Timeline of films
“Racial identities are not only black, Latino, Asian, Native American , and so on; they are
also white. To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it.
Without specifically addressing white ethnicity, there can be no critical evaluation of the
construction of the other.” (Coco Fusco, from essay “Fantasies of Oppositionality”,
published in Afterimage magazine. December, 1988)
Ginsberg:
Pg 8
“the specter of passing derives its power not from the number of instances of passing but
as a signification that embodies the anxieties and contradictions of a racially stratified
society.”
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race passing causes a “category crisis” (Garber)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Race Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986
“Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application.”
(pg 5)
“More often than not, they [groups defined by race] also have fundamentally opposed
economic interests.”
Neither Black Nor White
Sollors, Werner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
“The very existence of the octoroon convicted the slaveholder of prostituting his slaves
and selling his children for pofit. Thus, the choice of the octoroon rather than the fullblooded black to dramatize the suffering of the slave not only emphasized the pathos of
the slave’s condition but, more importantly, emphasized the repeated pattern of guilt of
the Southern slaveholder. The whiter the slave, the more undeniably was the slaveholder
guilty of violating the terms of the stewardship which apologists postulated in justifying
slavery.” pg. 235 from Zanger, Jules. “The Tragic Octoroon in Pre-Civil War Fiction”.
American Quarterly 18 (1966): 63-70.
“It is no historical accident that the mulatto figure occurs more frequently in AfroAmerican fiction at a time when the separation of the races was being institutionalized
throughout the South. As a mediating device the mulatto had two narrative functions: it
enabled an exploration of the social relations between the races, relations that were
increasingly proscribed by Jim Crow laws, and it enabled an expression of the sexual
relations between the races, since the mulatto was a product not only of proscribed
consensual relations but of white sexual domination.” Pg 236 from Carby, Hazel V.
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. (page xxi)
“In melodrama, man is seen in his strength or in his weakness; in tragedy, in both his
strength and his weakness at once. In melodrama, he is victorious or he is defeated; in
tragedy he experiences defeat in victory, or victory in defeat. In melodrama, man is
simply guilty or simply innocent; in tragedy, his guilt and his innocence coexist. In
melodrama, man’s will is broken, or it conquers; in tragedy, it is tempered in the
suffering that comes with, or brings about, new knowledge.” Pg 243 from Robert
Heilman note 69 but should probably just use his name from Sollors…
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passing – jews passed for gentiles… jap to Chinese, etc.
cities provided anonymity
passing only occurs when there are inequalities between groups… motive…
could be temporary (e.g. to get into a restaurant or theatre) but rarely is in film
many slaves passed as whites to escape
William and Ellen Craft 1848 – racial and gender passing
“It is a great risk and they live in nearly daily fear of exposure.” Pg 251 from “The
Adventures of a Near White”, Independent 75 (1913):373-76.
“She lives in terror of discovery—what if she has a child with a dark complexion, what if
she runs into an old school friend, how does she listen placidly to racial slurs? And more,
where does the woman who passes find the equanimity to live by the privileged status
that is based on the oppression of her own people?” pg 252 from Washington, Mary
Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960. New York, Doubleday,
1987, 164.
Blacks keep the secret of passers because of the “vicarious enjoyment of watching one of
our own infiltrate and achieve in a context largely defined by institutionalized attempts to
exclude blacks from it.” Pg 254 from Adrian Piper
Scan pg 17, 18, 261, 282
“I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the
white race; but that I would change my name, raise a moustache, and let the world take
me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of
inferiority pasted across my forehead.” (pg 190 of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
Man by James Weldon Johnson.
“Sometimes it seems to me that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a
privileged spectator of their inner life; at other times I feel that I have been a coward, a
deserter, and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s people.” (ibid Johnson
210)
“Gone were the morose, the worried, the unhappy, the untranquil faces she had been
seeing downtown for years. Here was the light and spontaneous laughter, here there was
real joyfulness in voices and eyes. Here was leisureliness, none of the hectic dashing
after material things which brought little happiness when gained.” From Walter White’s
Flight (1926 pg 293) Mimi rediscovering Harlem after passing as white and returning
“It’s a funny thing about passing. We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it.
