"Black Like...": Further Observations on Race and Passing

Emancipated slaves from Louisiana, 1863 (NYHS).

I was queried in response to some of the observations I made on my reaction to Black Like Me—I will take them on one by one, although my replies will be more free-flowing. A prefatory note: for the purpose of responding here, black and white are denoted as terms of racial distinction in America, but we can discuss these terms as misnomers as well in future posts.

Q. “How about now? Do you think black people and white people can share their joy?” In the statement I was making about Griffin, I mentioned that I thought he had missed experiencing the joy that oppressed people still share in spite of their circumstances—laughter and happiness. I have always thought that black people and white could share their joy—and they have. My own racial heritage is a testament to that. I am considered by some to be “biracial,” as my mother is white (she’s also Canadian), and my late father was black (from Galveston, Texas—the deep, deep, deep South part of Texas!). My parents shared their joy through the birthing and raising of their four children.

When I was a kid, it was called being “mixed,” as in “she (or he) is mixed.” That sounds pretty silly to me now, because it always makes me think of cake mix, but that was the term most often used. Today, living in a racially-mixed community, I share my joy (and commiserate as well) with whites and blacks alike. However, when it comes to “racial” perspective, I find that there is often more disagreement on some issues, as our experiences are usually very different, and those experiences “color” our responses accordingly. I have a black, or African-American, identity. It doesn’t erase the other aspects of my genotype (as opposed to phenotype).

There is still an obsession with phenotype—it is how we define, assess, view, and ultimately, judge others. It is sad, but it is a product of racial thinking over the past several hundred years of Western thought. I live in a town where, in certain pockets, an “us against them” (UAT) mentality serves the political aims of some of those in power. It is a structure that has historically doomed the town to be in the grip of old school demagogues who feed on victimization rather than acknowledging that blacks have agency.

Q. Is there a need to go “undercover” to understand each other? For those of us who share a black phenotype, white skin privilege forever excludes whites from truly understanding what it feels like to be black. There will always be a distinction between empathy and “being.” Griffin’s experiment took passing to the extreme, in terms of his health, but given the times, he felt it was a necessary step to take to illustrate to other whites our common humanity.

I think one of my issues with Griffin is his casting of blacks primarily as “victims,” and his (in my view) mistaken belief that the average white Southerner was more kindly disposed to blacks than previously viewed. He expresses great concern at the end of the book with the militancy of the burgeoning Black Power movement. He wants blacks to be treated equally with whites on a social basis while presumably maintaining the white power structure—he is vague on this point—but has a real fear of a possible race war—a “holocaust,” in his words. Maybe folks who lived during the Civil Rights movement or who read Griffin’s book when it was a bestseller could contextualize it better and speak more about the zeitgeist.

The desire to go undercover as someone else in an attempt to covertly observe that individual’s (or group’s) “essence” is a common one among humans (and investigative journalists—ha!). I don’t think there is a need to go undercover, except maybe to expose injustice—which is quite different from “understanding” it. Historically speaking, though, “passing” narratives are very popular, especially (but not exclusively) those that deal with racial passing—they were enormously popular in the 19^th century and remain so. Even Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling Nickel and Dimed can be framed as a “passing” narrative—albeit class-based.

Q. I know a lot of "black" people who are as white as me, who identify as black. I know people who have as many white relatives as black, and sometimes more, who identify as black. What makes a person “black” in America today? I, too, know many blacks of varying complexions—the one-drop rule remains in effect in America. After emancipation, hundreds of thousands of slaves disappeared—passed into white society. It is common knowledge that the longer your family has been in America, the more likely race-mixing has occurred. Yet phenotype is still the dominant signifier of “blackness” (or of any race) in America.

What’s insane is that, because of America’s racial history, the characteristics of black people (and whites) vary. There is no single standard. If you look vaguely like the standard phenotype, you are considered black. It’s why racial profiling persists to this day. Even if you look “white,” the moment you announce that you are black, assumptions that have nothing to do with you or your individual history or circumstances automatically become attached to you. These may be positive or negative, but they are there and serve as stand-ins for who you really are.

