Art and What Does a Caste System Look Like in America

When a person classified equally one race is accepted as another

Racial passing occurs when a person classified every bit a member of a racial grouping is accepted or perceived ("passes") every bit a fellow member of another. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United states of america to describe a person of color or of multiracial ancestry who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination.^{[ commendation needed ]}

In the U.s. [edit]

Passing for white [edit]

Although anti-miscegenation laws outlawing racial intermarriage existed in America as early on equally 1664,^[ane] 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 slave population. For generations, enslaved blackness mothers bore mixed-race children who were deemed "mulattos", "quadroons", "octoroons", or "hexadecaroons" based on their per centum of "black blood".^[ii]

Although these mixed-race people were often half white or more, institutions of hypodescent and the 20th-century one driblet rule in some—particularly Southern⁠—states classified them as black and therefore, junior, peculiarly after slavery became a racial caste.^{[ commendation needed ]} Just 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 The states, as documented by Paul Heinegg in his Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.^[3]

Mixed-race African Americans sometimes used their racially ambiguous appearance and frequently bulk European beginnings in order to laissez passer as white and evade the restrictions against them to seek improve lives. For some people, passing equally white and using their whiteness to uplift other black people was the all-time fashion to undermine the system that relegated blackness people to a lower position in society.^[4] These same people that were able to laissez passer as white were sometimes known for leaving the African American community and getting an pedagogy, later to return and assist with racial uplifting. Although reasons behind passing are deeply individual, the history of African Americans passing as white can be categorized by the post-obit fourth dimension periods: the antebellum era, post-emancipation, Reconstruction through Jim Crow, and present day.^[5] ^: four

Antebellum America [edit]

During the antebellum period, passing equally white was a means of escaping slavery. Once they left the plantation, escaped slaves who could pass as white found condom in their perceived whiteness. To pass as white was to laissez passer equally gratis.^[5] ^: four Withal, once they gained their freedom, most escaped slaves intended to return to black—passing as white was a temporary disguise used to proceeds freedom.^[5] ^: 28 Once they had escaped, their racial ambiguity could be a safeguard to their freedom. If an escaped slave was able to pass every bit white, they were less likely to exist caught and returned to their plantation. If they were caught, white-passing slaves such as Jane Morrison^[half-dozen] could sue for their freedom, using their white advent equally justification for emancipation.^[5] ^: thirty

Post-emancipation [edit]

Post-emancipation, passing as white was no longer a ways to obtain freedom. As passing shifted from a necessity to an selection, information technology barbarous out of favor in the black community. Writer Charles W. Chestnutt, who was born complimentary in Ohio as a mixed-race African American, explored circumstances for persons of color in the South afterward emancipation, for case, for a formerly enslaved woman who marries a white-passing man soon after the conclusion of Civil War. Some fictional exploration coalesced effectually the figure of the "tragic mulatta", a woman whose future is compromised by her beingness mixed race and able to pass for white.^{[ citation needed ]}

Reconstruction through Jim Crow [edit]

During the Reconstruction era, black people slowly gained some of the ramble rights of which they were deprived during slavery. Although they would not secure "full" constitutional equality for another century until afterward passage of the Civil Rights Human action of 1964 and Voting Rights Human activity of 1965, reconstruction promised African Americans legal equality for the showtime time. Abolishing slavery did not abolish racism. During Reconstruction whites tried to enforce white supremacy, in part through the ascent of Ku Klux Klan chapters, rifle clubs and later paramilitary insurgent groups such as the Cerise Shirts.^[7]

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

This idea of crossing the color line at different points in ane'southward life is explored in James Weldon Johnson'southward Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. ^[8] But the narrator closes the novel by saying "I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage",^[ix] meaning that he regrets trading in his blackness for whiteness. The idea that passing as white was a rejection of blackness was common at the fourth dimension and remains so to the present time.^[5] ^: 30

African-American people too chose to pass equally whites during Jim Crow and beyond. For case, United States civil rights leader Walter Francis White conducted investigations in the S during which he passed equally white to assemble information on lynchings and hate crimes, and to protect himself in socially hostile environments. White, who was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and had a light complexion, was of mixed-race, mostly European beginnings. Twenty-seven of White's 32 great-peachy-groovy-grandparents were white; the other five were classified as black and had been slaves. White grew upward with his parents in Atlanta in the blackness customs and identified with it. He served as the chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 until his death in 1955.

