(Racial) Passing

By Suzie Telep, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Passing originally refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation crosses social boundaries by adopting “the guise of another” (Ginsberg 1996), i.e. a social identity which is perceived as radically different from their supposedly “real identity.” The concept of passing emerged in the historical context of racial segregation in the United States. The term then referred to the experiences of people initially identified as Black who passed for White. Passing was then denounced as a social fakery by defenders of racial segregation, who adopted a strongly essentialist discourse: through passing, people whose supposed “true nature” was Black, engaged in illegitimate exercises of concealment and manipulation in order to cross the color line and gain undue access to privileges reserved for Whites. Many examples of racial passing narratives can be found in North American literature such as Nella Larsen’s famous novel Passing ([1929] 2023), which has been recently adapted into a Netflix film (2021). These narratives usually relay the experiences of Black, “Negro” or “mulatto” characters who would, in certain contexts, pass themselves off as White if their skin or other phenotypic features could be ambiguously perceived as “White” enough.

The concept of passing was subsequently reappropriated in gender and sexuality studies by Harold Garfinkel, who analyzed the emblematic case of Agnes, a transsexual woman who wished more than anything to surgically correct “the mistake of nature that gave her a penis and not a vagina” (Zimmerman 1992: 193). Referring to Agnes, Garfinkel defined passing as “[t]he work of achieving and making secure her rights to live as a normal, natural female while having continually to provide for the possibility of detection and ruin carried on within socially structured conditions” (Garfinkel 1967: 137). The concept thus theorized was originally employed to understand the efforts made by transsexual people to achieve gender and sex mobility.

Nevertheless, there are essentializing presuppositions of the concept of passing as canonically defined in US literature, which renders the analytic of the concept potently problematic: in its canonical formulation, passing conceives social ontology (whether race, or sex) as a pre-existing, inalienable essence which stands behind and before and serves as a limiting condition on performative self-invention and identity. Besides, previous works on passing rarely examine the social mechanisms by which this practice intersects with other trajectories of social classification (gender, ethnicity, sex, disability, religion, nationality, etc.). Therefore, subsequent studies criticized this essentialist approach to passing. They proposed a broader conception of this concept, which invites us to consider the categories of race, sex and gender in more critical and constructivist ways: rather than conceiving these categories as inalienable, a priori essences, these performative approaches, inspired by the works of Judith Butler, Ervin Goffman, or by John L. Austin’s theory of linguistic performativity, reconceptualized race, sex and gender as partly resulting from the social accomplishments of social subjects through routinized and repeated actions (cf. Sánchez and Schlossberg 2021). Thus, in their introduction of the special issue on “Pass.ed Performances” for Women & Performance, John L. Jackson Jr. and Martha S. Jones elaborate a “more expansive definition” of passing, defined as “an attempt to shore-up social intelligibility (for an externalized or internalized  audience  of  judges)  through  particular  empirical  details,  and  any  representation or understanding of self is predicated on just such operationalized variables” (Jackson and  Jones  2005:  11).

By avoiding “the pitfalls of essentialism” (Jackson and Jones 2005), the concept of racial passing thus revisited can help us to shed new and stimulating light on how immigrants cope with racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other forms of inequality and discrimination in our postcolonial societies (see Caruthers 2023, Yeh 2018). Thus, in my research on whitening (or “speaking like a White person,” Telep 2018, 2021b) among Cameroonian anti-racist activists in Paris, France, I theorize this practice as a form of racial passing which enables Black subjects to erase the social stigma of black skin (cf. Goffman 1963) by imitating the language and body style of middle and upper-class White people. Whitening operates at three levels: accent, body style, and discourse. At the accent level, these Cameroonian immigrants imitate the dominant norm of Parisian French while erasing the main phonetic features that are ideologically associated with an African accent. At the bodily level, they perform an Afropolitan style through the international Made In Africa fashion, which consists in mixing African prints and patterns with Western-style. By performing this form of cosmopolitanism rooted in Africa, these Black immigrants aim to challenge racist representations of African people produced by Western media and to show that they belong to the middle-upper classes of French society (Telep 2021a). At the discursive level, they take up an Afro-optimistic discourse which produces a positive representation of Africa as “the Rising Continent,” as opposed to hegemonic Afro-pessimistic discourses on the “Dark Continent” that are reproduced in mainstream Western media (Nothias 2012, 2014). Indeed, this Afro-pessimistic ideology represents Africa through essentializing and racializing images grounded in colonial tropes (such as the “eternal” continent of famines, wars, and tribal conflicts), and it depicts Black African bodies as essentially starving, sick, rachitic – meaning, always negatively marked bodies.

