Studies in American Fiction

Passing for Black, a novel by longtime journalist Linda Villarosa¹, offers a contemporary look at the seemingly archaic phenomenon of passing, examining the complexities of racial and transgender identities. In a recent discussion of contemporary passing tales, Michele Elam, extrapolating from the work of Paul Taylor, remarks that “it is a fact about each of us that we occupy the location that we do, and there are facts about each of us that qualify us for our social locations and that signify to others what our locations are.” Elam further defines passing as a process by which one “conceal[s]” one’s social location and then “invite[s] society to misapply its criteria for racial identification.”² Elam’s characterization of passing underscores the precarious collaboration between the self and society, whose powers of judgment shape the discursive field in which the subject is framed.

Nevertheless, in the introduction to Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall reminds us to observe “what the mechanisms are by which individuals as subjects identify (or do not identify) with the ‘positions’ to which they are summoned; as well as how they fashion, stylize, produce and ‘perform’ these positions.”³ Acknowledging that there exists “some interior landscape of the subject,” Hall affirms the power of individual articulation. Passing for Black exemplifies Hall’s insight by offering an account of identity analogous to that of the literary text—first, by offering narration as the vehicle by which one claims, positions, and articulates identity and then, by suggesting that the self, like the text, be respected as the product of a deliberate narrative act. Thus, Passing for Black subverts⁴ the tradition of the passing tale, recalibrating the parameters of passing and offering a novel way to conceive of locating the self as a reflex of authorship. [End Page 285]

The novel centers around a young black journalist, Angela Wright, as she journeys from a life of resigned heteronormativity to one of passionate same-sex romance, a move that heightens her fear that she is simply “passing” for some version of her actual self—“for black, [ . . . ] for straight, [ . . . ] [for] a lesbian.” ⁵ Angela’s crisis stems in part from her shifting of the psycho-social domains through which she filters her identity. Having understood herself as a woman appropriately framed within the confines of an impending heterosexual marriage, a tightly-knit black family, and the historically black enclave of Harlem, Angela initially interprets her own shifting of locales—to a burgeoning homoerotic union, an ‘alternative’ family and the unfamiliar borough of Brooklyn—as premised upon ambivalence and abjection. She frets that “I should turn around and take my confused self right out of Brooklyn and back home, to Harlem, to my fiancé, where I belonged.” ⁶

Yet when she encounters two transgender women who also experience the crisis that results from having moved from one site of being to another (in this case, by changing gender identification), Angela learns that shifting the site of one’s identity and concomitantly, insisting on being read as a new kind of text, is not to pass, but rather, to approach a truer form of identity, one inadequately framed within the given parameters of biology or history. Angela ultimately concludes that each person has the right to “be her own damn self”⁷—even if that self appears untenable to others. While the traditional passing tale proffers an account of identity that relegates a subject to her original location, irrespective of that subject’s desired orientation, Passing for Black suggests that a subject may shift her location according to her will, and moreover, that, as the author of the text that is her person, she govern the process by which her self-narrative is publicly interpreted.

Typically, preexisting rules about the parameters of cultural identities govern social recognition.⁸ But understanding that a subject may deliberately shift identity locations to simultaneously expand and crystallize the self requires others to view that self with more acuity. This more complex form of recognition, which operates against the grain, both of history and convention, requires a detailed reading of the self, and it is fruitfully modeled upon the reading of a literary text according to its narrative cues. Thus the continuum of passing literature⁹ offers an opportunity to reconsider, both how an individual challenges the position to which she has been historically summoned and also how establishing this new position constitutes a narrative event. The invocation of passing at once underscores the “politics of location” and challenges the myth that a subject’s position can be unambiguously mapped. [End Page 286]