In the 20th century, Krazy Kat comics creator George Herriman was a Louisiana Creole cartoonist born to mulatto parents, who claimed Greek heritage throughout his developed life.

The aforementioned 20th-century writer and critic Anatole Broyard was a Louisiana Creole who chose to pass for white in his adult life in New York City and Connecticut. He wanted to create an independent writing life and rejected being classified every bit a black author. In addition, he did not identify with northern urban blackness people, whose experiences had been much different from his as a child in New Orleans' Creole community. He married an American woman of European descent. His wife and many of his friends knew he was partly blackness in ancestry. His daughter Bliss Broyard did non find out until later her father's death. In 2007, she published a memoir that traced her exploration of her father's life and family mysteries entitled I Driblet: My Father'south Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets.

2000 to present [edit]

Passing as white in the 21st-century is more controversial: it is often seen as a rejection of black, family and civilization.^[5] ^: 10 ^[iv] In August 2021, genderfluid Blackness author for Steven Universe Future and Craig of the Creek, Taneka Stotts, told Insider that often Black and brown characters in blitheness exist ambiguously, calling this a "White passing narrative...where the narrative is written in a way that information technology'due south white-passing enough to get by your executives and the powers that be."^[10] Mae Catt, a queer Asian-American author for Immature Justice, added that when shows aren't run or written by people of colour, Black characters are "surface decoration" with racial representation going "very similarly to queer representation" every bit the cultural identity of characters is non shown, with an "unspoken implicit subversive bias" that their beliefs is "correct," behavior that is "inevitably white."^[10]

Passing as Indigenous Americans [edit]

Portrait of Englishman Archibald Belaney, who 'reinvented himself' as Gray Owl. Photo by Yousuf Karsh, 1936. Built-in in England, Belaney went to Canada and, among not-Natives, successfully passed equally a Showtime Nations person for many years.

Other persons have passed as Native American or Starting time Nations people.^[11] ^[12] ^[13] These people are sometimes called Pretendians, a portmanteau of the words pretend and Indian.^[14]

In the New Age and Hippie movements, non-Native people sometimes have attempted to laissez passer as Native American or other Indigenous medicine people. The debasing term for such people is "plastic shaman".^[15]

The writer and environmentalist Grey Owl was born in United Kingdom as a white man named Archibald Belaney; he made a life in Canada and claimed to be a First Nations person. When asked to explicate his White appearance, he lied and claimed he was half Scottish and one-half Apache.^[xvi] Belaney performed what he said were Ojibwe cultural practices and wilderness skills, and adopted an anachronistic and stereotypical lifestyle, every bit part of a persona which he was successful in marketing to not-Native audiences.^[17]

The United states player Fe Optics Cody, who was of Sicilian descent, developed a niche in Hollywood past playing roles of Native Americans. Initially playing Indians only in movies and television, eventually he wore his film costumes full-time and insisted he was of Cherokee and Cree descent.^[18] ^[nineteen]

In the visual arts and literature, other White-Americans have also attempted to pass as being indigenous. Ku Klux Klan leader and segregationist oral communication writer, Asa Earl Carter, attempted to reinvent himself equally Cherokee author Forrest Carter, writer of the novel The Education of Piddling Tree.^[11] ^[20]

Jay Marks, a man of Eastern-European Jewish ancestry, adopted the pen name of Jamake Highwater about 1969, claiming to be Cherokee-Blackfeet, and published numerous books nether that proper name. He won awards and NEA grants.^[21] ^[22] ^[23]

Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West was an African American from Rhode Island. The grandson of prominent attorney and customs leader, William Ashbie Hawkins, West reinvented himself as Red Thunder Deject and, despite only knowing "a few words of Catawba" that he had learned from books, he convinced anthropologists that he was the last fluent speaker of the Catawba language. Over objections from the Native Americans he studied, who told the academics he was not Native, West connected to work with anthropologists to publish language and cultural materials about a number of different tribes with whom he had never had contact.^[24]

American-born sculptor Jimmie Durham was exposed as a non-Native man posing every bit a Cherokee.^[25] Artist Yeffe Kimball claimed to exist Osage.^[26]

To attempt to protect Native American artists from the claims of non-Native impersonators, the Indian Arts and crafts Act of 1990 was passed in the United States. It requires whatever visual artist claiming to be a Native American creative person to be either an enrolled member of a state or federally recognized tribe, or for a recognized tribe to designate the artist as a tribal artisan.

In academia, due to non-tribal colleges' and universities' reliance on cocky-identification of tribal identity, non-Native people have sometimes passed equally Native Americans.^[27] Elizabeth Warren, Harvard professor and U.Southward. Senator, claimed Cherokee and Delaware beginnings. Her claims were rejected by the Cherokee Nation.^[28]

Professor and activist Ward Churchill, who advocated for American Indian rights, claimed to be alternately Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, and Métis.^[27] His claims were eventually rejected by the tribes he claimed, specifically the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians.^[29] ^[30] ^[31] Churchill was fired in 2007 from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct over his research and writings.^[32]

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 5, 2015 that Dartmouth College fired the director of its Native American Program, Susan Taffe Reed, "after tribal officials and alumni accused her of misrepresenting herself every bit an American Indian".^[33] She previously taught at Dartmouth, Bowdoin College, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.^[34] ^[35]

Terry Tafoya (now going by the name Ty Nolan), a former psychology professor at Evergreen State College, passed as being Warm Springs and Taos Pueblo. The Seattle Post Intelligencer discovered that he was neither, and reported his deception.^[27]

The Native American and Ethnic Studies Association's Statement on Indigenous Identity Fraud says:

If we believe in Indigenous self-determination as a value and goal, then questions of identity and integrity in its expression cannot be treated as just a lark from supposedly more than important issues. Falsifying one's identity or relationship to particular Indigenous peoples is an human action of appropriation continuous with other forms of colonial violence.^[36]

Passing as African American and other races [edit]

Civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, then president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, claimed in a February 2015 profile to have been built-in in a "Montana tepee" and accept hunted for food with her family unit as a child "with bows and arrows".^[37] She primarily identified as African American and had established herself as an activist in Spokane.

In 2015 Dolezal's mother disputed her daughter's accounts, saying that the family's beginnings was Czech, Swedish, and High german, with "faint traces" of Native American heritage. She also denied diverse claims made by her girl most her life, including having lived in Africa when immature, although the parents did live there for a time after Dolezal had left home.^[38] Dolezal ultimately resigned from her position at the Spokane NAACP chapter.

In 2015, Vijay Chokalingam, the brother of Indian-American entertainer Mindy Kaling, told CNN that he had pretended to be black years before in lodge to have advantage of affirmative action to be admitted into medical school.^[39] The medical school issued a argument that Chokalingam's grades and scores met the criteria for credence at the time, and race had played no gene in his access.^[forty]

John Roland Redd was an African-American musician born and raised in Missouri. In the 1950s he assumed a new identity, claiming to be an Indian named Korla Pandit and fabricating a history of birth in New Delhi, India to a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer. He established a career in this exotic persona, described every bit an "Indian Liberace". In 2001, 3 years later his decease, his truthful ethnic identity was revealed in an commodity by Los Angeles magazine editor R. J. Smith.^[41] ^[42] ^[43]

