Passing Interest

Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990-2010

Julie Cary Nerad

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438452289, 9781438452272
• eBook ISBN: 9781438452296
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century. With contributors working in the fields of African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, film studies, literature, and media studies, this book offers a rich, interdisciplinary survey of critical approaches to a broad range of contemporary passing texts. Contributors frame recent passing texts with a wide array of cultural discourses, including immigration law, the Post-Soul Aesthetic, contemporary political satire, affirmative action, the paradoxes of "colorblindness, " and the rhetoric of "post-racialism." Many explore whether "one drop" of blood still governs our sense of racial identity, or to what extent contemporary American culture allows for the racially indeterminate individual. Some essays open the scholarly conversation to focus on "ethnic" passers—individuals who complicate the traditional black-white binary—while others explore the slippage between traditional racial passing and related forms of racial performance, including blackface minstrelsy and racial masquerade.

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Introduction

The (Not So) New Face of America

Julie Cary Nerad

In a Politico story that reads somewhat like a postmodern, absurdist version of a news report, Stella O’Leary, the president of the Irish American Democrats, is quoted as saying that United States President Barack Obama is “as much Irish as he is Kenyan,” although, she adds, “he’s been very wrapped up in his African-American heritage” (Lovely par. 5). In this same spirit of recognizing Obama’s interracial—or, more precisely, international—heritage, the Irish band The Corrigan Brothers (nee “Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys”) recorded a hit song entitled “There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama” that went viral on the Internet in 2009.¹ Notwithstanding that according to the song his “granddaddy’s granddaddy came from Moneygall,” President Obama identifies as an African American. Of this fact, he has been consistent despite the media’s debate over just “how black” he is. Beginning with the run-up to his declaration of candidacy for the presidency through the actual presidential election of 2008, various “political pundits” and scholars cast and recast his racial identity as Black (he is phenotypically “black”); as African American (his father was from Kenya); as not “really” Black (his ancestors were not held in the American slave system); as bi- or multiracial (his mother was white); back to Black (he can’t hail a cab in Chicago); or as African American (as a respectful term of identity). His election in 2008 at least temporarily stemmed the tide of debate: Barack Hussein Obama is now almost universally hailed as the “first African American President,” even if the “birthers” still insist on questioning his American birth.

Regardless of the “degree” or quality of his “blackness”—after all, historically in America, any black makes you all black, despite the disagreements noted above—his election and inauguration are certainly significant moments in U.S. history. Indeed, many Americans framed Obama’s presidency as heralding the end of racism, as signaling the ascendency of a “post-racial” society, or, at the very least, as evincing to the world an America that has finally overcome its legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. President Obama is, as the white, British commentator Andrew Sullivan writes in The Atlantic, the “new face of America”:

[W]hat does he offer? First and foremost: his face.… Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can. (par. 1, 2)

This passage implicitly heralds the “brown-skinned” Obama as America’s savior against extremist Islamists. But it is explicitly Obama’s face and not his political position that enables him to change how the world “sees” America. In this hypothetical situation, Obama’s face undercuts any religious and cultural differences between America and a “young Pakistani Muslim,” who is (we are to assume) a possible future terrorist, because what he sees in the televised image is presumably his own blackness reflected in Obama’s. In other words, Obama’s skin trumps every other marker of his identity, including nationality, religion, class, age, etc. that might otherwise mark him as “the alleged enemy.” Of course, what the young Pakistani cannot possibly “see” in Obama’s face is that childhood spent in Indonesia and Hawaii, his (brief) Muslim schooling, or his current religious affiliation. More important here, however, is what Sullivan cannot imagine him seeing: despite Obama’s lighter skin tone, what is not “apparent” to the young Pakistani (through Sullivan’s lens) is Obama’s white mother or the white grandparents who raised him. In short, Sullivan’s young Pakistani Muslim does not see Obama’s Irish heritage; he sees only his African (or, more precisely, nonwhite) heritage. He sees, in Sullivan’s imagination, the image of a man like him. This passage tells us as much or more about what Sullivan “sees” than what a young Pakistani Muslim might see. In short, the (il)logics of this passage highlight both the continued importance of race in the Western imagination and the ocularity of the racial system in the United States. It also illustrates the unidirectional nature of racialization via the lingering power of hypodescent—better known as the “one-drop rule”—the Irish American Democrats’ “open arms” notwithstanding.

