When Will Passing Become Passé?

And why is racial essentialism alive and well?

2021

If you’re familiar with any early 20th century novel of racial passing (there are many) you probably know Nella Larsen’s Passing, originally published in 1929 and made into a motion picture last year by English actress and filmmaker, Rebecca Hall. Interestingly, Hall insisted on the use of black and white, which she describes as “a thousand shades of gray, like this movie is.” She also employed the 4:3 aspect ratio, a big subject in film aesthetics, I’m told, but suffice it to say that it enhances focus on human faces and, thus, character interiority. One can imagine why interiority matters in Larsen’s tragic story of Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two friends whose lives are torn apart by racial passing. For Hall, daughter to a black mother and white father, a major inspiration in making the film was the discovery that her grandfather, born into slavery, had once passed as white.

Ruth Negga as Clare Kendry in the opening scene of “Passing”

Larsen’s story spoke to the filmmaker across generations, but it’s not just Hall for whom the subject of crossing the color line has such staying power. In the near century since it was published, a steady stream of fiction and non-fiction narratives about passing, much of it best-selling work, has continued right up to the present. The most often-cited example is The Imitation of Life (1933) by Fannie Hurst. Other notable titles include A Man Called White (1948) by the first leader of the NAACP, Walter White, Reba Lee’s I Passed for White (1955), Black Like Me (1961) by John Howard Griffin, Toi Derricote’s The Black Notebooks (1996), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), The Human Stain (2000) by Phillip Roth, and most recently, The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennet (2020). Readers seem to love these tragic stories of buried pasts and revelation so much you’d think racial passing was still illegal in this country or that Loving vs. Virgina (1967) had never struck down anti-miscegenation laws.

Rebecca Hall

Granted, who doesn’t love a good story of a character who feels compelled to live a lie, especially one involving racial deception? But the trope’s lasting relevance seems to rely on more than just a strong narrative premise. Of Hall’s adaptation, New York Times reviewer Alexandra Kleeman puts it this way: “…it’s not a film about the past or even about the social conditions of Larsen’s America, but about the way choices made during Larsen’s time reverberate through succeeding generations.”

Why wax so poetic about a phenomenon that has changed drastically in the near century since Passing first appeared? And why do stories about the tragedy of passing continue to resonate even as race mixture is commonplace and the world is becoming brown?

The color line is no mere trope: violence against people of color perpetrated by individuals, groups and systems reinforces it every single day. Still, the line itself is getting murkier by the decade. In less than one generation, whites will become a minority race, provided climate change doesn’t kill us all off first. And according to the last census, the category of Americans who define themselves as multiracial is growing at three times the rate of any other racial category. That’s 6.9 % of the U.S. population in 2020, and 60% of that group reports feeling proud to have a multiracial background. Of course, a racially mixed future is no guarantee of progress on the measures that matter, like education, wages, health care or home/business ownership. Still, I’m having a hard time squaring what Kleeman calls the “psychic afterlife of racial trauma” and the “quiet holes pressed into the psyche by self-denial” with a burgeoning and increasingly visible multiracial population. Why wax so poetic about a phenomenon that has changed drastically in the near century since Passing first appeared? And why do stories about the tragedy of passing continue to resonate even as race mixture indicates the world is becoming brown?

I think there’s a straightforward answer and a more complicated one.

The straightforward answer is that most contemporary narratives traffic in trauma, Hall’s film being no exception. We are interested in how we have been damaged by the bruising forces of our childhood specifically and the world in general. As reasons to feel traumatized in mind, body and spirit assert themselves with merciless regularity, Oprah’s 2021 book with Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You? centers and legitimizes our mental and emotional anguish and promises that we can do something about it. We are learning more than ever about trauma’s effect on our bodies, mental health and neurological function. Thus, it follows that systemic racism and racial violence also take their toll. It makes sense that the effects of race hatred and discrimination are stored in our minds and bodies. It makes sense that such trauma can linger trans-generationally.

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

William Faulkner

To take nothing from its significance in saying so: narrativized trauma is enjoying a huge historical moment. As a way to grapple with the world’s present and historical ills regarding race, trauma is a timely and relevant lens; it might even be a useful one.

But it isn’t the only one.

Regarding Passing, Hall and Kleeman aren’t looking from a distance at how far we’ve come since the time when crossing the color line was a dangerous and profoundly life altering venture. They’re saying that passing’s trauma has never really passed. And they’re in good company. The most important fiction and journalism on race in the last ten years by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, Ibrahim Kendi, Colson Whitehead, Nikole Hannah-Jones and others have also shown that the roots of racism run deep, its effects continue unabated within our social systems and psyches, and despite our best intentions the future isn’t looking too great, either.

It would be easy, or tempting, given this A-List team of authors, to regard blackness as nearly synonymous with historical and prevailing trauma. That’s not the argument I’m making. Rather, I think it’s critical to recognize trauma as a powerful and consequential lens that reveals a choice about our focus. You might be wondering how it’s possible to write about this nation’s racial past without a focus on trauma.

A generation ago, Post-Structuralism was the lens, and graduate students learned to read race as a social construction. Then young scholar, Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Finding Your Roots fame on PBS, taught us to put scare quotes around the word race. Entire fields of scholarship grew up around the understanding that race had nothing to do with blood, biology or essence. It didn’t mean that the effects of racism were less traumatic, of course. But neither was trauma quite so centripetal in understanding multiethnic literature.

