she walked into forbidden worlds
impaled on the weapon of her own pale skin
she was a sentinel
at impromptu planning sessions
of her own destruction ....
Cheryl I. Harris, poem for alma
In the 1930s, some years after my mother's family became
part of the great river of Black migration that flowed
north, my Mississippi-born grandmother was confronted with
the harsh matter of economic survival for herself and her
two daughters. Having separated from my grandfather, who
himself was trapped on the fringes of economic marginality,
she took one long hard look at her choices and presented
herself for employment at a major retail store in Chicago's
central business district. This decision would have been
unremarkable for a white woman in similar circumstances, but
for my grandmother, it was an act of both great daring and
self-denial, for in so doing she was presenting herself as a
white woman. In the parlance of racist America, she was
"passing."
Her fair skin, straight hair, and aquiline features had
not spared her from the life of sharecropping into which she
had been born in anywhere/nowhere, Mississippi - the
outskirts of Yazoo City. But in the burgeoning landscape of
urban America, anonymity was possible for a Black person
with "white" features. She was transgressing
boundaries, crossing borders, spinning on margins, traveling
between dualities of Manichean space, rigidly bifurcated
into light/dark, good/bad, white/Black. No longer
immediately identifiable as "Lula's daughter," she
could thus enter the white world, albeit on a false
passport, not merely passing, but trespassing.
Every day my grandmother rose from her bed in her house
in a Black enclave on the south side of Chicago, sent her
children off to a Black school, boarded a bus full of Black
passengers, and rode to work. No one at her job ever asked
if she was Black; the question was unthinkable. By virtue of
the employment practices of the "fine
establishment" in which she worked, she could not have
been. Catering to the upper-middle class, understated tastes
required that Blacks not be allowed.
She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once
revealing her true identity. She listened to the women with
whom she worked discuss their worries - their children's
illnesses, their husband's disappointments, their
boyfriends' infidelities - all of the mundane yet critical
things that made up their lives. She came to know them but
they did not know her, for my grandmother occupied a
completely different place. That place - where white
supremacy and economic domination meet - was unknown turf to
her white co- workers. They remained oblivious to the worlds
within worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their
awareness and yet were present in their very midst.
Each evening, my grandmother, tired and worn, retraced
her steps home, laid aside her mask, and reentered herself.
Day in and day out, she made herself invisible, then visible
again, for a price too inconsequential to do more than
barely sustain her family and at a cost too precious to
conceive. She left the job some years later, finding the
strain too much to bear.
From time to time, as I later sat with her, she would
recollect that period, and the cloud of some painful memory
would pass across her face. Her voice would remain subdued,
as if to contain the still remembered tension. On rare
occasions she would wince, recalling some particularly
racist comment made in her presence because of her presumed,
shared group affiliation. Whatever retort might have been
called for had been suppressed long before it reached her
lips, for the price of her family's well-being was her
silence. Accepting the risk of self-annihilation was the
only way to survive.
Although she never would have stated it this way, the
clear and ringing denunciations of racism she delivered from
her chair when advanced arthritis had rendered her unable to
work were informed by those experiences. The fact that
self-denial had been a logical choice and had
made her complicit in her own oppression at times fed the
fire in her eyes when she confronted some daily outrage
inflicted on Black people. Later, these painful memories
forged her total identification with the civil rights
movement. Learning about the world at her knee as I did,
these experiences also came to inform my outlook and my
understanding of the world.
My grandmother's story is far from unique. Indeed, there
are many who crossed the color line never to return. Passing
is well-known among Black people in the United States and is
a feature of race subordination in all societies structured
on white supremacy. Notwithstanding the purported benefits
of Black heritage in an era of affirmative action,
passing is not an obsolete phenomenon that has slipped into
history.
The persistence of passing is related to the historical
and continuing pattern of white racial domination and
economic exploitation that has given passing a certain
economic logic. It was a given to my grandmother that being
white automatically ensured higher economic returns in the
short term, as well as greater economic, political, and
social security in the long run. Becoming white meant
gaining access to a whole set of public and private
privileges that materially and permanently guaranteed basic
subsistence needs and, therefore, survival. Becoming white
increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of
one's life rather than being the object of others'
domination.
My grandmother's story illustrates the valorization of
whiteness as treasured property in a society structured on
racial caste. In ways so embedded that it is rarely
apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits
that accompany the status of being white have become a
valuable asset that whites sought to protect and that those
who passed sought to attain - by fraud if necessary. Whites
have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over
time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and
protected by the law. Even though the law is neither uniform
nor explicit in all instances, in protecting settled
expectations based on white privilege, American law has
recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although
unacknowledged, now forms the background against
which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated. .
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