It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd
kind of revulsion, but we protect it.” Nella Larsen’s 1929 Passing pg 114
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Langston Hughes, “Who’s Passing for Who?” (1952??? Or 25)
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
“Five Million White Negroes” in Ebony Magazine, 1948 – get the cover “Can you
tell who is black?”
Media: “Race Crossing in the U.S.” by Caroline Bond Day from Blacks at
Harvard (1930), “Negro Blood Divorce Case” Chicago Broadax (May 28 1910
pg 2), “Fiery Cross in Yard Protests Wedding” NYT Novemeber 7, 1925,
“Wedding of WM E. Jackson an White New Jersey Girl Probably Deferred”
(Amsterdam News, Nov 11, 1925 – w/DuBois and Johnson quote)
In “The Vanishing Mulatto” (1925), Chalres S. Johnson used census data to
estimate that 355,000 blacks faded into the “great white multitude” between 1900
and 1920.
From the 1850s to the 1930s, passing was “the favorite theme in Negro fiction”
and became “a principal theme of American national consciousness until the end
of WWII”. Pg 284
Richard Wright eliminated a section on passing from Black Boy.
Neither White Nor Black
Judith Berzon
Mulatto has been the central character in works by Mark Twain, William Faulkner,
Robert Penn Warren, Gertrude Stein, Sinclari Lewis, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stow,
Richard Hildreth, William Wells Brown, Charles Chestnutt, Walter White, Nella Larsen,
Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay.
“Of the twenty works discussed in this chapter, fifteen are by black authors. But despite
the fact that black novelists have treated this subject with more frequency than whites,
there is much similarity in the approach of the authors of both races. In no instance does
a novelist, white or black, show contempt for, or cruelty toward, the passer. These
authors are sensitive to the psychologiocal, social, and economic reasons for passing, and
to a lesser extent, they discuss and dramatize these complex motivations.
“The mulatto is defined in terms of his marginal position within culture.” (pg 13)
Peola (in the 1933 version of Imitation of Life) tells her mother she has, “prayed same as
you, for the strength to be proud of being black under white. I’ve tried top glory in my
people. I’ve drenched myself in the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Booker Washington,
and Frederick Douglass. I’ve tried to catch some of their spark. But I’m not that stuff.”
(123)
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the trauma of discovering you’re black confirms the privilege of whiteness
in Iola Leroy, the trauma of discovering she is black is so great that she
experiences brain fever.
In most of the films, the characters are very aware of their race and try to change
Most of the passers in literature were men because women could marry lighter or
into money. Women did not have the same economic needs as men. Perhaps the
films used women to demonstrate the affects of financial responsibilities on
women.
“every black American must make a choice between an assimilationist attitude and some
form of black nationalist sentiment, or he must elect a position between these two
extremes. For those light-skinned marginal figures who undergo the crisis experience,
the need to choose is intensified.” (141)
“What of the varying reactions to passing by the two racial groups? It would appear that
blacks experience more ambivalence toward the phenomenon than do many whites, to
whom ‘passing is an insult and a social and racial danger’.” (145 from Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma)
Green, Straight Lick
“In Veiled Aristocrats, there are two strong African Americans who are vying for the
most valued of prizes—the most desirable woman in the film, Rena. (176)
John Walden passes for John Warwick, a white attorney
Frank Fowler, darker skinned black aristocracy in construction (in Pinky, she says “their
kind never studies anything useful – class criticism)
In Chestnutt’s house behind Cedars Fowler is not middle class and therefore competition
between him and Walden is unthinkable
The black middle class mocking walden’s plan places the bl middle class in the camp of
fowler’s vision for upliftment through hard work and community
In chesnutt’s book rena wants to continue passing for white but her mother becomes sick
and she is discovered… micheaux wanted to portray positive examples of middle class
Micheaux’s house behind cedars 1927
Rena to John Walden:
“When Judge Straight sent you away to school as a white boy, you were young and
unburdened and no environment had settled upon you and shaped you for another life as
it has me. You grew up and went through school as a white boy, so that by the time that
you were old enough o go out wit\h girls you had forgotten your childhood days
sufficiently to feel at home. It wasn’t a case of being suddenly picked up and placed in a
new strenuous environment as you have placed me.
