It's generally accepted that race is not biological, but a social construct. We've known this for more than 100 years; sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois warned against segregating subjects by racial identity on the grounds that these false distinctions ignore the scope of human diversity.
There is no gene or cluster of genes that determines a person's race. There is no test that can be administered to determine a person's race. Racial identity is fluid because race is an idea; one's perceived racial identity can and does change depending on one's experience and aspiration.
While race is just a notion, the social, political and economic meanings of being perceived as belonging to a particular racial group are real. For most of the 19th century, being perceived as Black meant you might be regarded as property that might be bought or sold. Discrimination and prejudice persist, providing an incentive for light-skinned Black people to gain entry into white society by "passing."
The idea of sublimating one's cultural and familial history and lighting out for a new, potentially terrible territory is a compelling one. In the popular fiction of the mid-19th century there emerged the trope of the "tragic mulatta," where (typically) a young Black (or mixed race) girl would pretend to be white.
Her beauty would entrance an aristocratic young gentleman; he'd fall in love with her. Then, at the last moment, with nuptials impending, she'd be exposed or break down and confess. She would usually get a fever and die or else be driven by shame to suicide. Her white beau — the white race — would be saved.
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Not all the stories ended so cruelly; in William Dean Howells' realist novella "An Imperative Duty" (1891), Dr. Olney agrees to keep secret his wife's discovery that she is 1/16 Black; suicide is averted when the couple move to Italy.
Another example is Charles Chesnutt's "The House Behind the Cedars" (1900), which borrows much of its fanciful plot from Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe." Chesnutt was 7/8 white, and could easily pass as a white man, but embraced his Black heritage.
Still, in "Cedars," set in the Carolinas "a few years after the Civil War," a Black woman dies after her white husband-to-be discovers her secret and calls off the wedding. But in the moments before she dies, he appears at her bedside to tell her he has always loved her.
Nella Larsen's "Passing" (1929), made into a Netflix film in 2021, is a more sophisticated work informed by the stereotypical tragic mulatta stories, a countervailing trend that appeared in short stories in Black women's magazines of the time (where the passing woman gives up her white suitor in the name of Black pride) and a sensational court case where a wealthy white man sued his wife, a former maid, for fraud, alleging she "concealed" her "colored" blood.
Kristin Levine's 2012 juvenile (aimed at readers ages 10 and older) novel "The Lions of Little Rock" was about the friendship between two middle-school girls in 1958 — the "lost year" after the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High. One of the 12-year-olds is shaken when her friend is revealed to have been passing for white and stops coming to school.
And Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" (2000) tells the story of a professor of classics caught up in bogus charges of racism and is eventually revealed as a light-skinned Black man who has been passing as white since his teen years in the 1940s.
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The indispensable text in the literature of passing is James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel,"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man," recently re-issued by Everyman's Library. The new edition of the 142-page novel is supplemented by a new introduction by poet Gregory Pardlo; a chronology of the author's life and times and the original preface to the 1912 edition, which was published anonymously. (When Johnson republished the book with some minor changes in 1927, he took credit as the author.)
Johnson is one of those figures whose accomplishments tend to obscure the quality of his work — he's probably best known as the writer of the poem "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" which his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, set to music and which became known as the "Negro National Anthem." He was serving in the diplomatic corps when he wrote "Autobiography," which he took pains to stress was not actually an autobiography, but a work of fiction.
Johnson's unnamed protagonist recounts his life from his odd childhood in Georgia: the small house he shared with his mother and a well-dressed white man who used to visit and who ties a gold coin, drilled through the middle and rendered worthless, around his neck. At this point he is ignorant of race, and doesn't discover that he is not white until he's ridiculed at his integrated school for standing when the headmaster calls for "the white scholars to stand."
He asks his mother about this, and she replies that, though she is Black, "your father is one of the greatest men in the country — the best blood of the South is in you."
After she dies, his white father withdraws all support; he moves into the Black community and does well, rising into the Black middle class as a musician. In New York he aligns himself with a character called the Rich White Gentleman (who may be passing himself) who gets him gigs playing ragtime piano for white people's parties, where he develops a taste for high society.
He travels to Paris, where he encounters his white father and a half-sister he never knew during a performance of "Faust." This encounter leads him to dedicate himself to composing music to uplift and glorify Black people. He determines to return home to the American South, to work on his art.
Once he's back home, he witnesses a brutal lynching. He abandons his musical ambitions and decides to live as a white man. Eventually he becomes romantically involved with a white woman, and one day, after a chance meeting with an old school friend who has grown up to be a distinguished professor at a Black college, he decides to tell her his secret.
At first she is shocked, but she eventually agrees to marry him and keep his secret. They are married and have two children and then the protagonist lives out his life as a mildly successful but unfulfilled businessman. He is content but admits, in the closing paragraph, that "I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage."
Race is man-made; it isn't real. This is a revolutionary book in that it takes for granted that race is an illusion. And the regrets of Johnson's protagonist are common and human enough to be universal, part of the general dread we all feel every day.
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