The continuous importance placed on Obama’s racial and national heritages demonstrates a paradox of twenty-first-century racial discourse: part of America wants to claim that we have moved “beyond race” and that the election of President Obama demonstrates that racism is a thing of the past. However, ironically, we can only make that claim by emphasizing his race.² That is, we must point out the significance of his racial identity, only then to dismiss it as irrelevant or secondary. These countervailing trends were evident in one of Obama’s own press conferences in March 2009. Referencing his “historic presidency,” ABC reporter Ann Compton asked President Obama if, over the first sixty-four days of his presidency, he felt that race had shaped his image or whether it had been “a relatively color-blind time.” In response, President Obama recognized the social significance of his personal racial identity, but then quickly moved to depersonalize his presidency by shifting the focus to economic issues. He explained:

[A]t the inauguration, I think that there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country, but that lasted about a day.… [R]ight now, the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged. And that is: Are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe? (Obama)

As opposed to Sullivan’s image of the young Pakistani whose religio-political beliefs are effectively scrambled by President Obama’s face, Obama’s response does imagine a “color-blind” citizenry who will judge him on his ability to grapple with economic affairs. His answer, that is, posits a public able to see him as just “the president,” a body politic who can effectively sever our cultural racial epistemology from a particular embodied man. His dismissal of racial identity as irrelevant to his ability to perform his job is not a new strategy. In the earlier twentieth century, for instance, Harlem Renaissance authors such as Claude McKay and Jean Toomer wanted to be known as talented poets, not as talented (for) “Negro” poets. While the implicit suggestion that Obama’s skin color has no bearing on his capacity to manage national and international affairs is certainly true, a sidelining of racial issues is perhaps both overly optimistic and slightly disingenuous—and even potentially dangerous—because his response problematically conceptualizes race as a distraction: the celebration of our historic (if partial) triumph over the “searing legacies of racial discrimination” lasted “about a day” before we had to get down to the real business at hand. Certainly, President Obama understands that race largely played a role in the housing and credit crises, the rising unemployment rate, and the breakdown of the healthcare and education systems that occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, continued socioeconomic disparities among racial groups—“the searing legacies of racial discrimination”—can only be addressed, once again, by highlighting race, not by sidelining it.

As Gayle Wald explains, however, many see color blindness as the means to a democratic society:

[I]t is now commonly held, by liberals and conservatives alike, that a purposeful indifference to race and a corresponding elevation of the “individual” as a social agent is an effective strategy of achieving the end of a just, democratic society. According to such color-blind arguments, a concerted “blindness” to race presents that most promising alternative to a society in which racialization—however unstable, shifting, or unenforceable—historically has played a role in governing social opportunity and status. (183)

Those critical of color-blind policies, however, might note the alternative way of reading the phrase “the end of a just, democratic society.”³ Indeed, in twenty-first-century America, being “color blind”—refusing to recognize race as a significant component of identity—is coming to mean being blind to continued systemic racial disparity, the kinds of disparity that were dramatically and publicly exposed after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita during the George W. Bush administration.⁴ Thus, what some Americans want to do in this “post-Bush” world is simply to pat ourselves on the back for electing an African American president, offer that achievement as evidence that race no longer matters, and then maintain policies that continue to increase socioeconomic and educational gaps among racial groups. Jodi Melamed names this type of willed blindness and the political and economic policies that grow from it “neoliberal multiculturalism” in which “esteeming some people of color of the same race, according to conventional categories, makes it easier to accept that others of the same race may be systematically treated unequally” (153).⁵