Nowadays, no one tries to refute that race is a socially constructed concept, but the idea has long since lost its teeth. The Presidency of Barack Obama failed to prove that we were past our race difficulties as a nation like many people, especially white people, hoped and expected it would. After Obama, of course, full-throttle backlash stormed in, and the arc of moral progress, or, at least, the arc of racial progress from the Civil Rights Era to, someday, the realization of King Jr’s dream, flattened.

We’re all post-Post now.

In a post-Post era, our available tropes tend not just toward race essentialism (the opposite of socially constructed meaning) but an accompanying sense that the color line is in fact not porous but unyielding, a state of nature to which we must adjust ourselves even as we endeavor tirelessly to root out racism’s wrongs. This leads to ironies like Rebecca Hall’s insistence that the actresses who play the roles of Clare and Irene in the movie (Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, respectively) be African American. In a Hollywood context, actors of color have long been shut out of roles that are then played by white actors, so it’s only fair. And, I suppose it’s historically authentic to use “real” African American actresses. But a 21st century adherence to a notion of racial purity when, arguably, the point of any story of passing is that racial purity is a fiction, seems compelled by an allegiance whose aims aren’t entirely clear.

Ruth Negga as Clare Kendra (left) and Tessa Thompson as Irene Redfield (right)

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote in his 1951 novel Requiem For a Nun. Three years after Passing, Faulkner, who was Larsen’s contemporary, published Light in August, a novel containing one of the most tortured racially ambiguous souls in all of American literature. Joe Christmas, a white man who has reason to believe he may harbor a drop of black blood, lives in utter abjection over the idea that he may be racially impure. He’s almost a caricature of self-loathing. His fears can’t be allayed by a simple “23 and Me” test, so ultimately the idea of his racial taint necessitates violence against himself and others. I used to amuse myself wondering what a contemporary white supremacist would say if he discovered that he harbored a forbidden drop of black blood. And yet nowadays, researchers have discovered that when someone belonging to Stormfront or the Aryan Brotherhood gets results that indicate African heritage, they have been known to blame the test (“rigged”) and discount the results. “You know how you feel,” one of them said. And, as provocative as it sounds, why shouldn’t they think that? Your race and identity aren’t the result of your DNA; they’re the result of the time and circumstances in which you live. Meanwhile, race purity as a club, an idea, has staying power because we all believe there is a color line and that our place on that line matters.

Trauma itself suggests a kind of purity: extreme human suffering is a totalizing experience, smacking you up against the wall of who you thought you were or could be, dismantling your present, sometimes erasing your past, marring your future, possibly for generations. So, the healing of trauma matters greatly. But so does its depiction.

The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political. And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show her, every day, that there can be no change."

Wim Wenders

In her study of images of racial trauma in the novels of Nella Larsen, William Faulkner and in the photographs of their contemporary, Carl Van Vechten, Dorothy Stringer invites us to think about what it means to work through trauma in narrative. Is that what we’re doing when we depict, again and again, tragic narratives of passing? Stringer questions when a depiction moves us to transform the conditions that lead to suffering, and when it simply carries the traumatic past forward into the future. How effective is it, she asks, to depict aesthetically rendered, subjective states of suffering to which we have privileged access—for example, Clare’s and Irene’s interiority, enhanced by Hall’s 4:3 aspect ratio? Stringer’s aim is not to pass judgment but to remind us that the process of generating and consuming representations of trauma is always interested and serves multiple investments, some of which may be coercive. As the filmmaker Wim Wenders put it, "The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political. And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show her, every day, that there can be no change."

After such a grand claim, it’s almost anticlimactic to say it, but not all novels involving racial ambiguity and the color line are tragic. In fact, many such narratives swirled around Larsen’s tragic depictions in Passing and in her earlier novel Quicksand (1928). Mixed-race authors like Sui Sin Far, Edith Maude Eaton, Zitkala-Sa, and Mourning Dove/Humishima feature stories with Eurasians, half-bloods and mulattas whose endings avoid tragedy and might even be called hopeful. What’s more, as M. Giuliia Fabi argues, African American authors who preceded Larsen by decades often wrote againstthe trope of the tragic mulatta, actively challenging the myth of racial purity and the ridiculousness of the color line.

For every tragic Joe Christmas or Clare Kendry there’s a racial trickster, hustler or shapeshifter turning the color binary on its ear. This fuller picture of literary history doesn’t discount Larsen’s or Hall’s storytelling, but it should remind us that the past, (and the way we read its consequences) is less documentary statement than representation.

As for the future, I find race essentialism incongruous with the identity shaping forces of the 21st century. For one, it’s inevitable that the Great Replacement feared by white supremacists is indeed happening (sorry, Stormfront!) For another, with our multiple accounts, disparate allegiances and alter-ego avatars, the Internet has made us all into tricksters and shapeshifters of one sort or another. Notions of authenticity and originality have less value, less shaping force.

But we will always need stories. We need stories for the day when the color line fades, rendering passing passé. If the history of passing has taught us anything, it’s that how and when difference matters matters.

Carol Roh Spaulding writes about all things neither/nor on Between.