All this frightens me. I’m afraid to talk, to smile, to do anything for fear that I will make
a mistake that will embarrass you. This Mr. Tryon that you are so interested in. I
imagine he is wonderful. But, oh john, I…I haven’t known men like him. I’m afraid
that… I don’t know what to do or say, or how to turn. I am not vain, but, but I find it so,
so hard to talk to him. And then another thing; always when in the presence of these
people—Mr. Tryon, and all the rest—I am constantly thinking of who I am, and who they
are, and how they would hate me and despise me if they knew the truth. How they would
scorn and look at me and point their fingers at me and call me that unspeakable name.”
(188)
Micheaux never advocated passing for white
“Cultural passing is a more complex matter by far.” (195)
In VA and GS, Micheaux attempts “to isolate and purge the damaging qualities of
whiteness from his idea of the American middle class.” (196)
Donald Bogle
Toms, Coons…
“The black servants of the Hollywood films of the 1930s met the demands of their times.
Not only their joy and zest but their loyalty, too, demonstrated that nothing in life wad
ever completely hopeless.
During this period of breadlines, of fireside chats from President Roosevelt over the
radio, of labor programs, of intellectual leftist activities, and of WPA programs, blacks in
films were used to reaffirm for a socially chaotic age a belief in life and the American
way of living itself.” (36)
- Released in 1934, IMIT, directed by John Stahl, starring Claudette Colbert (Miss Bea),
Fredi Washington (Peola), and Louise Beavers(black widow aunt Delilah), Miss Bea’s
child (Jessie)… they suffer from the depression (hunger, poverty, etc)… Delilah’s family
passed down a pancake recipe that is so good Miss Bea decides to market it and gives her
20%)
Miss Bea: “You’ll have your own car. You own house.”
Delilah: :My own house? You gonna send me away, Miss Bea? I can’t live with you?
Oh, honey chile, please don’t send me away.”
She doesn’t want her own home because…
Delilah: :How I gonna take care of you and Miss Jessie if I ain’t here? I’se your cook.
And I want to stay your cook. I gives it to you (the pancake recipe), honey. I makes you
a present of it.” Same deal with daughters as the 59 remake… Delilah dies… big
funeral… daughter returns humiliated…
From slippery characters
“slavery in America is not at all confined to persons of any particular complexion… there
are a very large number of slaves who are as white as anyone; but as the evidence of a
slave is not admitted in court against a free white person, it is almost impossible for a
white child, after having been kidnapped and sold into or reduced to slavery, in a part of
the country where it is not known (as is often the case), ever to recover its freedom.”
(craft)
from ginsberg pg 1
“100 DOLLARS REWARD. Will be given for the apprehension of my Negro Edmund
Kenney. He has straight hair, and complexion so nearly white that it is believed a
stranger would suppose there was no African blood in him. He was with my boy Dick a
short time since in Norfolk, and offered for sale…, but escaped under the pretense of
being a white man.” – Richmond, Whig, January 6, 1836
The 1936 version of Showboat (the first Showboat film was made in 1929 and the last
was in 1951), with Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, Irene Dunne, and Allan Jones,
The real story is only merely hinted at, never really contemplated; it is that of the
beautiful, rebellious daughter of the loyal black friend. She is light-skinned, sensitive,
tempestuous, and grows bitterly indignant when she sees that the white girl with whom
she is reared is getting all the fine things in life, while she is subjected to humiliation and
defeat… While her mother is treated with sympathy and warmth because she is the
submissive, old-fashioned Negro, who, as the saying goes, “knows her place”, the
daughter is too bitter and lacking in resignation over her underserved fate.” Dec. 8,
1934—Literary Digest
Hurst expressed that Negroes should be grateful that she even addressed black problems
(Null p 64)
The Birth of Whiteness: Race and Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Bernardi, Daniel.
Rutgers University Press, 1996
“Race matters.” – Cornel West, Race Matters, Boston, beacon press, 1993
Thomas cripps slow fade to black: the Negro in american film, 1900-1942, ny:oxford u
press, 1977
From juda Bennett
“The phenomenon known as “passing as white” is difficult to explain in other countries
or to foreign students. Typical questions are: “Shouldn’t Americans say that a person
who is passing as white is white, or nearly all white, and has previously been passing as
black?” or “To be consistent, shouldn’t you say that someone who is one-eighth white is
passing as black?” (James Davis, who is black? One nation’s definition. University Park,
penn state u press, 1991 pg 14)
“Were they really white -- passing for colored? Or colored—passing for white?”
