{"id":270,"date":"2014-09-15T10:03:04","date_gmt":"2014-09-15T14:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/?p=270"},"modified":"2014-09-15T10:03:04","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T14:03:04","slug":"are-people-still-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/?p=270","title":{"rendered":"Are People Still Passing?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>
Pinky is a 1949 American drama, directed by Elia Kazan, about a light-skinned African-American nursing student, played by Jeanne Crain, passing for white. The film also starred Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters. All three actresses were nominated for Academy Awards.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Racial passing<\/b> refers to a person classified as a member of one racial<\/span><\/a> group also accepted<\/span><\/a> as a member of a different racial group. The term was used especially in the U.S. to describe a person of mixed-race heritage<\/span><\/a> assimilating into the white majority<\/span><\/a> during times when legal and social conventions of hypodescent<\/span><\/a> classified the person as a minority, subject to racial segregation and discrimination.”<\/em> – Wikipedia<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When\u00a0some people\u00a0learn that characters in my novel, Provenance<\/em>, \u00a0are “passing”\u00a0they ask, “Do people still do that?” Sometimes I want to respond, “Is there still racial discrimination against people of color?” or “Do you think people with white skin color have a\u00a0social, professional and economic\u00a0advantage over people who are black, brown or Asian?” If the answer to either question is yes, and it is; then yes,\u00a0people\u00a0still pass.<\/p>\n

In the 21st century, passing is not the past.\u00a0Examples: Filmmaker Lacy Schwartz, recently profiled\u00a0in an article in the New York Times,\u00a0<\/span><\/a>shares her remarkable story of passing in her 2014 film, Little White Lie<\/em>;\u00a0Bliss Broyard’s 2007 best seller, One Drop<\/a>,\u00a0was about\u00a0the\u00a0revelation that her father, former New York Times literary critic Anatole Broyard, was passing; Stanford professor Allyson Hobbs’ new book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/em><\/a> was just released today. I did\u00a0a\u00a0 Google search on the word “Passing” and the\u00a0first two terms that came up were “passing racial identity,” 588,000 results and, \u00a0“passing for white,” 86,300,000 results. In 1929,\u00a0Nela Larson published her novel, Passing<\/a>;\u00a0it is still in print today and available through all major book retailers and\u00a0as Kindle and audio editions. As of 2007, Passing<\/i> is the subject of more than two hundred scholarly articles and more than fifty dissertations.<\/p>\n

Yes, passing is still something people do and\u00a0just like race, it\u00a0is\u00a0something we still\u00a0talk about.<\/p>\n

Throughout Provenance<\/em> my characters pass in the traditional way,\u00a0pretending to be white; but they also pass\u00a0by\u00a0rejecting their history and heritage,\u00a0though they\u00a0are\u00a0clearly identified as a person of color.\u00a0As I wrote and researched the book, I learned\u00a0what it was like to pass in the early 20th Century, when the novel begins,\u00a0and into the 21st Century as\u00a0race relations\u00a0in America evolved.\u00a0I realized that passing is\u00a0as much about how you see yourself as it is about how others see you. Yet, is it\u00a0okay to\u00a0embrace\u00a0an\u00a0identity that enables you to live out\u00a0the dreams you have for yourself – regardless of the\u00a0skin you’re in?\u00a0I can’t answer that. However, I suspect that\u00a0until we\u00a0rid ourselves of the construct\u00a0of race, people\u00a0continue to pass in one way or another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group also accepted as a member of a different racial group. The term was used especially in the U.S. to describe a person of mixed-race heritage assimilating into the white majority during times when legal and social conventions of hypodescent classified the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,10,19],"tags":[48,73,81,82,85],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-diversity","category-family","category-race","tag-discrimination","tag-mixed-race-heritage","tag-passing","tag-passing-for-white","tag-race-in-america"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}