Spinning on Margins: An Analysis of Passing as Communicative Phenomenon |
Spinning on Margins: An Analysis of Passing as Communicative Phenomenon
Queen: a journal of rhetoric and power
Special Issue: Rehtorics of identity: Place, Race, Sex and the Person (January 2005)
From the conference held from 2005-01-20 through 2005-01-22 at the University of Redlands
21 pages
Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University
Acts of black-to-white racial passing in the United States represent a struggle between self-identity and the social structures into which one is born. From a historical perspective, passing is a strategy of representation through which light-skinned black Americans attempt(ed) to reconcile “two unreconciled ideals:” their limited opportunities as black people in a segregated society with their idealized life goals as full American citizens in the pre-civil rights era (DuBois, 1903; Gandy, 1998). In other words, passing is a strategy employed by many light-skinned black Americans to resolve being excluded from the general white world of social activity by “the vast veil;” the physical, legal, psychological, and social obstacles structurally embedded between blacks and whites (DuBois, 1903).
This individual paper employs Structuration Theory, legal precedent, literature and rhetorical analysis to respond to the following specific interrogations: (1) is it possible to develop a vocabulary about “passing,” which is an activity based on nonverbal communication and physicality and enshrouded in a code of silence? And, in a broader sense, (2) how do acts of passing themselves become communicative behaviors that express identity?
This three-pronged analysis of the passing phenomenon will work to call the ideological and epistemological foundations of race itself into question. First, Giddens’s Structuration Theory will explain that passers note a contextual diversity/dissonance at the macro level between the general white world of social activity and the general black world of social activity. Second, a rhetorical analysis of legal precedent will highlight America’s investment in race as the basis for defining and partaking in social and material privileges that become routine and critical aspects of day-to-day life. Court cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and People v. Dean are pivotal points in tracing whiteness from “color to race to status to property” (Harris, 1993, p. 1714). Additionally, these cases address the debate of social versus legal whiteness as the grounds for constituting full participation in society. Third, available literature, including narratives written by enslaved Africans along with novels, diaries, and memoirs from the Harlem Renaissance, recounts tales of passing and the emotional and social tolls paid in the process (Harris, 1993; Johnson, 1912; Hughes, 1933; Williams, 1991; Ifekwunigwe, 1999). Rhetorical analysis of this literature will uncover the tropes of a vocabulary of passing and reveal race as a “fantasy theme” and social resource that individuals who are not in the mainstream of white America utilize to attain economic, political, and personal fulfillment.
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Marcia A. Dawkins, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Marcia Dawkins, Queen: a journal of rhetoric and power