While a critical investigation of passing literature might center on the question of what happens when a subject detaches from and dissimulates about her prior positioning, I ask a related yet distinct question: what happens when a person does not “conceal” her location, but rather, genuinely switches it? What is at stake when a subject re-positions herself, not in order to escape the trammels of a given identity, but rather to stitch the pattern of an emerging one? Such a recalibration is bound to be misperceived by those who are poised to acknowledge it, particularly as it constitutes an overarching paradigm shift that destabilizes commonly held beliefs (for example, that one cannot be both black and white or male and then female). In fact, the framework of passing¹⁰ cannot account for the sincere act of switching the context for one’s identity from one locale to another. Passing presumes that to change the site of one’s identity and then to conceal that change is to dissimulate. But to shift location need not be to prevaricate and degenerate; rather, it might herald, in the words of the I Ching, a “dispersion” that begets “an accumulation.”¹¹

While the traditional passing tale figures the passing subject as pretending to be what she is not and thus, as living a lie, the passing story presented by Villarosa, what I term a subverted passing narrative, figures the would-be passer as actively concretizing a greater truth about herself. Furthermore, the subverted passing narrative, by challenging both the transparency and simplicity of an identity’s position, suggests that evaluating shifts in the sites of identity must be the prerogative of the subject—and not, therefore, to be arbitrated chiefly within the public domain. This subverted iteration of a familiar genre exceeds the traditional passing moral by challenging the notion that identity should be measured against the standards set by social convention. Instead, it stages narration as the vehicle by which a person articulates the text that is her self—a text that must be read in the context of the subject’s discursively rendered desire. Rather than placing the onus on the subject to maintain a continuous link between her social location and the expression of her identity, subversions of the classic passing paradigm insist that society revise the process by which it deploys a set of “racial [or other cultural] criteria” to mark and judge a subject. The conventional passing tale¹² asks: how might one avoid the pitfalls of dissimulating about one’s historic identity? But the subverted passing narrative asks the more urgent question of how one might grant recognition to others without succumbing to the error of misrecognition. In other words, how does one become an ideal reader, disposed to appropriately interpret the narratives that people offer about themselves?

Passing for Black addresses this question, first, by depicting a black subject whose identity crisis exceeds the parameters of racial passing and then, by introducing two transgender purported passers, whose demands to be publically acknowledged as [End Page 287] women caution us against dispensing with “romantic” formulations of sincerity, agency, and narrative authority.¹³ Joining the ranks of what Michele Elam identifies as a growing body of richer, more complex passing literature, Passing for Black adapts even as it subverts the traditional passing tale that has “risen seemingly from the dead not to bear witness to past issues but to testify in some of the fiercest debates about the viability of race [and sexuality] in this ‘beyond race’ [and post-identity] era.”¹⁴ In so doing, Passing for Black urges readers to resist given parameters for ontological categories like race and gender, not by abandoning such categories, but rather, by better adapting them to lived experience and personal desire. Although the novel undercuts its own admirable critique of transphobia by briefly returning to the outmoded passing paradigm it chiefly worked to transcend, it succeeds in expanding, even as it revises, the genre of passing literature, which has simply transformed alongside the shifting tides of culture.

Key passing tales, exemplary of the tradition, reveal that the logic of passing assumes that to change and subsequently, to conceal, deny or occlude one’s identity “location” is to dissimulate and regrettably, degenerate. In such accounts, the protagonist passes from the black world into the white, only to encounter psychic danger, the loss of cultural roots, and a cycle of deprivation and despair. In many of these works, like Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, Chopin’s “Desirée’s Baby,” and Larsen’s Passing, the passing subject’s story ends in death. In others, such as Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and James W. Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the passing subject experiences a figurative, social death mourned by passer and reader alike. For example, the “Ex-Colored Man” famously laments that he “ha[s] sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage.”¹⁵

By contrast, Villarosa’s Angela complicates the traditional passing tale. Unlike the prototypical passing heroine, Angela is neither tragic nor a “mulatta.” She is a brown-skinned, curly-haired woman who believes herself “almost beautiful” and is, at first glance, comfortably ensconced within a black community that is upwardly mobile without being wholly mainstream.¹⁶ Recalling yet extending the pro-black rhetoric of the Harlem Renaissance, Villarosa places her protagonist in a setting where, the positive value of blackness now taken for granted and white racism now mediated by the long arm of the Civil Rights and Black Power continuum, the black subject is freer to contemplate, not simply her blackness, but the various ways in which she might express it. Like Irene Redfield, the foil to the passing subject in Larsen’s novel Passing¹⁷, Angela has no desire to infiltrate the white world: as a Harlem resident, a New Yorker and an American, she enjoys prosperity and success as a writer, and her cross-cultural mobility, underscored as she begins her watershed same-sex affair, remains unchallenged. [End Page 288]

