Passing for White, Passing for Black

A review of Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Elaine K. Ginsberg ed., Duke University Press, 1996.

On September 10, 2020, the editorial director of Duke University Press issued a statement about Jessica Krug, a published author who for several decades had falsely claimed a Black and Latinx identity before being exposed as a case of racial fraud. The public statement was brimming with rage and indignation: “I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity,” the editor wrote. The feminist scholar was denounced as a case of deception and fraud, rendered more shameful by the fact that “early in her career, she took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars.” Confronted with her lies, Jessica Krug herself issued a blog confession in which she disclosed her original identity “as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City” who, because of “some unaddressed mental health” issues, had assumed a false identity initially as a youth and then as a scholar. Using a word tainted by a history of antisemitism, she described herself as “a culture leech,” apologized profusely, and asked to “be cancelled.” It turned out Jessica Krug wasn’t the only case of racial impersonation in academia: over the forthcoming months, other scholars were exposed as having claimed a false racial identity, including another author who had manuscripts accepted by Duke University Press even after she was denounced as a so-called “Pretendian,” or a person falsely claiming a Native American heritage. In another statement, the same editor indicated that “for months now, we at Duke University Press have engaged in difficult conversations about how we can do a better job of considering ethical concerns as we make our publishing decisions.” But she did not indicate whether the academic publisher would take measures to check the self-declared racial identity of its contributors, or how it would proceed in doing so.

Policing race, unpolicing gender

I remember being amused and puzzled by these media statements. I saw them as a typically American story as we like to imagine them in France: a narrative following a pattern of public exposure, legal confrontation, personal confession, atonement for past sins, and redemption, as was the case of Bill Clinton in the Jessica Lewinsky affair. Only in the case of white people assuming a Black identity there was neither mercy nor redemption: the culprits were expected to expose their shame publicly before disappearing into oblivion. And indeed, following her confession Jessica Krug vanished from public view, never to be seen again: she was, in effect, cancelled. To a certain degree, I can understand the outrage of the Duke editor and other persons who had been fooled into believing the usurpated identity of racial impostors. But only to a degree: there are also convincing arguments to support the fact that racial usurpation is not such a big deal, and should be treated with leniency. Whom did Jessica Krug harm by pretending to be black? Does having benefited from earmarked resources justify the policy of cancellation of a scholar who may otherwise have brought useful contributions to the field? What if it was possible to “play one’s race” as one plays a role? After all, isn’t it a central tenet of critical studies that identity is a fiction and that social roles are performatively enacted? According to Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble was published in 1990, gender is performance. Likewise, in Epistemology of the Closet, also published in 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that limiting sexuality to homosexuality or heterosexuality, in a structured binary opposition, is too simplistic. The discipline of queer studies that they helped establish is a broad tent: one does not have to prove one’s credentials as a gay, lesbian, or otherwise LGBTQI+ person to identify as “queer.” Likewise, in crip theory—the radical arm of disability studies—, a person is considered as disabled if she considers herself to be so. There are no checks of medical records or social security status: indeed, disability scholars deny doctors the exclusive right to declare who is disabled and who is not, and argue that disability status is biased against persons of color, people living in precarious conditions, and otherwise discriminated persons. Being disabled (or being queer) is a social construction, just like what is opposed to it, namely being able-bodied (or being straight). Why should race be treated differently? Are academics serious when they claim that race is also a fluid and reversible category?

The moral panic raised by racial usurpations of minority identity is a very contemporary phenomenon. To understand its roots, one has to delve into the American history of race relations, and to understand the academic context as it emerged in the 1990, especially in literature departments where questions of identity and fiction were most prominently raised. It was a time when the modern racial impersonators started their career, and when transracialism, although based in those cases on identity theft and deception, appeared as a feasible option. The book Passing and the Fictions of Identity, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg and published in 1996, therefore provides a useful benchmark to assess contemporary debates in light of their foundational moment. The term passing designates a performance in which one presents oneself as what one is not, a performance commonly imagined along the axis of race, class, gender, or sexuality. In American literature, passing across race and across gender are thoroughly imbricated—most famously in the narrative of William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), in which the black couple escaped from slavery, she dressed as a white man and he posing as her servant, and in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) when Eliza, traveling to Canada, disguises herself as a white man and her young son as a girl. In the twentieth century, novels such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) added to the discourse of racial passing a third important sense of passing: the appearance of “homosexual” as “heterosexual.” Passing and the Fictions of Identity explores passing novels as a literary genre that complicates racial and sexual categories. It also considers passing across social status delimitations, as in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) in which the narrator, an Igbo African and a former British slave, becomes a free sailor and a pioneer of the abolitionist cause. It addresses gender crossing through a close reading of The Woman in Battle (1876), an account of Civil War cross-dressing that presents itself as the autobiography of Loreta Velazquez, a woman who masqueraded as a Confederate officer and spy during the war. Passing novels also include The Hidden Hand (or Capitola the Madcap), a picaresque adventure tale first published in 1859, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), in which national, racial, and sexual identities are presented as nostalgic constructions subject to a pathos of lost origins. Black Like Me (1961) is not a work of fiction but a realistic account of a journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation, by a journalist who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. Closing the book, Adrian Piper, a philosopher and a performance artist, offers her personal testimony as an African American woman who identifies herself as black but often passes for white because of her light-skin complexion.

