Today’s question: on “passing for white”

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 9:40 pm by Jane the Actuary

Today’s question: on “passing for white” 2015-02-24T21:40:12-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yeah, once again, this is a question rather than some actual commentary or information. But here’s something I was thinking about that I’d like your thoughts on. (“You” being defined, as usual, as anyone who happens to read this.)

A generation — or, really, two generations ago, there would be instances of families of (to be precise about this) mixed European and Sub-Saharan African descent, with very light skin due to generations of intermarriage, who would “pass as white” — meaning that their neighbors and community perceived of them as vaguely “ethnic” (Southern European) white people and treated them accordingly, welcoming them into their White social circles, not applying Jim Crow laws to them, and so forth. Sometimes you’ll read about this, now, in articles (used to be the sort of “human interest” article that would appear in the newspaper, in the old days when newspapers had such sections), with the ending to the story either being that the family was “found out” and shamed, or that they severed relationships with darker-skinned relatives, and that a later generation found out the story when researching family history.

Come to think of it, I haven’t read a story like that in a while. Maybe it’s just, indeed, the decline of newspapers that would have published this sort of story. (I suppose it’s also a Slate-ian type of story.) But my question is, does the concept of “passing for white” still exist?

And what I mean by that is this:

there are clearly families who fit into this category: people of mixed ancestry with light skin and other physical characteristics such that, if you had to guess, and assign a single ethnic origin to them, you’d think they were, in fact, more Italian, Spanish, or Greek.

Back in the days of the One Drop Rule, such people would still be black, and expected to identify that way: still, if it were known, marked that way on the birth certificate or other records, still be held to Jim Crow restrictions in the South, and still, in general, shamed as “trying to pass” if they didn’t accept the label “black.”

So I’m just curious: open-endedly, in your experience, do you think things have changed?

Are people of mixed racial/ethnic origin “allowed” (by society, by their communities, by their extended families) to identify with both ethnicities, or one, or the other, or neither, or is the demand still placed on them to “be” black, or Hispanic, or Asian?

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