One thing we know that black isn’t: it isn’t scientific. No serious scientist believes that race even exists. It’s too bad we don’t live that way. One of the biggest clichés heard in progressive circles is “race is a social construction.” Okay, let’s all acknowledge that—how, then, do we allow race-based thinking to continue? What sort of education do we provide to the vast majority of Americans who believe that dark skin color joined with black vernacular language constitute something to deny full humanity to?

In my view, black is political, black is cultural, black is historical, black is ideological, black is experiential, black is collision, black is rupture--black has never been simply a shared set of physical characteristics (which, as I noted above, remains the primary signifier since it is the most obvious one).

To the commenter who asked about cross-racial/LGBT adoption, the parents of all of the families I know which are constructed in that way (as well as the white children being raised by black LGBT parents!) make sure that their children are raised in multicultural communities with a strong awareness of their American racial identity. I find that these parents are very cognizant of the scrutiny they are placed under when raising children who do not share phenotype or genotype. All the ones I know are more than up to the task.

Race theory is part of my research on the rise of ethnology in early 19^th century America. One of the questions posed to me by one of my oral examiners (Dr. Robert Reid-Pharr) was: “Is ethnology the reason we can’t get beyond race?” I will offer more on that in a later post. Race thinking and racial prejudice are so deeply ingrained in our culture that it will take decades (I’m optimistic, aren’t I?) of willful attempts to successfully eradicate it. The strides made over the past 144 years have fueled my hope that one day we will become enlightened enough as a country to continue the really hard work of achieving racial justice. I know I won’t live to see it, but in the historical continuum, I believe it can happen—but only if we collectively move beyond racial demagoguery/essentialist nonsense, confronting it and denouncing it from every quarter (I have an argument against racial essentialism as deeply conservative and antithetical to the goal of true racial justice—I will take that up in a later post).

In Shadow and Act, a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Ellison, that most American of American writers, he frames a response to the question of blackness and “Americanness”:

It is not skin color which makes a Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American experience, the social and political predicament, a sharing of that “concord of sensibilities” which the group expresses through historical circumstances and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the larger American culture.... More important, perhaps, being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmation of self as against all outside pressures—an identification with the group as extended through the individual self which rejects all possibilities of escape that do not involve a basic resuscitation of the original American ideals of social and political justice. And those white Negroes (and I do not mean Norman Mailer’s dream creatures) are Negroes too—if they wish to be.

I would direct you to the 1996 film Black Is, Black Ain’t, the late documentarian Marlon Riggs’s meditation on “blackness.” Also, take a look at the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, among others.

All best, Rebecca

Black Like Me (Part 2 of 2)

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. --James Baldwin

Black Like Me is a well-intentioned, well-meaning book (and film) about a white Southern journalist who goes “undercover” as a black man in an attempt to discover for himself the true conditions of black life in the segregated south in 1959. John Howard Griffin changes his phenotype to become “black”—but it is all surface.

If you visit his page on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Howard_Griffin or decide to read the book for yourself (as well as Griffin's other "passing" narratives), you can read more for yourself about the details of his transformation—in shorthand, he did it with drugs, tanning lamps, and skin cream. The photograph at right is of Griffin with Black Star Photo Agency photographer Don Rutledge during his transformation.

Griffin maintains a detailed awareness of how “clean” everything is in his Negro life travels. He describes with amazement (at times almost insultingly, in my opinion!) the cleanliness of the rooms he rents, the cleanliness of the bathroom in the rooming house, and the clean restaurants. One might think that he is phobic about it. He also seems hyper-focused on the cleanliness of the black body.

I haven’t done a thorough subtextual reading as yet, but an early scene in the book (not in the film, though) has him in a bathroom with two other black men: “One man was in the shower. Another, a large, black-skinned man, sat naked on the floor awaiting his turn at the shower. He leaned back against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of him.”

Griffin engages in conversation with these black men, alluding casually to the fact that they are naked—he remains fully clothed, which makes for a strange power relation—there is a rejection of the vulnerability (and equality) that nakedness offers. The scene reads pretty bizarrely—intimate and oddly titillating in its extreme corporeality: “In the shower’s obscurity, all I could see was a black shadow and gleaming white teeth. I stepped over the other’s outstretched legs and washed quickly, using the soap the man in the shower thrust into my hands. When I had finished I thanked him.”