The dilemma of passing

Passing for white is still a reality in contemporary American society, where African American identity was built on a history of slavery and segregation and where Blacks still suffer from racial prejudice and social exclusion. As F. James Davis writes in Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (1991), “Those who pass have a severe dilemma before they decide to do so, since a person must give up all family ties and loyalties to the black community in order to gain economic and other opportunities.” There is no forced “outing” of people who pass for white in the African American community: “Publicly to expose the African ancestry of someone who claims to have none is not done,” writes Adrian Piper. And yet passing is met with ambivalence and equivocation. In the novel Passing, one character remarks: “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.” By contrast, at the time the book was published, passing for black when one is white was deemed a complete impossibility. Adrian Piper, who was suspected of doing so, reacts violently to such accusation: “It’s an extraordinary idea, when you think about it: as though someone would willingly shoulder the stigma of being black in a racist society.” Based on her own experience, she considers being black as “a social condition, more than an identity, that no white person would voluntarily assume, even in imagination.” The many instances of microaggressions, discriminatory treatment, racial slurs, or racist conversations she overheard even in an academic context considered as “safe” justify her point: raised as an African American by a committed family, but as a person who “looked white” and “talked white,” she involuntarily passed as white and thus was able to witness the racist behavior of white persons who lower their guard when they think they are among themselves (as in the Saturday Night Life routine when a whitefaced Eddy Murphy experiences the sight of relief as a single black man exits a bus full of white passengers.) In Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin expresses outrage and mortification at a variety of incidents that would have been commonplace to black Southerners living under Jim Crow: being turned away from hotels and restaurants, made the target of racial animosity and sexual objectification, denied banking privileges, rejected peremptorily from jobs, required to use segregated toilet facilities, and forced to sit at the back of the bus. Clearly under such conditions, no white person would willingly become black.

There are several reasons why passing became a popular trope in American literature, and why literary criticism took on the subject with an enthusiasm bordering on frenzy in the 1990s. Cross-dressing and assuming a fake identity have always been a familiar ploy in literary fiction, from picaresque novels of sixteenth century Spain to the theater comedies of Shakespeare and Marivaux. The American legacy of slavery and racial segregation added an element of drama to this familiar plot. The fictitious characters of the passing novel and the unknown thousands of very real black men and women who passed out of slavery moved from a category of subordination and oppression to one of freedom and privilege. According to the one-drop rule, any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry (“one drop” of “black blood”) was considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). African blood is invisible on the surface of the body, allowing persons of mixed descent with a light skin and Caucasian facial features to pass as white. Crossing racial or sexual boundaries involves a suspension of disbelief that is at the heart of literary fiction: appearances are deceiving, identities are in flux, and nothing is what it seems. The visual force of passing, and especially the shock of its discovery after the fact, is extraordinary. Especially in the case of race, passing is not simply performance or theatricality, the pervasive tropes of recent work on sex and gender identity, nor is it parody or pastiche, for it seeks to erase, rather than expose, its own dissimulation. Unlike sexual identity which is not necessarily apparent, race is eminently visible, as if it were natural. Race is essential, communal, and public, whereas sexuality is contingent, individual, and private. The misperception of race is therefore surprising insofar as it contradicts the established belief in the strength of blood ties and genetic makeup. Racial passing resonates deep within the American psyche. Even though a significant proportion of white Americans, about 3.5 percent according to geneticists, are known to have some African ancestry, very few people who identify themselves as white are ready to acknowledge this heritage. According to Adrian Piper, “the fact of African ancestry among whites ranks up there with family incest, murder, and suicide as one of the bitterest and most difficult pills for white Americans to swallow.”