(Langston Hughes, the ways of white folks, ny:vintage classic, 1990 pg 33)
“One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.” (WEB DuBois, 215 – The Souls of Black Folk)
race exists because they return to “their people”
Showboat – Julie Laverne passes for white and stars in Captain Andy’s Floating Palace
(written by Edna Ferber), Ferber argued that her book told the story of the South –
magnolia follows Julie north and sings “nigger songs” for a living…
Oscar Hammerstein –
FROM GAINES
Adrian Piper
“What is harder for me tograsp is how they could want these things enough to sacrifice
the history, wisdom, connectedness, and moral solidarity with their family and
community in order to get them. It seems to require so much severing and forgetting, so
much disowning and distancing, not simply from one’s shared past, but from one’s
former self—as though one had cauterized one’s long term memory at the moment of
entry into the white community.”
While it can be subversive, passing “ironically assumes the one-drop rule”. (gaines, 159)
Lost boundaries: Black male doctor, Scott Carter (Mel Ferrer), and his wife, Marcia
(Beatrice Pearson) pass for white in Keenham (in New Hampshire)… they raise a boy
(Howard – Richard Hylton) and a girl (Shelley – Susan Douglas) and never tell them that
they have black blood… WhenWWII begins, they both enlist, when Dr. Carter’s black
blood is discovered he is rejected… When Dr. C tells his son that he has black blood,
Howard goes a little crazy and runs off to Harlem…
Based on a true story printed in WL White -- Reader’s Digest, December 1947, 135-154
“In this film, ‘passing’ as a psychological dilemma is gendered male.” (266 –Race,
Gender, and the Psychoanalysis in Forties Film: Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave and
the Quiet One. – Michele Wallace)
The use of passing characters in literature continued through Reconstruction and
increased with urbanization because of the possibilities for anonymity in the larger cities.
Henry Louis Gates JR. defines race as a metaphor
Notes from films:
Individualism
Transcend race and class handicaps
If you’re white,
You’re all right.
If you’re brown,
Stick around,
But if you’re black,
Get back, get back.
H. Rap Brown, Die, Nigger, Die! (New York: Dial Pres, 1969.) p. 2
“I yam what I am!” Invisible Man, pg 260
“I could glimpse the possibility of being more than a member of a race. It
was no dream, the possibility existed.” (346)
It was as though by dressing and walking in a certain way I had enlisted
in a fraternity in which I was recognized at a glance (474) … My entire
body started to itch, as though I had just been removed from a plaster
cast and was unused to the new freedom of movement. In the South
everyone knew you, but coming North was a jump into the unknown.
How many days could you walk the streets of the big city without
encountering anyone who knew you and how many nights? You could
actually make yourself anew. The notion was frightening, for now the
world seemed to flow before my eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was
not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.
(487-488.. ny: vintage books, 1972)
“Certainly in the space of popular media culture black people in the U.S.
and black people globally often look at ourselves through images,
through eyes that are unable to truly recognize us, so that we are not
represented as ourselves but seen through the lens of the oppressor …
Nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary filmmaking. (155 bell
hooks yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End
Press, 1990)
“Racial identities are not only black, Latino, Asian, Native American , and
so on; they are also white. To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its
hegemony by naturalizing it. Without specifically addressing white
ethnicity, there can be no critical evaluation of the construction of the
other.” (Coco Fusco, from essay “Fantasies of Oppositionality”, published
in Afterimage magazine. December, 1988)
Freire the oppressed imitate the oppressed.
Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front
by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions.
He is seen, but he does not see…
And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. (Foucault, 200)
Passing characters are not exclusively American but the majority of passing narratives
were written by American authors, set in the United States, and reflect anxieties in
American culture. These narratives expose the contradictions in the myth of America as
the land of opportunity for all people, while also reinforcing the idea that Americans can
reinvent themselves. Passing narratives, are a metaphor for the experience of
assimilation into the dominant (white) culture. The group that is most represented in
passing narratives, is also the group that has never really been allowed to fully assimilate,
African Americans.
