Irene, who is also fair-skinned but lives a firmly Black middle class life in Harlem, is irritated that Clare wants it both ways — having acquired the privileges of Whiteness, she now longs for the community of Blackness.
The term “passing” has historically referred to mixed-race Americans without visible African ancestry who posed as White to escape oppression or to gain access to social and economic benefits.
For Hall, the subject of passing is personal — her maternal grandfather was an African American man who passed as White for much of his life.
From James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 book “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” to Fannie Hurst’s 1933 “Imitation of Life” to Brit Bennett’s 2020 bestselling novel “The Vanishing Half,” stories about racial passing have captivated us for generations.
Gaines, the author of “Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy,” cited William and Ellen Craft’s “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom” as an early example of a passing narrative.
Harper published the novel “Iola Leroy,” a story about the daughter of a White enslaver who upon her father’s death, learns that she has African ancestry and is subsequently sold into slavery.
Authors writing about passing began considering murkier questions — what it meant to be loyal to one’s race, what was the value of Whiteness and what was lost when a person decided to pass.
Deploying a trope known as the “tragic mulatto,” a Black character would opt to pass for White — only to find themselves unhappy in their new life.
As the rape of enslaved women at the hands of their enslavers threatened to muddle the nation’s racial hierarchy, the “one drop rule” emerged as an answer — meaning that a mixed-race person with known African ancestry was to be considered Black.
“Passing” — and stories about passing — destabilize those rigid categories of race and highlight their inherent contradictions, Blay said.
That idea of race as both fictional and real is what Brit Bennett wanted to explore when she set out to write “The Vanishing Half.” The novel focuses on two identical twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, whose paths diverge dramatically: Desiree marries a dark-skinned Black man and gives birth to a similarly dark-skinned daughter, while Stella leaves behind her family to pass for White.
That the character of Stella is able to transform into a White woman just because people assume so — and that she would choose to go along with it — is a reality that’s difficult to comprehend.
Institutions and forms now allow us to identify in more detailed ways, and an increasing number of people are claiming multiracial identities.
Through characters who manipulate those identities for their own ends, we can imagine other possibilities in which we reject those labels and take control of our own destinies, Hobbs said.