thoughts on passing “by mistake”
March 13, 2007
I guess the big question here is, is that even possible? Can people actually not think about how people will see them. Earlier in the year we talked about Wentworth Miller and how he didn’t know that people would think he wasn’t part black. He assumed that people would know, or he just forgot that anyone wouldn’t know. If we try to liken this to Irene, we can wonder about her ability to be “mistakenly passed for white”. She didn’t tell John Bellew she was white, but at the beginning of the conversation she didn’t know that she would need to hide her blackness. Irene let the conversation go where it would and let the people involved thing what they would about her racial background. And I suppose that’s the complexity of Larsen’s book. Irene can pass and she can’t. It seems like she has the agency to let everyone understand that she is black, but is it her responsibility to do this? Should we all constantly be announcing their ethnic and racial history to everyone we meet? It seems to me that Irene should have the right to just live as she thinks an African American upper middle class woman should live much like Wentworth should be able to be whatever he identifies himself to be. I think the fact that Irene passes for convienence is problematic, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a fault or a transgression. Actually, I find that Irene’s actions almost mimic the idea of “sticking it to the man”. She’s fooling everyone in there just because she can–and that it’s easier for her. To come back to the idea of “mistaken passing”. I watched a movie in a class directed by Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust…and as I was looking online I saw that she directed a Tracy Chapman video) called Illusions. It’s about a woman who works her way up in a movie company and very few people there knows she is black. However, she does not pass in the “normal” sense. She did not cut ties from her family and she is married to a black man. So, she is only white in terms of her career. Unfortunately I couldn’t find access to more than a minute of this movie online but we do have a videocassette in our library. It’s only 34 minutes and the call number is PN1997 .I393.
March 13, 2007 at 4:15 pm
I think passing by mistake happens alot. For those who occupy the borders of the races, even though they recognize thier racial spaciality, continue to live thier lives like normal people. I dont think it is impossible to go through life and forget that others see you as something else. That is why it is a shock to both the unintentional passer and the observer to find out that they person is not what the observer sees. The “passer” is shocked becasue he or she is suprised they are not seen as they see themselves; the observer is troubeled by the disconnect from what one sees and what one thinks. Right?
April 17, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Passing by mistake definitely, definitely happens, and, for people with ambiguous features, happens every day, in every public setting. How people will “take” you–that is to say, what they’ll assume–depends often on location, on population, and even on individual encounter. Unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to make sure you’ve been correctly identified in every social interaction, and it becomes tiresome to try–and however proud you may be of your heritage, there’s a certain feeling of degradation that comes with being asked to label yourself for someone at all. You wonder, “Why do you want to know? So you can place me in the proper column? So you can decide how to treat me, so that you don’t treat me as an equal by mistake?”
It’s not just identifying yourself to new acquaintances, either; accidentally passing to perfect strangers can place you in awkward and painful situations. For example, on my last evening in Kentucky before I left for my first year at Amherst, my mother took me out to dinner. While we waited for our food, the people at the neighboring table (who had nodded a polite greeting to us when we walked in) entered into a lengthy and loud conversation about how detrimental Mexicans are to white business in the town, what with the loitering habits and unruly Spanish speaking. Maybe if I’d thought to identify myself ahead of time (wearing a Mexican flag, perhaps, or a sombrero?), they might’ve saved their racist blather for another day, when it wouldn’t be overheard by an actual Mexican. Maybe they wouldn’t have.
Either way, it doesn’t seem quite fair to me to place the burden of identification squarely on the ambiguous-looking person. Walking into a public place these days often implies an act of unintentional passing, without enacting any form of social transgression.