Reverse Passing? Kidding… Right? |
Reverse Passing? Kidding… Right?
The Root
2010-12-14
Jenée Desmond-Harris
A report that biracial people are denying their white parents seems absurd to me—but I’m paying attention anyway.
Ever heard of Barack Obama? You know, the first black president? The one who won an election and near-deity status in the African-American community while openly discussing his white mother in books, interviews and stump speeches?
Yeah, me, too. This is just one of the reasons I’m scratching my head at the findings of a new study that people with one white and one black parent “downplay their white ancestry,” in part to gain the acceptance of other black people. The authors dub this phenomenon “reverse passing” and call it “a striking phenomenon.” I’m beyond stumped. In a summary of the results, the sociologists behind “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans” report that this occurs especially in “certain social situations”—ostensibly, around other black people—where having a white parent “can carry its own negative biases.”
Let’s be clear: Although the study does conclude that people are “exercising considerable control over how they identify” racially these days, we’re not talking about having the freedom to elect to call oneself black. Rather, according to the lead author, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna, those who self-identify as biracial or multiracial “adopt an identity that contradicts their self-perception of race.” In other words, they’re being purposely disingenuous. They’re exchanging honesty for social benefits, in a mirror-image version of the well-known phenomenon of passing as white…
…While I don’t relate to the results of this study, I won’t dismiss them. My first reaction—after sheer confusion—was to feel superior to the study subjects. (Maybe they should have gone to an HBCU, where I got the message loud and clear that you can be black in any way that makes sense to you. Maybe they should be in social circles like mine. When polled on Facebook, many black acquaintances said that they always figured I had a white or mixed parent, and—surprise!—they didn’t de-friend me.)…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Jenée Desmond-Harris, Nikki Khanna, Nikki Khanna Sherwin, The Root