The suggestiveness of this scene continues, as the naked man on the floor offers Griffin his towel, and then the two men share a post (non) coital cigarette while still in the bathroom. He begins to feel the injustice thrust upon him because of the color of his skin, but Griffin ultimately remains a voyeur, sharing the details of his experience with his readership. That readership is important to Griffin’s project.

Although he is writing for Sepia Magazine, his assumed readership is white—he wants whites, especially Southerners, to see how it feels to be black and to have to put up with the indignities of inequality. He remains an outsider, though, and I think that part of the key to his problem is that he is unable to understand the nature of black joy. For instance, when he is in his room, he hears talk, laughter, and “juke-box jazz.” This depresses him—why would hearing laughter and music make him sad? His view of black life denies any possibility that there could be joy in blackness. He cannot view it in any way as separate from white oppressiveness. He sees himself (and thus other blacks) only as “victim.” Black joy is fleeting and pathetic.

The other aspect of this expose is how deeply Naturalism has influenced Griffin’s views. In Griffin's view, blacks, as oppressed people, are sensual, sexual beings—truly la bête humaine, in the Naturalist tradition of Emile Zola (or Stephen Crane, or Richard Wright). He ascribes a heightened pathology among poor blacks to high rates of poverty and a legacy of discrimination, rather than to innate differences between them (us?) and whites: “Here sensuality was escape.” Griffin's blacks are “depraved on account of they’re deprived,” so to speak (cf "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story). However, he also writes of the pornographic fascination that many of the white men he met had about blacks, and of his own fruitless attempts to refute racist stereotypes. He is traumatized by his experiences--in Mississippi, he is so troubled by the trope of a black man looking at a white woman that his thoughts about his own wife (while seeing himself as a black man) reflect his own fear of miscegenation.

The text is so rooted in the sociology of the 1950s and 60s that it’s almost nostalgic. Another aspect of the text is how heavily Griffin’s Catholicism plays in his writing. He invokes the saints often, also finding respite in reading classic texts by Catholic theologians, and writes euphemistically on interracial prostitution—references to “pay [ing] for various types of sensuality with various ages of Negro girls,” “perversion dates,” and the like. He proudly notes the Church’s more or less progressive (for the era) stance on racial discrimination, and finds refuge and peace in his faith.

Now, the film version of Black Like Me was also well-meaning and well-intentioned—made by individuals committed to racial equality and justice, with good Lefty, radical credentials. However well-meaning, though, the awkwardness and complete unreality of the project remains inescapable. The dialogue is stilted, and the scenes where John is confronted and threatened by white racists are incredibly contrived with some unintentional humor. The portraits of the whites sit at opposite extremes—rednecks with broad accents versus kindly, progressive (for the era) whites.

In one flashback, we see John being chased down by actors whose “redneck” accents and behavior are so clichéd that the scene loses its power. He prays to St. Jude—is this his way of saying that racial equality is a "lost cause?" When the flashback ends, he is staring at his reflection in a mirror—he hears the racist voices yell out “Nigger!” and breaks the mirror in fury and self-recognition. His skin dye (part of the coloring process) spills onto the photograph of his white wife and son and he laughs hysterically at the irony.

When John just can’t take “the blackness” anymore, he seeks refuge at the home of the white liberal publisher of his dispatches, who is the only one he feels can truly understand his predicament as a white-black-white man (gets confusing, doesn’t it?). He apparently has not made the inroads into understanding “the black experience” that he thought he would.

As I said earlier, it’s the absence of joy that I believe he is missing. He does not grasp the capacity for joy in the midst of the circumstances of the Negroes with whom he comes in contact. He wants to go back to the white world—he weeps about being black: “I don’t know how they [blacks] have stood it all their lives!” to which his editor replies, “Well, that’s simple, they have no choice.” John continues with his experiment--since I want you to read the book, I have deliberately left out the integrationists, Communists (and their sympathizers), Uncle Toms, education, housing, and all the other topics Griffin discusses. The aftermath--the media blitz, the death threats--read the book for yourself! I don’t want to say too much more, as I think the book, which is still in print, is well worth reading. It is available at the great and wonderful Plainfield Public Library.

All best, Rebecca

P.S. You must read about how Griffin turns himself back into a “white” man and “passes” back into white society—it is a completely unnerving experience.