Passing (racial identity)

Main article: Passing (sociology)

Racial passing occurs when a person classified as a member of one racial group is also accepted as a member of a different racial group. The term was used especially in the United States to describe a person of multiracial ancestry assimilating into the white majority during times when legal and social conventions of hypodescent classified the person as a minority, subject to racial segregation and discrimination.

Examples in the United States

In the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, some Americans of mixed ancestry passing for white often claimed Native American, Slavic, or Southern European ancestry to explain skin color and features differing from white Americans of Northern European (Germanic or Celtic) descent. They were trying to find a way through the binary racial divisions of society, especially in the South, where slavery became closely tied in the colonial era to the foreign status of people of African descent, which prevented them from being considered English subjects. In the 18th and 19th centuries, most free people were classified by appearance and actions. If they looked white, were accepted by neighbors and fulfilled community obligations, they were absorbed into European American society. Late 19th-century Jim Crow state laws establishing segregation in public facilities, and early 20th-century state laws establishing the "one-drop rule" for racial classification (as in Virginia in 1924), were examples of European Americans attempting to impose regulations of hypodescent, that is, classifying someone as black based on any black ancestry. Then someone who identified by appearance and majority ancestry might be described as "passing" for Caucasian. In Louisiana, people of color who passed as white were referred to as passe blanc.

The US civil rights leader Walter Francis White (who was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and very fair) was of mixed-race, mostly European ancestry, as 27 of his 32 great-great-great-grandparents were white; five were classified as black and had been slaves. He grew up with his parents and family in Atlanta in the black community 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 earlier stages of his career, he conducted investigations in the South, during which he sometimes passed as white to gather information more freely on lynchings and hate crimes, and to protect himself in socially hostile environments.

In the 20th century Krazy Kat comics creator George Herriman was a Louisiana Creole (of partial African-American ancestry) who claimed Greek heritage throughout his adult life. The 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 not be classified as a black writer. In addition, he did not identify with northern urban blacks, 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 black in ancestry. His daughter Bliss Broyard did not find out until after her father's death. In 2007 she published a memoir that traced her exploration of her father's life and family mysteries entitled One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets.

Missouri-born African-American musician John Roland Redd spent his career (from the 1950s unto his death in 1998) passing as an Indian. Reinventing himself as Korla Pandit and fabricating a romantic history as a baby born in New Delhi, India to a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer. Two years following his death, his actual identity was revealed in an article by Los Angeles magazine editor R. J. Smith.[1][2][3]

Passing as indigenous Americans

Portrait of Grey Owl taken by Yousuf Karsh in 1936. Born in England, he went to Canada and lived with First Nations people, passing as part Native American for many years.

In a limited reversal of the usual pattern, some people of European ancestry have chosen to pass as members of other races.[4][5][6] The environmentalist Grey Owl was a white British man named Archibald Belaney, rather than First Nations as he claimed to be. When asked to explain his European appearance, he lied and claimed he was half Scottish and half Apache. Belaney learned some of the Ojibwe language and wilderness skills, and attempted to live by his anachronistic idea of what makes someone Native American.[7]

The United States actor Iron Eyes Cody, who was of Sicilian descent, created a niche by playing roles of Native Americans. He had claimed American Indian heritage to get work.[8] European-American authors and artists who have notably attempted to pass as being Native American include Asa Earl Carter, who claimed to be Cherokee;[4][9] Jay Marks (Jamake Highwater), who claimed to be Cherokee-Blackfeet;[10][11][12] and Yeffe Kimball, who claimed to be Osage.[13]

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, has claimed Cherokee ancestry. Genealogists were unable to find any Native ancestors for Warren.[14] It is disputed as to whether she officially identified as Native American to claim any status or advantage.[14]

Professor and activist Ward Churchill, who advocated for American Indian rights, claimed to be Cherokee-Muscogee Creek.[15][16][17] He was fired from the University of Colorado.[18]

Similarly, civil rights activist Rachel Doležal, then president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, was described in a February 2015 profile as having been born in a "Montana tepee" and having hunted for food with her family as a child "with bows and arrows".[19] She also has identified as black. Doležal's mother describes the family's ancestry as Czech, Swedish, and German, with "faint traces" of Native American heritage, and denies her daughter's story.[20]

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 as an American Indian".[21] She previously taught at Dartmouth, Bowdoin College, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[22][23]

To address the issue of non-Native peoples posing as Native American artists, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 was passed in the United States, requiring artists to be enrolled in a state or federally recognized tribe to make the claim of being a Native American artist.