In the United States, race does still matter. Indeed, the concept of race continues to be a fundamental element of identity in America. The tenacity (and centrality) of race is due in part to the fact that, notwithstanding scientific evidence that debunks the claim of significant genetic difference among races, America as a culture—and Americans as individuals—continues to believe in the biological reality of race.⁶ In a kind of circular logic, we still believe in the “reality” of race because lived experience continues to validate race as a significant marker of identity and kinship, and because race continues to have real social and economic consequences. Telling people that race isn’t biologically “real” doesn’t erase history or trump personal experience, both which continue to reinforce the reality of race. As Baz Dreisinger puts it: “Theoretical jive about race as a ‘disproved’ concept is, well, jive; good old Race, rigid and old hat, lives on in our hearts and minds. Slay something—blackness, whiteness, Latino-ness—in concept and you still haven’t slain it in the flesh” (125). Dreisinger here articulates the significant gap between theory and praxis. And nothing continues to highlight this gap like racial passing, the lens through which the contributors to Passing Interest each explore contemporary understandings of race and racial identity in the United States, particularly as represented in texts produced between 1990 and 2010.

While any limitation of time frame is to some extent arbitrary, I selected 1990 as the beginning point for this collection for several reasons. The first few years of the 1990s were a watershed of national and international events that marked a new phase in history—a breaking down of barriers—that may, arguably, have set the stage for the 2008 election of an interracial president, one who so motivated the young voters of Generation Mix.⁷ Nineteen ninety was the last year of the Cold War. It was also the year of German reunification (the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989). In South Africa, in February 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed after twenty-seven years of imprisonment. While the changes were not all peaceful—1990 also saw the start of the Persian Gulf War—American culture was flooded with images of walls literally and figuratively crumbling. On the home front, George H. W. Bush vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1990, before signing the Civil Rights Bill of 1991 into law in November 1991.⁸ William Jefferson Clinton, later affectionately and sometimes derisively known as our “first black president,” was elected in November 1992.⁹ The Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police officers in March 1991, and the resulting “not guilty” verdict announced in April 1992, sparked both a violent six-day race riot and a national conversation on race in the United States.¹⁰

All this happened in the very years that the Multiracial Movement—a movement founded on the idea of barrier breaking—was coming into its own. In 1993, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel held hearings to discuss the racial and ethnic classifications that would be available on the 2000 U.S. Census. Representatives of the Association of Multiethnic Americans argued for “either a simple ‘multiracial’ check box or the possibility of checking all applicable racial categories” (DaCosta 1). By the time of the hearings, of the roughly sixty social support organizations for mixed race people that existed, most had been formed in the preceding five years (DaCosta 3).¹¹

While certainly this movement toward recognizing multiracial identity grew in part from the multicultural movements of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and is sometimes still collapsed into that term, it is unique from that earlier effort in that rather than highlighting and demanding equality for distinct identities—the thrust of identity politics—multiracials highlight points of intersection in a way more akin to a feminist theoretics that attempts to ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: The “Posts” of Passing
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The (Not So) New Face of America
• 2. On the Margins of a Movement: Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs
• 3. “A Cousin to Blackness”: Race and Identity in Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life
• 4. Can One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
• 5. Passing in Blackface: The Intimate Drama of Post-Racialism on Black.White.
• 6. Broke Right in Half: Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone
• 7. Passing for Chicano, Passing for White: Negotiating Filipino American Identity in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son
• 8. Race in the Marketplace: Postmodern Passing and Ali G
• 9. Passing for Black, White, and Jewish: Mixed-Race Identity in Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna
• 10. Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Racial Passing/Performativity, and Film Blackness
• 11. Consuming Performances: Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure
• Bibliography
• Contributor Biographies
• Index
• Back Cover