In September 2020, afterward Black Latino scholars confronted her, African History Professor and author Jessica Krug admitted she had been falsely passing as African-American. As an activist, Krug had likewise been using the alias "Jessica La Bombalera".^[44]

Other countries [edit]

Germany [edit]

For Jews in Nazi Deutschland, passing as "Aryan" or white and not-Jewish was a means of escaping persecution. In that location were three ways to avert being shipped off to the death camps: run, hibernate or pass. No pick was perfect, and all carried the risk of getting caught. People who could not run abroad but wanted to maintain a life without hiding attempted to pass as "Aryan."^[45] People who were "visibly Jewish"^[46] could try to modify their appearance to become "Aryan", while other Jewish people with more ambiguous features could pass into the "Aryan" ideal more easily. In these attempts to pass as "Aryan", Jewish people altered their appearance by dyeing their hair blonde and fifty-fifty attempting to reverse circumcisions.^[45] Edith Hahn Beer was Jewish and passed every bit "Aryan"; she survived the Holocaust by living with and marrying a Nazi officeholder. Hahn-Beer wrote a memoir called: The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Adult female Survived the Holocaust. Another such example is Stella Kübler, a Jewish collaborator who initially attempted to hide her Jewish background. Decades later, Belgian-American Misha Defonseca would exercise the reverse: falsely merits to be a Jewish Holocaust survivor until 2008 when her truthful identity was revealed.

Canada [edit]

The scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Indigenous health arm, Carrie Bourassa, was a pretendian.^[47]

Examples of racial passing have been used by people to assimilate into groups other than European. Marie Lee Bandura, who grew up as part of the Qayqayt First Nation in New Westminster, British Columbia, was orphaned and believed she was the concluding of her people. She moved to Vancouver's Chinatown, married a Chinese man, and raised her four children every bit Chinese. One day she told her daughter Rhonda Larrabee almost her heritage: "I volition tell you once, merely you lot must never ask me over again."^[48] ^[49]

England [edit]

Patrick O'Brian (1914–2000), born Richard Patrick Russ, an English language novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin serial of sea novels set in the Regal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, was for many years presumed by reviewers and journalists to exist Irish,^[50] and he took no steps to correct the impression, until a 1999 exposé in The Daily Telegraph ^[51] fabricated public the facts of his beginnings, original name and first marriage, provoking considerable critical media comment.

Handling in pop culture [edit]

Literature [edit]

Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel, The Garies and Their Friends, explores the choices in the racist antebellum due north (Philadelphia) of 3 mixed-race characters who could laissez passer for white: George Winston, who opts to get out the United States rather than be subjected to discriminatory laws; Emily Garie, who marries into the coloured gild that she identifies with and defends; and her blood brother, Clarence Gary, who secretly passes afterwards attention a white boarding school. He falls in beloved with a white woman, is exposed as existence role black, and dies of tuberculosis and despair.
Kate Chopin's 1893 brusque story, "Désirée'south Baby", tells the story of an abased baby, apparently white, raised by a wealthy French Creole family. The babe (Désirée) grows upwards to marry a wealthy homo of practiced proper name. When their child is built-in, in a few months information technology becomes credible the child is role black. The husband, Armand, sends Désirée and the babe abroad, implying she is of mixed race. The final scene reveals that Armand was the 1 of mixed ancestry, and that this had been kept from him by his parents.
Marking Twain's 1894 novel, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, is a scathing satire of passing in the antebellum south. Roxy, a slave, is one⁄16 black; in order to avert existence sold downward the river, she decides to switch her ain babe (who is one⁄32 black) with a white kid she is caring for. Her baby Tom, who passes for white, is raised as a spoiled aristocrat, just when his true identity becomes known, as the child of a slave and thus born into slavery, he is sold downwards the river.
Writing in the late 19th century, Charles W. Chesnutt explored issues of mixed-race people passing for white in several of his short stories and novels set in the South after the American Civil War. Information technology was a tumultuous time, with dramatic social changes post-obit the Emancipation Proclamation; many of the people who had been enslaved were mixed race because of generations of white men having taken sexual advantage of slave women, or having more conventional liaisons with them.^{[ commendation needed ]}
In 1912, James Weldon Johnson anonymously published The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which depicts the life of a biracial man who, later on witnessing a lynching, chooses to alive as white. Doing and so costs him his connection to and dream of making music steeped in African-American roots.
Jessie Redmon Fauset published Plum Bun in 1928, a novel in which the African-American protagonist, Angela Murray, tries to leverage her light pare tone to proceeds social advantage.
Nella Larsen's 1929 novella, Passing, deals with two biracial women's racial identities and their social experience: 1 generally passes for white and has married white; the other is married to a black man and lives in the black customs of Harlem.
Fannie Hurst's 1933 bestselling novel, Imitation of Life, includes the graphic symbol Peola, a calorie-free-skinned African-American daughter who rejects her darker-skinned mother in society to pass for white. The novel was adapted as 2 independent major motility pictures of the same name (see Film).
Ray Sprigle, a white journalist, disguised himself equally black and travelled in the Deep Due south with John Wesley Dobbs, a guide from the NAACP. Sprigle wrote a series of manufactures under the title I Was a Negro in the Southward for 30 Days. The manufactures formed the basis of Sprigle's 1949 book In the Land of Jim Crow.^{[ citation needed ]}
Langston Hughes wrote several pieces related to passing, including two relevant curt stories. One, titled "Passing" in the 1934 collection The Means of White Folks, concerns a son who thanks his mother for literally disregarding him on the street as he is passing for white. The other, titled "Who's Passing for Who" (1952), portrays a couple whose racial ambiguity leads to questioning whether they are passing for white or for black.
Unpublished in Regina 1000. Anderson'due south lifetime, the one-act play The Man Who Passed narrates the plight of Fred Carrington. A former Harlem resident, afterward years of passing every bit white, returns to the friends he had abandoned to face the many consequences of his selection.
Blackness Like Me (1961) was an account by journalist John Howard Griffin most his experiences as a Southern white man passing every bit blackness in the tardily 1950s to explore how blacks were treated in the Deep South.
Danzy Senna's 1998 novel, Caucasia, features Birdie, a biracial girl who looks white and accompanies her white female parent as they get into hiding. Her sis, Cole, looks black and goes with their black father into a different hiding place.
Eric Jerome Dickey'south 1999 novel Milk in My Java, features a biracial woman who has been traumatized by the black community and her family; she moves to New York Urban center and passes for white.
The Human Stain (2000) is a novel past Philip Roth featuring a light-skinned African-American man who spent his adult professional life passing every bit a Jewish-American intellectual.
Mat Johnson and Warren Pleese's graphic novel, Incognegro, is inspired by Walter White's work as an investigative reporter for the NAACP on lynchings in the South in the early 20th century. It tells of Zane Pinchback, a young, light-skinned, African-American man whose eyewitness reports of lynchings are regularly published in a New York periodical under the byline "Incognegro".^[52]
Harlan Ellison, the speculative fiction writer, examines the emotional bear upon of passing in his allegorical short story, "Pennies, Off a Expressionless Man'due south Eyes". In information technology, a white man (secretly an alien non-human who was stranded on Globe as a child) attends the funeral of a beloved black man who raised him, and who taught him how to alloy in and announced human being.
Nell Zink'south 2015 novel Mislaid is told in the voice of a white Southern lesbian, who pretends to exist heterosexual to ally. She eventually leaves her husband, and assumes a new African-American identity for herself and her daughter, passing as a mixed-race woman.
In her 2017 book Real American: A Memoir, author Julie Lythcott-Haims depicts her experiences as a person of mixed race.
In Brit Bennett'southward 2020 novel The Vanishing Half, one of a set of identical twin sisters decides to cut her family ties and pass every bit white.