There are also gender differentiations in the process of racial passing: for Black women in particular, whitening is a way of deconstructing racist, sexist and classist representations of the “Black African Woman” by projecting a dominant Black woman ethos and an exotic Black beauty that partially conforms to white Western notions of beauty (Telep 2022). Therefore, by performing linguistic, discursive, and bodily signs indexing Whiteness, these African immigrants want to be socially recognized as legitimate members of predominantly White upper-middle classes of French society, as well as members of the “new world society” (Ferguson 2002).

To conclude, the concept of passing is a particularly effective tool for contributing to an intersectional analysis of racial, social, and gender mobilities among immigrant populations. Because race is always intertwined with other power structures, racial passing enables immigrants to transgress other social boundaries that are too often addressed separately by social scientists who study passing practices; however, it often seems difficult to separate the semiotic markers of race from those referring to social or gender mobility (cf. Telep 2022; see also Moriel 2005, Bosa, Pagis & Trépied 2019: 5). By adopting a non-essentialist, intersectional, and performative approach to passing, we can shed better light on the everyday self-presentation strategies by which immigrants attempt to counter racist, sexist, and classist representations of their social group.

REFERENCES

Carruthers, Andrew M. 2023. “Specters of excess: Passing and policing in the Malay-speaking

archipelago.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 33(2): 131–160.

Ferguson, James G. 2002. “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the “New World Society”.” Cultural Anthropology 17(4): 551-569.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Ginsberg, Elaine K. 1996. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Duke Universiy Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Jackson, John L. and Martha S. Jones. 2005. “Pass·ed Performances: An introduction.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 1: 9-16.

Larsens, Nella. [1929] 2023. Passing. Broadview Press.

Moriel, Liora. 2005. “Passing and the performance of gender, race, and class acts: A theoretical framework.” Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 1: 167-210.

Nothias, Toussaint. 2012. “Definition and scope of Afro-pessimism: Mapping the concept and its usefulness for analysing news media coverage of Africa.” Leeds African Studies Bulletin 74: 53-62.

Nothias, Toussaint. 2014. “‘Rising’, ‘hopeful’, ‘new’: visualizing Africa in the age of globalization.” Visual Communication 13(3): 323-339.

Sánchez, María C. and Linda Schlossberg (Eds.). 2001. Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion. New York: New York University Press.

Telep, Suzie. 2018. “‘Moi je whitise jamais.’ Accent, subjectivity, and the process of linguistic accommodation in a migratory and postcolonial context,” Langage et société 165 (3): 31-49.

Telep, Suzie. 2021a. “Performing Whiteness, Troubling Blackness: Afropolitanism and the Visual Politics of Black Bodies in Youtube Videos.” Signs and Society 9(2): 234–62.

Telep, Suzie. 2021b. “Speaking like a White Person: Ideologies about Accent among Cameroonian Immigrants in Paris”, OBST (Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie/Contributions to Language Theory) 98: 7-30.

Telep, Suzie. 2022. “Performing an Ethos of a Dominant Black Woman in Paris through Body and Language: Passing at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Class.” CFC Intersections 1(1):71–84.

Trépied, Benoît, Bosa, Bastien and Julie Pagis (Eds.). 2019. “Passing,” Genèses 114.

Yeh, Rihan. 2018. Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zimmerman, Don H. 1992. “They Were All Doing Gender, But They Weren’t All Passing: Comment on Rogers.” Gender & Society 6(2): 192-198.

Movie

Passing (2021), Hall, Rebecca (Dir.)