From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jan 26 2009 - 04:54:12 EST
Long Time Passing
By AMY FINNERTY
Published: January 23, 2009
How black is Eminem? How white is our president? We can’t help asking these awkward questions as we digest “Near Black,” by Baz Dreisinger. A freelance journalist and an assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, she explores cases of “reverse racial passing” — as distinct from the more conventional, black-as-white “passing,” for so long a feature of our tortured society. Presenting “narratives about white people who either envision themselves or are envisioned by others as being or becoming black,” and drawing on examples ranging from Twain’s “Pudd’nhead Wilson” to the sophomoric genre film “Soul Man,” she argues that the appropriation of black identity by whites — both literally and metaphorically — has been a potent strain in American culture for centuries.
Skip to next paragraph
NEAR BLACK
White-to-Black Passing in American Culture.
By Baz Dreisinger
184 pp. University of Massachusetts Press. Paper, $24.95
First Chapter: ‘Near Black’ (January 25, 2009)
The term “white passing” is broadly defined here. A white journalist with dyed skin infiltrating black precincts and writing about it is passing. So is a “jive-slanging” white D.J. A white immigrant sold into slavery in the early 19th century (a case of “coerced passing”) also has a place in Dreisinger’s compendium of racial mix-ups, satires and cautionary tales.
In the 1890s, 1920s and 1990s, the author asserts, “rhetoric about . . . a potentially vanishing white population” spawned an abundance of passing narratives.
During Reconstruction, hysteria about racial contamination fed the fear that “whiteness was not an essence,” that blackness could spread.
Such notions were put to use by intentional reverse passers; white women feigned blackness to circumvent anti-miscegenation laws, for instance. One anecdotal tale describes a white woman drinking her black lover’s blood, in an effort to become black as measured by the “one drop” rule. Whiteness was viewed as a fragile state that could easily be corrupted. The themes of proximity and contagion, alluded to in the book’s title, pervade “Near Black.”
Sometime after the civil rights movement but before an apparently black man became the most powerful person on earth, however, whiteness got harder to rub off. Black authenticity became a sought-after badge. Dreisinger connects “homosocial bonding” — in short, geeky white guys trying to become more virile — racial mixing in cities and the popularity of black musical genres to latter-day white-passing narratives.
The author cites Philip Roth’s novel “The Human Stain,” the Richard Pryor comedy “Silver Streak” and dozens of other examples from literature and film. White passing may be rare in real life, but it makes for a juicy storytelling device, replete with mistaken identities, sexual transgression and not a little voyeurism.
This book is tough sledding, though, with heavy footnotes and messy academic dissections of the malleable concept of race. While she strives not to conflate examples, Dreisinger suggests that many of today’s passing narratives might be “a product of anxiety about, not acceptance of, current racial and ethnic ambiguities.” Maybe so, but the payoff for the reader does not reside in theoretical discussions. Rather, it is in the wildly diverse accounts gleaned from the author’s assiduous research. We don’t really care if we can trace the dots from enslaved whites to hip-hop artists, from Jack Kerouac’s novels to the harrowing life of Salome Muller. (She was a German who was sold down the river by her father’s boss and lived as a slave until 1843; she was declared white — and, therefore, free — in a court of law.)
MULLER’S is just one of many gripping tales, real and fictional, included in “Near Black.” But little unites the assorted case studies, existentially, other than Dreisinger’s original conceit. Black-as-white passing was a transparently explicable, if depressing, phenomenon. White-as-black passing, however, appears to have happened for a multitude of reasons a frequent one being a cultural election by the passer, for the sake of personal happiness, profit or, sometimes, a lark. The unique, eccentric stories the author has assembled are more enlightening, in the end, than her diligent efforts to connect them to one another.
Amy Finnerty is a freelance writer and editor in New York.