Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
[Lia Vainer] Schucman points to what she calls “the racism of intimacy” as a unique feature of Brazilian culture arising from its history. In contrast with the segregationist racism that prevailed in South Africa or the South in the United States, what we have in Brazil is a kind of racism that presupposes interaction between ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’. This relationship may even be moderated by positive feelings of affection without ceasing to be racist. “My aim was to analyze how ‘interracial families’ experience, negotiate, construct or deconstruct racism in their intimacy,” she said.
Paul A. Kramer, Associate Professor of History Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
This narrative piece, selected by The Best American Essays 2012 as a “notable essay,” tells the story of Rev. Jesse Routté, an African American Lutheran minister in New York who, in response to racist abuse during a 1943 trip to Mobile, Alabama, returned four years later disguised as a turbaned, Swedish-accented “foreigner.” When he reported positive treatment, it flaunted contradictions in Jim Crow’s racial definitions.
Meena Krishnamurthy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Though a means of escaping and undermining racial injustice, the practice comes with own set of costs and sacrifices.
In Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, adapted by Rebecca Hall and distributed on Netflix last fall, Clare Kendry—a light-skinned Black woman—decides to pass as white. Clare grows up poor in Chicago; after her alcoholic father dies, she is taken in by her racist white aunts. When she turns eighteen she marries a rich white man who assumes she is white. Clare makes a clean escape until, some years later, she runs into her childhood friend, Irene Redfield, at a whites-only hotel; Irene, it turns out, sometimes passes herself, in this case to escape the summer heat. The storyline traces their complex relationship after this reunion and ends in tragedy for Clare.
Hall’s film adaptation joins several other recent representations that dramatize the lived experience of passing. The protagonist of Brit Bennett’s best-selling novel The Vanishing Half (2020), for example, decides to start passing as white in the 1950s at age sixteen after responding to a listing in the newspaper for secretarial work in a New Orleans department store. Much to her surprise, after excelling at the typing test, Stella is offered the position; her boss assumes she is white. Initially Stella keeps up the ruse just to support her and her sister, but passing also becomes a way for her to escape the trauma of her father’s lynching and the prospect of her own…