Film [edit]

The 1934 motion picture Imitation of Life featured the character Peola, who has mixed beginnings and passes as white.
The 1936 adaptation and the 1951 adaptation of the musical Bear witness Boat, prepare in the segregated South, characteristic a character Julie who is of mixed race and accustomed as white. The discovery of her partially African ancestry sets off a crisis, equally she is married to a white human.
Lost Boundaries (1949) features a blackness couple passing for white in New Hampshire who become pillars of the community, with the husband serving equally the esteemed boondocks physician. Upon beingness commissioned in the United States Navy, his racial identity is revealed. This fictional business relationship is based on the history of a existent family.^{[ citation needed ]}
Pinky was a 1949 Academy Award-winning film on the topic.
In the moving picture Band of Angels (1957), starring Clark Gable, Yvonne de Carlo and Sidney Poitier, Martha Starr grows upward as a privileged white Southern belle in the segregated dues-bellum South. Her male parent dies bankrupt, and her earth is disrupted when it is revealed that her mother was African American.
The 1959 remake of the 1934 film Imitation of Life featured the character Sarah Jane, who has mixed ancestry and is accepted as white.
Sapphire (1959) is a British pic which explores the theme of racial passing.
Shadows is a 1959 American independent drama film directed by John Cassavetes about race relations during the Beat Generation years in New York Metropolis. The film stars Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, and Hugh Hurd as three mulatto siblings, though only one of them is night-skinned plenty to be considered African American.
The 1960 film I Passed for White features an African-American character who is accepted as white because of her visible European-American beginnings.
Melvin Van Peebles'due south 1970 movie Watermelon Human tells the story of a casually racist white man who wakes up blackness and the result this has on his life.
The 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door features a depository financial institution robbery conducted by an African American hugger-mugger guerrilla grouping. Lighter-skinned members, who employ wigs to pass as white, are purposefully used. Witnesses to the criminal offence describe them every bit Caucasian males, deflecting suspicion from the guerrillas.
In the 1979 movie The Wiggle, Steve Martin's character explains in the introduction that "It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black kid." He was raised past the black family who adopted him and identified every bit black.
Julie Nuance's Illusions (1982), prepare in 1942, featured a woman in a Hollywood film studio who had passed every bit white to proceeds her position. Information technology was named i of the decade's best films in 1989 by the Black Filmmakers Association.^{[ commendation needed ]}
The 1986 moving-picture show Soul Man features a white man who wears greasepaint to qualify for an African American-simply scholarship at Harvard Law School.
In the 1990 moving picture Europa Europa, based on the real-life story of Solomon Perel during World State of war II, the main character is a young Jewish refugee who discards his identity papers and is eventually accepted as a hero of the Nazi government and exemplar of Aryan traits.
The 1995 moving-picture show Panther features a blackness Federal Bureau of Investigation agent named Pruitt, who passes for white when among African Americans.
The 1995 film Devil in a Blue Dress features a mixed-race adult female, light-skinned enough to pass, who becomes embroiled in a mystery in which her appearance is an important factor.
The 1996 film A Family unit Thing features a white homo, played by Robert Duvall, who learns when his mother dies that she was not his biological mother. His natural mother was African American and died every bit she gave birth to him. He too finds he has a blackness half brother (played by James Earl Jones) who is a policeman, as well as a maternal aunt.
The 2000 Boob tube flick A Business firm Divided is based on Kent Anderson Leslie's non-fiction book Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, (1849–1893), most a mixed-race adult female in the South whose female parent was a slave. Her wealthy white father raises her in a life of privilege. When he tries to will his property to her, his white relatives challenge her for control of the estate. They cite local laws forbidding property ownership by blacks (legally, the younger adult female is defined by her mother's slave status and racial caste). After courtroom challenges, Amanda Dickson succeeded in inheriting her father's fortune.
The 2003 picture show The Human Stain stars Anthony Hopkins as an African-American man of mixed-race ancestry who has passed every bit white for most of his adult life to achieve his professional and academic goals. It is adapted from Philip Roth'south novel of the same proper noun.
In 2004, Marlon and Shawn Wayans starred in the film White Chicks in which ii black FBI agents go undercover as rich white girls and are believed to be white by the white people they run into, including the girls' friends.
The 2005 film Slow Burn down has themes of interracial dating, "passing" or pretending to be a member of another race.
The 2007 documentary short Black/White & All That Jazz tells the story of singer-actor Herb Jeffries, who identified as "a man of color" in order to be accepted every bit a singer. He was of Irish and Sicilian ancestry.^{[ citation needed ]}
In the 2008 motion-picture show Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr. plays a blue-eyed, blond-haired Australian method actor who undergoes plastic surgery to portray an African-American soldier in a Vietnam State of war movie inside the picture show.
The 2021 film Passing tells the story of a black woman who meets a black friend who is "passing" as white.

