racial identity from white to mixed race. Never met one willing to consider themselves black. Not even the ones where all of their grandparents were passing. It's just too much for them to give up much less take on. I can't really say I blame them.  We just don't live in that world yet."
-snip-
This comment was reformatted to increase its readability.

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Excerpt #7
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trwq3CNCMkU
1. Jan Jan, 2021

" @TVChild3   Passing is an action my dear, a practice. It is a specific term that refers to specific behaviour. As in to engage in passing. Passing is not an ability. You're confusing someone's looks allowing them to pass for white, with this very specific cultural practice, which is a choice to pretend to be white and live in white society and deny your black heritage."

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2. Yeahaboutthat Though, 2021
"I have a great uncle whose white skin, blonde curly hair and blue eyes helped him pass for white. Where they were from, once you passed, you never came back or associated with the family again for fear of the death penalty. He was encouraged by the family to take his random birth lottery (in terms of appearance) and leave, never to be heard from again. Somewhere out there his great children walking around today don't even know they are a part of our black family."

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3. S Joseph,2021
"My grandmother passed as white to immigrate to the US and then to get into the union as a seamstress.

She left my dad and aunt back in Grenada since they were too dark to pass. It caused lifelong pain."

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Reply
Luke, 2021
4. "Wow, so your grandmother looks white? Sorry im trying to understand this passing""

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Reply
5. Kimberly Robinson, 2021
"@Luke  Yes, that’s what she means."

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Lillie George, 2021
"I have lost many many cousins through passing.  My mom chose not to straighten her hair and move north in order to pass, but so many of her cousins did in the 40"s, 50's, and 60's.  The point is that the need for passing in the first place has destroyrd families."

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[Pancocojams Editor's Note: The next four comments refer to the 2021 Rebecca Hall's movie "Passing that is based on the 1923 novel of the same name by Black American Nella Larson.]

Lovley1, 2021
"this looks so good. its gonna get a lot of good conversations started about the trauma and stigmas of colorism and how it has negatively affected the black community. Eye opening look into the psychology of surviving while black."

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Reply
Blythe Dhia, 2021
"It should actually go beyond colorism, and open up conversations about the ridiculousness of race and what is considered white and black in this country."

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Tudor Miller, 2021
"Very interesting film. I've read the book, I'll probably read it again when I get the chance. Couldn't they have chosen two actresses who are actually 'white passing' I'm sure there are plenty of biracial, multiracial individuals who could play this role very convincingly. Apart from that, the trailer looks amazing. I'll definitely be watching it. Love from London UK. 🇬🇧"

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Lola Rew, 2021
..."I really like the actresses, but they cannot pass."
-snip-
A number of other commenters in this discussion thread wrote comments that can be summarized as "The two main characters in  in Rebecca Hall's Passing movie wouldn't have been able to pass because of their skin colors and facial features". 

Here's a link to that movie's trailer (and a summary of that 2021 movie] -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trwq3CNCMkU

"Adapted from the celebrated 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, PASSING tells the story of two Black women, Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and Clare Kendry (Academy Award nominee Ruth Negga), who can “pass” as white but choose to live on opposite sides of the color line during the height of the Harlem Renaissance in late 1920s New York. After a chance encounter reunites the former childhood friends one summer afternoon, Irene reluctantly allows Clare into her home, where she ingratiates herself to Irene’s husband (André Holland) and family, and soon her larger social circle as well. As their lives become more deeply intertwined, Irene finds her once-steady existence upended by Clare, and PASSING becomes a riveting examination of obsession, repression and the lies people tell themselves and others to protect their carefully constructed realities."

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Excerpt #8
From https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/10/07/354310370/a-chosen-exile-black-people-passing-in-white-america
"Dr. Albert Johnston passed in order to practice medicine. After living as leading citizens in Keene, N.H., the Johnstons revealed their true racial identity, and became national news.
-snip-
That quote is from a photo caption in this article.

'Who Are Your People?'

Loss of self. Loss of family. Loss of community. Loss of the ability to answer honestly the question black people have been asking each other since before Emancipation: "Who are your people?"

[Stanford historian Allyson] Hobbs began writing about passing for her doctoral dissertation, and was encouraged to turn it into a book. The dissertation became A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in America. It's a history of passing told through the lens of personal stories.”…

 Once Hobbs began researching, the stories came thick and fast. There was New Yorker Theophilus McKee, who'd chosen to live as a white man for all of his adult life. That's until he stepped forward to claim a huge inheritance as the only colored descendant of Negro Civil War veteran Col. John McKee. His claim and the court fight with his biracial siblings made national news.

There's the story of Harry S. Murphy, who was assigned as a ROTC cadet to the University of Mississippi by a commander who assumed Murphy was white. "For a year, Harry had a ball at Ole Miss," Hobbs laughs. "He ran track, dated white girls and was known as a terrific dancer." Years later, the university fought to keep James Meredith from registering as its first black student, Harry Murphy gleefully broke the news: "Ole Miss was fighting a battle they had no idea they'd lost years ago.

Then there's the sad tale of Elsie Roxborough, a beauty from a distinguished Detroit family who became the first black girl to live in a dorm at the University of Michigan. She tried acting in California, then moved to New York to live as a white woman. When her disapproving father refused to support her, Roxborough — then known as Mona Manet — committed suicide. Her grieving and equally pale sister passed as a white woman to claim the body, so Roxborough's secret wouldn't be given away. Her death certificate declared she was white.

[…]

The rise of a more diverse America, and a growing multicultural movement that insists on people's right to recognize all of their ethnicity, has helped racial passing pass into history.”

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This concludes Part I of this two part pancocojams series.

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