In 1882 the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended Chinese immigration for
10 years.
The law was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902.
It wasn’t repealed until 1943, when China became an ally of the US in WW2.
But in the intervening years, although the Chinese immigrant population in the US sharply
declined it didn’t stop altogether.
At the tail end of the 19th century and into the dawn of the 20th, Chinese immigrants looking
to enter the US found themselves barred from coastal cities and states like California
and New York.
But the US shared a then more lenient border with its Southern neighbor: Mexico, where
In order to enter the country Chinese migrants disguised themselves as Mexican Nationals
and entered the U.S. with doctored documents.
Professor Allyson Hobbs of Stanford University details stories like this and other instances
of racial passing in her book A Chosen Exile.
While Hobbs notes that stories of African Americans who passed for white in the 20th
century to avoid the terror of Jim Crow laws remain the more commonly known passing narratives
in the US, people from a variety of backgrounds have chosen to pass in order to change their
class, legal, and social standing in society.
So passing is when people decide to change their background and their social identifiers
in order to gain certain benefits.
And in US history the most commonly discussed instances of passing are usually people pretending
to be of European descent.
And that is because at various points in time, whiteness, or being of Western European descent
(particularly Anglo-Saxon ) has carried with it certain legal protections and benefits.
As Professor Cheryl Harris notes in her article “Whiteness as Property”, those legal protections
are directly linked to property.
This can include things like the ability to earn a living, travel freely between states,
purchasing a home, or attending elite schools.
Harris details how cases like Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education demonstrate
a positive correlation between property, prosperity and race in US law.
In Plessy’s 1896 case, Homer Plessy (a New Orleans man of European and African descent)
boarded a whites only railway car with the intention of being detained in order to fight
the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Act which dictated that citizens of different races
must ride in designated cars.
Plessy’s case was supported by a group of Louisiana citizens who argued that dividing
the cars deprived black riders of their legal rights.
The Supreme Court eventually declared that the state and the railroad company had the
right to maintain segregated cars, ultimately leading to the “separate but equal” doctrine
that became the backbone of Jim Crow and segregation laws in the US.
These laws ostensibly granted separate facilities for white and black citizens, but they more
effectively created generational, systematic class divides in the US that aligned with
race.
It wasn't until the Supreme Court's decision in 1954’s Brown versus Board of Education
that the separate but equal doctrine was struck down.
The plaintiff’s attorneys argued effectively that segregated schools disadvantaged black
children who were being put into facilities that were understaffed, underfunded, and therefore
guaranteed worse life outcomes for black children than their white peers.
But the pivotal argument in the case came in the form of the Clark Doll Experiment.
Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark, a husband and wife psychologist team, conducted experiments
with black children in order to determine the lasting psychological impacts of the racial
bias created by legal segregation.
The Clarks showed groups of black children two dolls: ones that looked white and ones
that looked brown.
The Clarks asked the children to identify the traits they associated with the dolls,
including which one was white and which one was negro or colored.
They also asked the children to identify which dolls were “good” and which were “bad”,
as well as which dolls looked more like them.
Overwhelmingly the children identified the white dolls as good and the brown dolls as
inferior, with some children becoming so overwhelmed and upset when asked to identify themselves
with the brown dolls that they would cry or run from the room.
Future Supreme Court Justice and one of the attorneys for Brown versus Board of Education,
Thurgood Marshall, persuaded other members of the NAACP legal defense team to use the
Clarks’ findings in the court case.
The result was a persuasive demonstration of how awarding legal protections and privilege
based on race had long lasting effects on children who are marked outside of the privileged
group.
Therefore the arguments for desegregation centered on questions of legal access rather
than the desire to subvert or hide black identity.
So the legal undergirdings of how we assign financial or other benefits based on race
or gender or ethnic background or country of origin is often the true motivator for
people to pass, more so than a desire to change their race or appearance.
But the question of passing and legality does not just extend to the benefits of property
assigned on the basis of race.
It can also encompass related concepts, like physical safety.
For example during World War II it was common for European Jews to either change their last
names or hide their Jewish heritage in order to escape concentration camps and extermination
at the hands of the Nazi party.
Throughout history, passing for persecuted groups has extended to any place and time where those
in the social minority were in physical or legal danger from the state because their
group had been designated as “undesirable.”
So passing in those cases was a matter of life and death.
Some of you may remember the story of Ellen Craft and her husband William who in 1848
engineered their own escape from slavery in Georgia by passing.
Ellen, dressed as a white male planter, traveled North from Georgia with William pretending
to be her manservant.