Characters with a desire to become something that they are not in order to escape their
realities have been present from the earliest American films to the present. The popular
encyclopedia of American cinema, Videohound, categorizes films with these characters
under “Not-So-Mistaken-Identity”. Of these “not-so-mistaken identity” films, more than
half of the characters in question are black passing as white. This reflects the American
obsession with race, authenticity, and reinvention. As characters whose racial identity
could rest somewhere between black and white, passing characters have the potential to
subvert racial categories by proving the falsity of the black and white racial binary.
Elaine Ginsberg argued that the power of passing narratives is "its interrogation of the
essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing has the potential to create a
space for creative multiple identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to
cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress." (16) However in most
popular American films, these characters are never allowed the freedom to define
themselves and live with their choices.
“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from
them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a
vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural
boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its
inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the
troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who
cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of “normal”. (3 – Anzaldua,
Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Co, 1987)
Despite the possibilities their existence in a society anxious about interracial sex
suggests, they are actually used most often to prove that it is not possible to transcend
racial categories. And just in case the repeated humiliation, violence, and personal
sacrifices they endure in the films did not persuade the audience to value stability in
racial identity, more traditional, stereotypical black characters are always present, and
usually placed at the moral center of the films, to reinforce racist definitions of blackness
and whiteness.
When they were released, most of these films were viewed as serious attempts to resolve
“the problem of the color line” (DuBois). However they rely on existing assumptions
about race to promote unequal power relationships between blacks and whites (i.e. the
submissive black side-kick and their liberal white friend). Furthermore, by only allowing
the passing characters two choices (i.e. being black or white), the black and white racial
binary is reinforced and the possibility for a racially and culturally diverse society is
rejected. In White Americans, the New Minority?: Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding
Boundaries of Whiteness, Jonathan W. Warren and France Winddance Twine provided
the history of assimilation for immigrant groups and asserted that, "precisely because
Blacks represent the other against which Whiteness is constructed, the backdoor to
Whiteness is open to non-Blacks. Slipping through that opening is, then, a tactical matter
for non-Blacks of conforming to White standards, of distancing themselves from
Blackness, and of reproducing anti-Black ideas and sentiments." Passing films portray
the process by which light-skinned blacks try to pass as, or assimilate to white. However
they never succeed in these films because of their black blood. Their failure proves that
blackness is real and cannot be changed and therefore that whiteness is also stable,
thereby allowing white audiences to rest assured that they cannot “at any moment
become a slave, or black”. (Browder)
The majority of passing films were released during periods of cultural crises in the United
States. The three decades with the most successful (based on box office figures) passing
films are 1930-1960. During this period the nation experienced the Great Depression,
WWII, and the Civil Rights Movement. The purpose of this website is to analyze these
films within their historical and cultural contexts to learn more about how blacks and
whites responded to racial passing. The films and the audiences’ response to the films
can help us learn more about the following:
How blacks and whites viewed themselves and each other;
The racial politics at the time the films were released;
The relationships between race, gender, and class;
Generational conflicts regarding race;
The importance of films in the construction of race; and
Passing in a larger cultural context (i.e. passing also occurs based on ethnicity, gender,
and class differences).
Finally, the scholarship on passing has changed significantly over time. The ideological
shifts in the ways passing is interpreted by scholars will bring us closer to understanding
what this cultural knot reveals about contemporary American culture.
Types of Passing
- race, gender, class, ethnic
- permanent, temporary, for convenience (e.g. at a movie theatre)
- known or unknown to the person who is passing
- with or without consent from the family
Purposes
- escape slavery
- gain opportunities
- investigative/truth seeking
- romance
- disguise
MISCEGENATION
Since white privilege cannot exist without blackness, laws were passed to prevent those
categories from being diluted. Interracial relationships were frowned upon in many
countries, however the United States had the most stringent rules (and harsh
punishments) for blacks who had relations with whites. The first laws prohibiting
marriage between blacks and whites, were passed in Maryland in 1661. To enforce these
laws, blackness was defined by the "one-drop rule": anyone with one drop of black blood
was legally black. The laws against miscegenation survived in many states until 1967,
when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the Loving v. Commonwealth of
Virginia decision.