Passing In, Passing Out

BRIAN BALOGH: Both Sylvester Long and Clarence King reveal a common thread in many passing stories– a personal toll. In King’s case, it was from keeping his secret. In Long’s story, that toll came from being exposed. Historian Allyson Hobbs says this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Passing can be a high stakes gamble built on secrecy and subterfuge.

ALLYSON HOBBS: One could certainly understand that it would cause an enormous amount of emotional and psychological trauma.

BRIAN BALOGH: Hobbs has written a history of racial passing in American life. She discovered many stories of people who had achieved professional and social success passing as white. But for African Americans during the Jim Crow era, passing as white meant also walking away from family, friends, and community.

ALLYSON HOBBS: They talk about missing their family. They talk about things like not being able to celebrate holidays with their families. They talk about living in a world that feels alienating and isolating to them. They talk about the difficulties of fitting into that world, which often mean that they have to listen as white coworkers speak disparagingly about African Americans.

BRIAN BALOGH: Right.

ALLYSON HOBBS: They have to laugh at racist jokes. They might have to tell a racist joke themselves. So I think there’s a lot of sacrifice that happens for people who pass themselves, but also for the people that they leave behind.

BRIAN BALOGH: Right, the other side of the equation. And that’s even more complicated, because they didn’t decide to initiate this action. But all of a sudden they are implicated, in a way, in a lie.

ALLYSON HOBBS: They’re deeply affected by it. In many cases, they are the ones that have to keep the secret. In many cases, they are the ones who have to look the other way when they see a family member or a friend in public. Because during the years of segregation, 1890s to 1955 or 1960, to even know someone or to be associating with a black person, particularly on a level of equality, could raise some eyebrows about one’s racial identity or one’s politics. So there were a lot of things that those people who were left behind had to do in order to make sure that the people who were passing were protected.

BRIAN BALOGH: I asked Hobbs how she went about documenting something that, by its very nature, is so hidden.

ALLYSON HOBBS: Many authors, in their papers and in their correspondence– people like Nella Larsen or Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes– would talk quite a bit about passing. So particularly during the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance, passing becomes this topic that it seems that authors are really obsessed with. So throughout Nella Larsen’s papers and throughout her correspondence, she often makes mention to somebody that she’s bumped into, and it turns out that they’re actually passing so they had a very awkward moment. She’s wondering about what their family thinks about this, so it certainly comes up quite a bit in the literature.

I was also very lucky to find some family histories that were written by students in the 1930s and ’40s who were students at Howard. And I was really struck as I read through the family histories how many students said that they couldn’t write a family history because they did not know much about one side of their family because someone had passed and they don’t know what happened to him, or what happened to that side of the family.

BRIAN BALOGH: And that speaks to some of the loss that you were referring to earlier.

ALLYSON HOBBS: Exactly.

BRIAN BALOGH: To being cut-off from, really, a part of your own history.

ALLYSON HOBBS: Absolutely. And that’s actually how I came to this project, because my aunt told me a story about a relative of ours. Growing up in the ’30s, she grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a historically African American neighborhood. She went to the African American high school. But once she graduated from high school, her mother decided that it was in her best interest for her to move to Los Angeles and assume the life of a white woman.

She pleads with her mother. She doesn’t want to leave the only family and friends and community that she’s ever known. But her mother’s determined, and she moves to Los Angeles. She marries a white man. She has children who identify and believe themselves to be white and know nothing about their mother’s past.

And then a few years later she receives this very inconvenient phone call, and it’s her mother. And she’s calling to tell her that her father is dying and that she must come home immediately. And our relative says, I can’t come home. I’m a white woman now and there’s just no turning back.

BRIAN BALOGH: And what year would this have been, Allyson?

ALLYSON HOBBS: This would have been the ’40s and early ’50s. And what I found so tragic about that story was that her mother really believes that she’s doing the very best thing that she can do for her daughter and probably has not thought through what those consequences might be. And that years later when she needs her daughter, when she wants to see her daughter, she can’t.

BRIAN BALOGH: Right. I personally do not believe that we’re living in a post-racialist world. But I do wonder if we might be nearing a post-passing, or a post-racial passing world.

ALLYSON HOBBS: I think we are. I think that we are now living in a much more multicultural world, a much more multiracial world, a world where mixed race identities are much more accepted and recognized. But at the same time, there are still many ways that people pass.

And I think that we’ll begin to see new ways that people pass. I mean, it’s very possible that we could see passing happening when we think about undocumented immigrants. I think passing is a very flexible phenomenon, and it sort of adapts to whatever the particular restrictions are in a given society.

BRIAN BALOGH: Allyson, thank you so much for joining us on BackStory today.

ALLYSON HOBBS: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you.

BRIAN BALOGH: Allyson Hobbes is a historian at Stanford University and author of “A Chosen Exile– The History of Racial Passing in American Life.”