Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal by Randall Kennedy

Author:Randall Kennedy [Kennedy, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307388421
Google: 0NoYuMmTIZAC
Amazon: 0307388425
Published: 2008-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Five

PASSING AS SELLING OUT

“Nothing is more fundamental to the current identity debates…than the issue of choice versus ascription.”

David A. Hollinger, “Identity in the United States” (2004)

The paradigmatic racial passer is the “White Negro,”*71 a person who holds himself out as “white,” though, according to ascendant rules of racial designation, the person is really “black.”1 I am not talking about a person who is mistaken about his background; perhaps he has been deceptively told that his parents were white.†72 Nor am I talking about a person whose appearance leads observers to think of him as white in the absence of any purposeful conduct on his part that reinforces this (mis)perception.*73 The White Negro to whom I refer is an individual who presents himself as “white” knowing that he would be seen as “black” if the racial facts of his ancestry were known to observers. This person self-consciously hides or misrepresents such facts in order to be known as white.

White Negroes have often been charged with betraying African Americans by abandonment or complicity in maintaining an illicit racial hierarchy. Are such charges valid? Is it right to “out” passers ensconced in racial closets? Ought people be free to reinvent themselves racially without social disapproval?

Let’s begin by considering the circumstances in which “blacks” have held themselves out as “whites.” Passing can be divided into two categories. One is temporary passing, in which the passer goes over to the white side with the intention of rejoining the African-American community at some point. The other is permanent passing, in which the passer intends to leave the African-American community forever. Temporary passing is a venture in pretense: the person in question pretends to be white for a discrete period of time. Permanent passing is a venture in conversion: the person in question actually attempts to become white.

In the antebellum period, enslaved blacks who appeared to be white often fled bondage by seeking to pass. An extraordinary instance occurred in 1848, when Ellen Craft—the daughter of a master and his slave mistress—escaped from bondage by train, boat, and carriage on a four-day journey from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ellen pretended to be white. Her enslaved husband was part of her disguise; he pretended to be her servant. Ellen, moreover, traveled not as a woman but as a man; to obtain freedom for herself and her husband, she temporarily traversed gender as well as racial lines.*74 As soon as the Crafts reached territory in which they were no longer menaced by immediate re-enslavement, however, she tore off her masks and reclaimed her identity as a Negro.†75

Blacks have engaged in temporary passing in many other, less dire settings. To advance occupational ambitions, some have passed as white during the workday while presenting themselves as African American outside the workplace.*76 Other blacks have passed as white in order to shop, sleep, or eat meals at racially exclusive establishments. In their classic Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton

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