They were able to check themselves into hotels and board railroads until they safely reached
the north.
I mentioned the story of Ellen and William in our episode on cross-dressing, but the
implications of passing here are also present because Ellen was able to gain access to these
elite hotels and methods of transportation along with William because she was passing
for a white man.
But the benefits of being within a legally protected group wasn't just known to those
attempting to pass or crossover; they were also acknowledged by members of the protected
group.
In 1863 abolitionist propaganda circulated in the US displayed pictures mixed heritage
children from New Orleans with very fair skin who were also born into slavery.
Because under US law slavery was a legal condition that was passed down from mother to child,
these children, although they could pass for white or had what was considered very small
percentages of black heritage, were still considered legal slaves.
Northern abolitionists, fearing that support for the Civil War was waning as rich citizens
were often exempted from service and poor white citizens were drafted at higher numbers,
used the images of these children to elicit empathy and support for the abolition of legal
slavery.
These images were printed in Harper’s Weekly and on small souvenir photographs called carte
de visite.
Abolitionists like Henry Ward Beecher stated that in addition to the great evils
of slavery, situations like this where white passing children could also be enslaved should
strike outrage and fear into conscientious White Citizens.
Because if these children, (who looked so close in appearance to the children of the
predominantly white and middle-class abolitionist readers of Harper's Weekly) could be enslaved,
then what was stopping free white children or their parents from being drawn in to the
treacherous clutches of slavery?
The appeal was incredibly effective on anxious readers who noted that race, which had long
stood as the primary determinant of slavery in the US, was not a foregone and concrete
conclusion.
If people who could pass as white were still enslaved than the boundaries of legal protections
based on race were fluid and fragile, making them more difficult to police.
And in the 20th century this anxiety around the fragility of racial legal boundaries was
discussed and immortalized in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, most famously in
Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing.
But to add one more confusing spoke to this already huge wheel, passing does not just
occur when those in a legally disadvantaged group claim membership in the dominant culture.
There are also cases where those from the dominant group have crossed into a minority
group, often causing public shock and outcry when their deceptions are revealed.
I mean, who can forget the internet outrage caused by Rachel Dolezal.
But despite her notoriety she was far from the first.
Hobbs notes the case of musician Mezz Mezzrow, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who
chose to pass as black at various points in his life to strengthen his jazz career and
later wrote about it in his 1946 autobiography Really the Blues.
Mezzrow hoped to gain social capital and increased ability to book gigs as a jazz musician by
passing.
And an actor who went by the stage name Iron Eyes Cody rose to fame in the latter half
of the 20th century, claiming membership in several Native American tribes.
At the height of his career he was featured as an actor in Western films, starred in the
famously publicized “Crying Indian” ad of 1971 , authored a book on what he claimed
were types of Native American sign language, and even landed himself a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame.
It wasn’t until he died in 1999 that it was discovered that he was actually the son
of two Sicilian immigrants who was born Espera Oscar de Corti in 1904 in Louisiana.
But despite evidence including baptismal records and family accounts, de Corti still claimed
to be the child of a Cherokee father and Cree mother until he died.
And there’s also the story of Linda Taylor, a white woman who passed as a variety of races,
including black, throughout her life in order to engage in myriad illegal schemes such as
changing wills, cashing fake checks, theft, and most famously welfare fraud.
A report from Josh Levin at Slate notes how Taylor, passing as a black woman, came to
national attention in 1976 when then Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan used her case as an
example of reasons to restructure American welfare programs.
Taylor was rapidly becoming infamous as the “welfare queen” when Reagan found her
story in an article in Chicago newspapers.
Later it was revealed she was born a white woman in Tennessee and raised in Arkansas
as Martha Miller and she later began passing for different races and ages in order to aid
her in her crimes.
So just like whiteness has a social capital that has material gains that aren’t only
related to improved finances, the kinds of capital that people hope to gain by passing
isn’t directly tied to the dominant social group but still bears the potential
for legal gains (like subverting the law) and financial gains (like making a career
in entertainment).
So passing carries with it the potential to alter someone’s legal or social status,
pointing to the difficulty of pinning down social markers that are often subjective and
fluid.
But the material results of passing usually benefit the person crossing the divide in
tangible ways.
So what do you think?
Anything to add to this condensed timeline?
Be sure to read all of the links down in the works cited since there’s a ton more to
cover in this story.
And if you like Origin of Everything then be sure to like us on Facebook, Subscribe
to our channel on Youtube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter for more show updates.
That’s it for now and I’ll see you guys back here next week!