Music [edit]

Stone ring Big Black released a song on this subject called "Passing Complexion" on their 1986 album Atomizer.^{[ commendation needed ]}

Television [edit]

On the soap opera One Life to Alive, the character of Carla Gray was introduced in 1968 equally an Italian-American traveling actress. She has dalliances with both white and black doctors (scandalizing television viewers when Gray, who they believed was white, kissed a blackness medico). Her truthful racial heritage was revealed when maid Sadie Gray, a black woman, claimed Carla as her girl.
Thou*A*S*H addressed the theme of "passing" in the episode "George". Eagle and Trapper John help a wounded soldier who reveals a double secret-he is a homosexual and is as well a negro "passing" as a white man.
M*A*Due south*H too addressed the theme of "passing" in the episode "Dear Dad... 3". Eagle and Trapper John show a bigoted white soldier the fallacy of the fearfulness of white person receiving "Colored" [African American] claret plasma; Hawkeye and Trapper are helped past Lt Ginger Bayles, who mockingly scolds the patient for "passing" as white subsequently the claret transfer.
On the terminal episode of the outset season of the sitcom The Jeffersons (1975), Andrew Rubin played Tom and Helen Willis' son Allan, who left the family unit for two years and traveled in Europe, passing equally white. This enraged his sis Jenny, who looks black.
In an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, clueless news reporter Les Nessman actually tries to dye his skin black to appear every bit an African American for a news story; this is a spoof of the John Howard Griffin story Black Like Me.
On the December 15, 1984 episode of Sat Dark Live, the black player Eddie Potato appeared in "White Like Me",^[53] a sketch in which he used theatrical brand-upwardly to appear as a white man.
In 1985, player Phil Morris played black attorney Tyrone Jackson on the lather opera The Young and the Restless. He uses make-up to pass as a white man and infiltrate Joseph Anthony'south crime arrangement.
In "Are You Now or Have Y'all Always Been", the second episode of season-2 of the television receiver show Affections (October three, 2000), actress Melissa Marsala plays Judy Kovacs, a bank robber on the lam who is passing.^[54] ^[55] The episode takes identify in 1952 and introduces the Hyperion Hotel as a setting for the show.
In November 2005, Ice Cube and Emmy Laurels-winning filmmaker R. J. Cutler teamed to create the six-part documentary series titled Black. White., broadcast on cable network FX. Two families, one black and one white, shared a home in the San Fernando Valley for the majority of the show. The Sparks and their son Nick, from Atlanta, Georgia, were fabricated up to appear to be white. The Wurgels and their daughter Rose were transformed from white to black. The evidence premiered in March 2006.
In "Libertyville" (March 29, 2009), an episode from the sixth season of Cold Case set in 1958, the actor Johnathon Schaech portrays Julian Bellowes, who'south just married into a wealthy family in Philadelphia. He has not told them he is a Louisiana Creole of colour.^[56]
Similarly, the tertiary season episode "Colors" (October 16, 2005) (fix in 1945) includes Christina Hendricks and Elinor Donahue playing a dancer who passes as white for at least sixty years.
A Season viii episode of Law & Social club, entitled "Blood" (November 19, 1997), features a rich African American who has been passing for white for his unabridged developed life in gild to first become a corporate job in the Due south so to maintain his career. He is defendant of killing his white girlfriend in guild to give away their dark-skinned newborn baby that would betrayal him as being of African-American descent.
The sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019) features Jacqueline White, a Lakota Native American woman who passes for white. She is played by white actress Jane Krakowski; the casting of a white woman in the part drew criticism.^[57] ^[58] ^[59]

