I’ve been thinking about your essay for a week! :) I persist in thinking of “race” as a social construct, and “gender” too, in the sense of gendered behaviors, clothing, etc. My favorite example of how social constructs wield power is money, which is of course entirely made up, a game, but a game that kills some people, makes others suffer horribly, grants some comforts, and gives others unholy power over their fellow humans. My grandmother was born Jewish but raised in a Catholic orphanage; she married an Irish-Catholic man and denied her Jewish background to the day she died. (One of my aunts had to do some VERY aggressive family research against her wishes — it created a rift that never healed.) To me, and to most of my family, this seemed absurd, it was no big deal. But NOT being seen as Jewish was important to her, just as BEING seen as Jewish was important to my aunt, who is now Orthodox and lives in Israel.
Once when I was an undergrad, a classmate came up to me and asked quietly if I was passing. I thought she meant the class! When I answered that I was passing the class she thought I was being coy and persisted, but gave up in the face of my blinding ignorance, which she thought was a performance. So I was a white girl whose black classmate had read as white-passing black. In Iowa, this wouldn’t likely happen. Not only am I both paler and straighter-haired in my middle age, I’m living in a less multi-everything context. But I’ve gone to Target with my white family and been treated well by the employees there, and then gone to Target with my not-white friend and been treated very differently. And America is filled with people who have that experience — they go out in public with their black family and friends and are read as black, but then the same individual goes out with their white family and friends and gets read as white.
The consistent thing here is the “how we are read by other people” part. (Hell is other people!) We usually have very little control over how other people read us. I recall the pain of a friend-couple who were cis-female and trans-man when they’d go to Pride events in the early 2000s… people would “read” them as a straight couple and treat them like outsiders at Pride — where they definitely belonged, but people didn’t “treat” them as such. They could have dressed up in drag, but his entire purpose in transitioning was to be the cis-passing man that he was — he WAS living out and proud, but back then no one could see that. Today, the LGBTQIA+ community is much more aware, but still…
I guess what I’m saying is that the fascination with “passing” is not necessarily to do with essentialism, but instead this weird “magic” of other people’s readings of us, and how it changes our social position — whether we are treated well or poorly, whether we are welcomed or just tolerated, whether we are seen by our classmate as honest or deceptive. There are those who believe in the categories, and for them stories of passing are either disturbing or unbelievable. (I taught Larson’s Passing not long ago and a minority of the class actually found the very idea of passing implausible. I gave historical examples, just as you do above, to show them it was a real thing — yet they seemed unconvinced!) But for people who know that the categories are fluid fictions, stories of passing still have their appeal, because they describe this strange experience which feels like a magic spell, something “cast” upon you, where YOU are transformed by the mirror of others’ eyes — look, the mirror lies! — and while anyone can experience such a spell, some people can co-opt it and use it to an advantage, but (isn’t this always the case with magic?) at Some Great Cost.
I think of the character Desiree from Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” — one moment she’s a privileged mistress of a great estate. One word from her husband transforms her into an outcast. But the ending reveals he had knowingly sacrificed HER social status to save HIMSELF from the same social regard. It feels like magic, wicked, terrible magic. And magic is always a good story. :)
Wow, Amy. Many thanks for your thoughtful reply. I feel honored. And, yes, I agree that how other people read us is powerful and, as you point out, not in our control. As I said above, "Your race and identity aren’t the result of your DNA; they’re the result of the time and circumstances in which you live."
What I don't understand is why you might have been read as passing rather than just asked if you were of mixed race. There's that question again--why is passing relevant? Why do people assume you have something to hide or that you would be willing to live a lie about your race in an era when more and more of us are mixed? Why not just "You look mixed? I'm curious about your racial heritage."
I don't know...ironically enough, maybe you have to be a race essentialist to believe in passing?
I’ve been thinking about your essay for a week! :) I persist in thinking of “race” as a social construct, and “gender” too, in the sense of gendered behaviors, clothing, etc. My favorite example of how social constructs wield power is money, which is of course entirely made up, a game, but a game that kills some people, makes others suffer horribly, grants some comforts, and gives others unholy power over their fellow humans. My grandmother was born Jewish but raised in a Catholic orphanage; she married an Irish-Catholic man and denied her Jewish background to the day she died. (One of my aunts had to do some VERY aggressive family research against her wishes — it created a rift that never healed.) To me, and to most of my family, this seemed absurd, it was no big deal. But NOT being seen as Jewish was important to her, just as BEING seen as Jewish was important to my aunt, who is now Orthodox and lives in Israel.
Once when I was an undergrad, a classmate came up to me and asked quietly if I was passing. I thought she meant the class! When I answered that I was passing the class she thought I was being coy and persisted, but gave up in the face of my blinding ignorance, which she thought was a performance. So I was a white girl whose black classmate had read as white-passing black. In Iowa, this wouldn’t likely happen. Not only am I both paler and straighter-haired in my middle age, I’m living in a less multi-everything context. But I’ve gone to Target with my white family and been treated well by the employees there, and then gone to Target with my not-white friend and been treated very differently. And America is filled with people who have that experience — they go out in public with their black family and friends and are read as black, but then the same individual goes out with their white family and friends and gets read as white.
The consistent thing here is the “how we are read by other people” part. (Hell is other people!) We usually have very little control over how other people read us. I recall the pain of a friend-couple who were cis-female and trans-man when they’d go to Pride events in the early 2000s… people would “read” them as a straight couple and treat them like outsiders at Pride — where they definitely belonged, but people didn’t “treat” them as such. They could have dressed up in drag, but his entire purpose in transitioning was to be the cis-passing man that he was — he WAS living out and proud, but back then no one could see that. Today, the LGBTQIA+ community is much more aware, but still…
I guess what I’m saying is that the fascination with “passing” is not necessarily to do with essentialism, but instead this weird “magic” of other people’s readings of us, and how it changes our social position — whether we are treated well or poorly, whether we are welcomed or just tolerated, whether we are seen by our classmate as honest or deceptive. There are those who believe in the categories, and for them stories of passing are either disturbing or unbelievable. (I taught Larson’s Passing not long ago and a minority of the class actually found the very idea of passing implausible. I gave historical examples, just as you do above, to show them it was a real thing — yet they seemed unconvinced!) But for people who know that the categories are fluid fictions, stories of passing still have their appeal, because they describe this strange experience which feels like a magic spell, something “cast” upon you, where YOU are transformed by the mirror of others’ eyes — look, the mirror lies! — and while anyone can experience such a spell, some people can co-opt it and use it to an advantage, but (isn’t this always the case with magic?) at Some Great Cost.
I think of the character Desiree from Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” — one moment she’s a privileged mistress of a great estate. One word from her husband transforms her into an outcast. But the ending reveals he had knowingly sacrificed HER social status to save HIMSELF from the same social regard. It feels like magic, wicked, terrible magic. And magic is always a good story. :)
Wow, Amy. Many thanks for your thoughtful reply. I feel honored. And, yes, I agree that how other people read us is powerful and, as you point out, not in our control. As I said above, "Your race and identity aren’t the result of your DNA; they’re the result of the time and circumstances in which you live."
What I don't understand is why you might have been read as passing rather than just asked if you were of mixed race. There's that question again--why is passing relevant? Why do people assume you have something to hide or that you would be willing to live a lie about your race in an era when more and more of us are mixed? Why not just "You look mixed? I'm curious about your racial heritage."
I don't know...ironically enough, maybe you have to be a race essentialist to believe in passing?