In the New Age and Hippie movements, non-Native people sometimes have attempted to pass as Native American or other Indigenous medicine people. The pejorative term for such people is "plastic shaman".[24]

The Native American and Indigenous 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 merely a distraction from supposedly more important issues. Falsifying one’s identity or relationship to particular Indigenous peoples is an act of appropriation continuous with other forms of colonial violence.[25]

Other examples

In Nazi Germany and in areas controlled by Germany before and during World War II, some Jewish people who looked "Aryan" (based on appearance, head dimensions and body physical features) passed as "Aryan" to save their lives, and avoided deportation by the Nazis to concentration and death camps. Edith Hahn Beer was Jewish and "passed" as "Aryan"; she survived the Holocaust by living with and marrying a Nazi officer. Hahn-Beer wrote a memoir called: The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust.

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 last of her people. She moved to Vancouver's Chinatown, married a Chinese man, and raised her four children as Chinese. One day she told her daughter Rhonda Larrabee about her heritage: "I will tell you once, but you must never ask me again."[26][27]

Mindy Kaling's brother Vijay Chokal-Ingam says he pretended to be black to get into medical school.[28]

Treatment in American literature and popular culture

Literature

Film

Music

Television

Creoles and mixed race

In Latin America, generational acculturation and assimilation took place via intermarriage. Medium-brown offspring of even dark parents were no longer "black", but were labeled with any of a half-dozen terms denoting class as much as skin tone. Descendants who were European-looking were accepted as white.

This was somewhat similar to the growth of a mixed-race Creole class in Louisiana, especially in New Orleans before the US purchased the territory. In the early years of the French and Spanish colony, men took enslaved or Native American women as wives or mistresses. In the Latin culture, the wealthy men often had their mixed-race sons educated in Europe or trained in skilled trades. Gradually a third caste developed, made up of free people of color, or mixed-race Creoles. Creoles were often educated, and many became wealthy property owners. They also formed a community of artisans in New Orleans. Beautiful young Creole women often became the official mistresses of white French colonists, who provided financial settlements for them and their children in a system known as plaçage. This enabled them to have their children educated.

Certainly there were many generations of mixed-race people in the American South. In the later 18th and 19th centuries, they were often the children of white planter fathers and enslaved women. Among the most famous were the multiracial slave children born to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings from their long relationship after he became a widower. Hemings was three-quarters white, as her mother was mulatto. Betty Hemings was the daughter of a slave woman and an English sea captain; she became the longtime mistress of Jefferson's father-in-law John Wayles after he became a widower for the third time, and had several children with him. Sally was the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife Martha Wayles Jefferson.

In 1998, DNA studies showed that the descendants of Eston Hemings, Sally's youngest son, were related to the Jefferson male line. Most historians, the National Genealogical Society, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation of Monticello believe that the weight of historical evidence suggests Jefferson was the father of Eston and all of Hemings' children (who were thus seven-eighths European by ancestry and legally white under Virginia law at the time). The historian Annette Gordon-Reed was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 for her work on the history of the Jeffersons and the Hemings families (which won a Pulitzer Prize and 15 other major awards), and for "changing the course of Jeffersonian scholarship" by showing how earlier historians had disregarded or discounted important evidence from slave testimonies.[34]

The Civil War did not end relationships across color and ethnic lines. Although during the Jim Crow era, southern legislators created strict segregation between whites and blacks and anti-miscegenation laws, people made their own arrangements. As under slavery, relationships often developed out of white social dominance. For instance, as a 22-year-old young man, segregationist US Senator Strom Thurmond had an affair with Carrie "Tunch" Butler, the 16-year-old black maid to his family. She bore his daughter Essie Mae Washington-Williams. Thurmond provided financial support for his daughter and paid for Butler's education, but kept her existence a secret. His daughter did not discuss their relationship until after his death.