Fine art [edit]

Racial passing is a recurring theme in American artist Adrian Piper'south piece of work. For example, in her 1988 visual functioning piece Cornered, Piper states "I'thousand black" and explains that this statement may surprise her audition because Piper, who is a calorie-free-skinned African American, could laissez passer as white.^[sixty]

See as well [edit]

Concepts [edit]

Amalgamation (history)
Assimilated Jews
Blood quantum laws, also known equally Indian blood laws (equally in, Native American)
Brown Paper Bag Test, too known every bit a Paper Purse Party
Color terminology for race
Cultural cribbing
Cultural absorption
Cultural conformity
Bigotry based on skin colour, too known equally colorism
Good pilus
Melting pot
Miscegenation
Multiracial
One-drop dominion
Passing (gender)
Pretendian
Racial fluidity
Racial integration
Racial transformation (individual)
- Racial transformation of Michael Jackson
- Martina Big
- Racial identity of Rachel Dolezal
- Skin whitening
- The Operated Jew
Transracial (identity)
White privilege
Whiteness studies

Racial groups [edit]

Castizo, one of the colonial Spanish race categories
Cherokee, a Native American tribe/people in the USA
Cholo
Chicano (see Mexican Americans)
Coloureds, an indigenous term in Southward Africa
High yellow, an American term for people of primarily European ancestry, classified as black
Mestizo
Métis, too known every bit Mestee, a people recognised under Canadian police force, descended from native women and European fur traders
Mexicans (racial identity issues)
Mischling, the High german term used during the Third Reich for people of mixed Jewish and "Aryan" ancestry
Native Hawaiians (the concept of Native Hawaiian beginnings)
Puerto Ricans#Political and international status (racial classification issues)
Torna atrás

Individuals [edit]

Anatole Broyard^[61]
Alvera Frederic^[62]
Anita Florence Hemmings^[63]
Theophilus John McKee
Merle Oberon^[64]
Elsie Roxborough^[65]
Mary Mildred Williams

References [edit]

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^ For case, Lord Dunsany referred to The Last Pool as "this charming book by an Irish sportsman" in a 1950 Observer review (Tolstoy, 324) and William Waldegrave, reviewing The Wine-Nighttime Bounding main in 1993, was nevertheless referring to O'Brian's supposed "Irish gaelic, French and English childhood" (William Waldegrave, Patrick O'Brian, reprinted in Patrick O'Brian, The Reverse of the Medal, HarperCollins reprinted 2003)
^ Fenton, Ben (24 October 1999). "The Hush-hush Life of Patrick O'Brian". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 5 January 2006. Retrieved 26 August 2008. O'Brian, 83, the author of a series of naval historical novels that take seen him lionised around the literary world, has ever been assumed to be an Irishman from a Cosmic family unit. He is not.
^ Mat Johnson on Incognegro^{[ permanent expressionless link ]}, Newsarama, November 29, 2007
^ The title refers to Black Like Me (1961), a book by the announcer John Howard Griffin who temporarily passed as black to learn about racial segregation.
^ Schoenfeld, Jené (2014). "Tin One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century". In Nerad, Julie Cary (ed.). Passing Interest: Racial Passing in Us Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. pp. 95–105. ISBN978-1-4384-5227-2.
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^ Sargent, Antwaun (April 9, 2018). "Adrian Piper's Massive MoMA Survey Will Force You to Face Your Prejudices". Artsy. Archived from the original on May 16, 2018. Retrieved May 15, 2018.
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Redmond Oftelith