Passing

"'She probably started passing like the rest of 'em, that's what... There used to be a lot of that. A lot of it. Not so much nowadays, but there used to be a lot of 'em did it-if they could.'" (290)

This excerpt of Song of Solomon is referring to passing as a white person. After doing some research, I've found that this practice of passing was not uncommon and resulted in alienation from a person's non-passing family.  Sadly, as Stanford historian Allyson Hobbes notes, passing causes the loss of "the family jokes, the oral history every family has, and repeats and passes down". Oftentimes, many felt it was the best thing to do in a society where melanin was highly ostracized; if you could pull off white, then your life could be so much better.

One example of passing is the story of Elsie Roxborough. Born into an upper class African American family in Detroit, she made history as the first black woman to live in University of Michigan dorms. After graduating, she moved to anew York and tried passing as a white woman to find fame as a writer. Her new name was Mona Manet. However, upon hearing his daughter was passing, her father refused to support her, and Elsie commit suicide. Her sister had to pass as a white woman herself to claim Elsie's body, and her death certificate was declared as a white woman.

Clearly, passing is a very complex choice black people make. On one hand, they don't pass but still have familial connections, yet they go through the constant discrimination and racism as a visible black man or woman. On the other hand, pretending to be white cuts one off from their black relatives, yet gives them an identity that opens opportunities they'd never get before.

Overall, America has seen passing for a long time. A recent roles reversed incident was seen in the Rachel Dolezal debacle, in which a European descended woman pretended to be black and even was the NAACP director. In my opinion, it says a lot about our country that passing is a practice in the first place.