The fictions of identity

Through the contributions to this volume, passing was constituted as a literary genre and a productive space in which to interrogate identity in all its dimensions. According to one contributor, “passing is an act of resistance against dominant constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity.” As she explains, the discourse of racial passing reveals the arbitrary foundation of the categories “black” and “white,” just as passing across gender and sexuality places in question the meaning of “masculine” and “feminine,” “straight” and “gay.” For the editor in her introductory chapter, “just as the ontology of race exposes the contingencies of the categories ‘white’ and ‘black,’ so the ontology of gender exposes the essential inauthenticity of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’” Socially constructed identities seemed to connote an identity easily altered or cast off: one could be black or white (or Native American) by an act of volition, a conscious decision that would engage the rest of one’s life but that had no relation to one’s previous self. The facticity of identity made any experience of that identity necessarily inauthentic: “Passing is only one more indication that subjectivity involves fracture, that no true self exists apart from its multiple, simultaneous enactments.” It was accepted as a an article of faith that “identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and contingent.” There was no authentic self, but an assemblage composed by “a series of guises and masks, performances and roles.” Literature had first established passing as a trope, and literary criticism gave it its badge of honor. The 1990s were years of transformation in the humanities, and the university became a factory for ideas of gender transition and eventually of race fluidity. Under the influence of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, who are quoted at length in this volume, identities were read as fictions and constructed as fantasies. Race was compared to a “metaphor,” an “empty signifier,” a “mark empty of any referential content” or “the unheimlisch return of a desire” that could be as malleable as text. Then was a time to “construct new identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress.”

In such intellectual climate, it is no wonder that some enterprising individuals took critical theory at its own word and decided to experiment in real life the theses that literary critics and social scientists had proposed on the cultural front. If all identities are in passing and race is a masquerade, why not assume a different racial identity and pretend one belonged to a minority of color instead of dull and undifferentiated whiteness? If race is a role we play, why not choose the character we wish to embody and play the part accordingly? Of course, assuming a different ethnic identity involves lying about one’s “true” origins. But if race is a lie, lying about a lie is not a lie: it is all performance. There were several motivations behind the choice made by some individuals, mostly academics and performing artists, to take on the identity of an ethnic minority. First, the stigma once associated with being colored started to recede with the civil rights movement and the promotion of ethnic identities. In the ideologically charged climate of the 1970s, Black was beautiful, Native Indian was noble, ethnic was chic. There was a whiff of marginality and radicalism in embracing the cause of ethnic minorities fighting for their rights. As the author of Black Like Me experienced it, one could not act as a spokesperson of a group in which one did not belong. He chose to step aside and to support black separatism from a distance; others preferred to espouse the cause with which they identified unequivocally, and to play the part until the end. As a second reason, this was a period when ethnic studies and other interdisciplinary fields emerged as new and exciting disciplines. For a promising academic, it was important to position oneself where all the action was. If this involved lying about one’s ethnic origins, so be it. Most of the time, the deception began with a lie by omission or a sous-entendre that may have been based on family lore. In a nonsuspecting environment, there was no hard questions asked, and no need to provide minute answers about one’s genetic makeup. In some cases, what began as a histrionic role became an acting career. Academics spend their life on a stage and impersonate a role in front of a devoted audience. They tend to embody the ideas they defend to the point their appearance becomes inseparable from their discipline. Teaching ethnic studies made one feel part of this ethnicity.

The backlash against transracialism

And yet, transracialism has few modern proponents, and academics who are found to have lied about their ethnic origins are subjected to public shaming and a strict policy of cancellation. “In Defense of Transracialism”, an article published by the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in the academic journal Hypatia in spring 2017, was met with a barrage of insults and denunciations, and the journal’s editors had to publish an apology. How, then, are we to understand the backlash against racial trespassing and the cancellation of individuals who claimed an ethnic identity when in fact they were white? Why did race and gender follow different paths and ended up on opposite sides of academic debates, with transracialism denounced as wholly illegitimate while trans identities were recognized and even praised by gender theorists? First, the issue of passing involves not only an individual’s decision to change race, but also deliberately lying and deceiving about it. Academia is an industry that defines itself in large part by its ethical standards: having a career based on a lie makes other people angry and resentful. American ethics adds a layer or prudery and moral posturing to these manifestations of public outrage: remember that in the Lewinsky case, what was reproached to Bill Clinton was not to have had an affair with an intern, but to have lied about it. Denunciations of ethnic fraud also emphasize the fact that the culprits benefited from preferential treatment and financial resources originally earmarked to members of ethnic minorities: they “stole” these resources from others, who may have benefited from these affirmative action measures but could not. One may find this argument shallow and petty: there is more to academia than just money and a struggle for positions, and every social policy has its leakages. The resolution to curtail the phenomenon of passing also comes from the realization that it may have reached massive proportions. According to the 1990 census, two million Americans reported as American Indians and Alaska Natives. In 2000, almost twice as many gave the same answer to the questionnaire. Among them, in proportion, Latinos and highly educated adults as well as women were the groups most directly affected. Checking the “Native American” box is not only a means of gaming the university admission system: Native American cultures have experienced a kind of cultural renaissance, which increases the number of persons willing to associate with them. As a last argument, the reaction to Rebecca Tuvel’s article showed that feminists who support trans identities and queer studies are particularly ill at ease with the possibility of transracialism. They do not want to witness the contamination of gender debates with issues of racial transition. Policing race is also a way to police their own discipline and to erect barriers to avoid trespassing.