See also

Footnotes

  1. Smith, R. J. (June 2001). "The Many Faces of Korla Pandit". Los Angeles (Emmis Communications) 46 (6): 72–77, 146–151. ISSN 1522-9149.
  2. Zack, Jessica (August 15, 2015). "Exotic Korla Pandit hid race under swami persona". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved January 2, 2016.
  3. Bradner, Liesl (September 12, 2015). "How a Black Man From Missouri Transformed Himself Into the Indian Liberace". The New Republic. Retrieved January 2, 2016.
  4. 1 2 Nolan, Maggie and Carrie Dawson, ed. Who's Who? Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian Literature. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004: 16–17. (retrieved through Google Books, July 26, 2009) ISBN 978-0-7022-3523-8.
  5. Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie. Indian County: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005: 221. (retrieved through Google Books, July 26, 2009) ISBN 978-0-88920-479-9.
  6. Root, Deborah. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, And The Commodification Of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996: 102. (retrieved through Google Books, July 23, 2009) ISBN 978-0-8133-2089-2.
  7. Donald B. Smith, From the Land of Shadows: the Making of Grey Owl, (Saskatoon: Western Prairie Books, 1990)
  8. "Iron Eyes", Snopes
  9. Bataille, Gretchen M. American Indian Representations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001: 49. (retrieved through Google Books, July 26, 2009) ISBN 978-0-8032-1312-8.
  10. Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1996: 238. ISBN 978-0-19-512063-9.
  11. Hoxie, Frederick E. Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life From Paleo-Indians to the Present. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006: 191–2. (retrieved through Google Books, July 26, 2009) ISBN 978-0-395-66921-1
  12. Weaver, Jace. Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001: 138. (retrieved through Google Books, July 26, 2009) ISBN 978-0-8061-3352-2
  13. Anthes, Bill. "Becoming Indian: The Self-Invention of Yeffe Kimball." Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006: 117–141. ISBN 0-8223-3866-1.
  14. 1 2 Hicks, Josh (September 28, 2012). "Did Elizabeth Warren check the Native American box when she 'applied' to Harvard and Penn?". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 14, 2015.
  15. Richardson, Valerie. Report on Conclusion of Preliminary Review in the Matter of Professor Ward Churchill. University of Colorado at Boulder. 2005 . Retrieved July 26, 2009.
  16. Brown, Thomas. "Is Ward Churchill the New Michael Bellesiles?" George Mason University's History News Network. March 14, 2005 . Retrieved July 26, 2009.
  17. Harjo, Suzan Shown. "Ward Churchill: The White Man's Burden." Indian Country Today. August 3, 2007 . Retrieved July 26, 2009.
  18. Moloney, Kevin, "Colorado Regents Vote to Fire a Controversial Professor" for The New York Times. July 25, 2007. Retrieved October 9, 2015
  19. Moncy, Shawntelle (February 5, 2015). "A Life to be Heard". The Easterner. Retrieved June 14, 2015.
  20. Hill, Kip; Wasson, David (June 12, 2015). "Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal’s claims about background disputed". The Spokesman-Review. Retrieved June 14, 2015.
  21. Frosch, Dan (October 5, 2015). "Dartmouth Removes New Native American Head Amid Ethnicity Questions: Tribes accused Susan Taffe Reed of misrepresenting herself as American Indian". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 9, 2015.
  22. Jaschik, Scott, "Indian Enough for Dartmouth?" for Inside Higher Ed, September 17, 2015. Retrieved October 9, 2015
  23. Pierce, Meghan, "Dartmouth criticized for Native American Studies hire for the New Hampshire Union Leader, September 19. 2015. Retrieved October 9, 2015.
  24. Aldred, Lisa, "Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality" in: The American Indian Quarterly issn.24.3 (2000) pp.329-352. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
  25. "NAISA Statement on Indigenous Identity Fraud". Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. 2015. Retrieved 20 September 2015.
  26. "A Tribe of One". Government of Canada. National Film Board of Canada. 2009. Retrieved July 26, 2009.
  27. Hui, Stephen (May 26, 2003). "Film: The story of the smallest tribe" (PDF) 114 (4). Burnaby, British Columbia: Simon Fraser University. p. 10. Archived from the original on February 25, 2012.
  28. CNN
  29. Mat Johnson on Incognegro, Newsarama, November 29, 2007
  30. The title refers to Black Like Me (1961), a book by the journalist John Howard Griffin who temporarily passed as black to learn about racial segregation.
  31. Schoenfeld, Jené (2014). "Can One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century". In Nerad, Julie Cary. Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. pp. 95–105. ISBN 978-1-4384-5227-2.
  32. Menzies, David (May 1, 2014). "10 Angel episodes that were too big for Sunnydale". Den of Geek. Retrieved March 25, 2016.
  33. "Cold Case: Libertyville (2009)". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved March 22, 2011.
  34. "Annette Gordon-Reed", MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved February 9, 2011

Further reading

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, March 28, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.