Nevertheless, her community proves limiting to Angela because of the narrowness of its own parameters. Despite her status as a successful black woman, Angela feels alienated from the given norms of black behavior. Angela is vexed by the emphasis placed upon class within the black community, noting that the black subject who moves into the middle class, yet remains firmly committed to her working-class ideals, is privileged as more authentically black.¹⁸ As Angela, born to a television journalist mother and a physician father, does not have the class background favored within the politics of black authenticity¹⁹, she sometimes feigns the stereotypical behaviors associated with a black, urban, working-class identity: to pass, not against, but for black. In a conversation with her best friend Mae (of a rural working-class background), Angela assumes what she terms her “‘black woman voice’” to gain the “authority” to win an argument, and she later admits that when adopting black vernacular speech—letting the word “sistah” fall from her lips—the sound of her own voice rings false in her ears.²⁰

The idea of “passing for black” (rather than as white) bespeaks a more nuanced identity crisis than the notion of passing implies. In other words, Angela asks not “to be or not to be black” but rather, how to enact blackness—certainly, a move more readily undertaken in a post- Civil Rights context. Lamenting that she must “wrestle [ . . . ] with the tyranny of striving for authenticity,” Angela characterizes the act of being “black enough” as “difficult,” dependent upon membership in a “secret society with rules as fluid as waves.”²¹ Enumerating the gestures that signify blackness, Angela continues, “You had to know the right language, the right music, the right dance steps, and, of course, the right handshake. But it all kept changing.”²²

Angela’s opinion recalls K. Anthony Appiah’s skepticism regarding the politics of multicultural identity. In his essay “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” Appiah cautions that being regarded as black or gay (his own affiliations) “requires that there are some scripts that go with being an African-American or having same-sex desires. There will be proper ways of being black and gay, there will be expectations to be met, demands will be made. It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another.”²³ While in the traditional passing tale, tyranny is the mainstream white society that would compel either meek assimilation or bold dissimulation, in the contemporary, subverted passing narrative, tyranny is the rigid politics of cultural identity. Appiah’s comments address the subject who belongs to a particular cultural group and must navigate her place within it, but they do not address the phenomenon by which a subject might actually desire recognition as a member of a particular group. In fact, [End Page 289] Angela is loath to voice her discomfort with being too narrowly defined as “black” for fear that “it would sound like [she] didn’t want to be black at all.”²⁴

While Angela’s alienation from proscriptions for black identity is partly derived from the way racialism is informed by class, it is also provoked by her emerging queer identity. In different ways and to different degrees, Angela’s mother, Janet Wright; her mother’s best friend, Nona; and her fiancé, Keith, all affront Angela with their beliefs in an extreme, cartoonish form of black nationalist rhetoric, one seemingly conditioned upon an equally extreme rhetoric of anti-feminism and homophobia.²⁵ The text links Mrs. Wright’s decision to wear her hair in an afro to her tacit agreement with her friend Nona’s anti-feminist stance and then to her homophobia: “‘I hate the word “lezzzbian,”’” she growls in response to the mere mention of the term.²⁶ Moreover, African-American History professor Keith’s vociferous insistence that gay rights should never be placed on par with black civil rights²⁷ makes Angela’s struggle to name and accept her own same-sex desires all the more urgent and firmly establishes Villarosa’s intention to move beyond race as the privileged site of bias, incisively underscoring the interconnections among diverse modes of oppression.

Angela’s burgeoning queer identity destabilizes proscriptions for blackness, causing her to question her own authenticity. She feels so alienated by the proscriptive protocols of bourgeois black identity—chiefly those that dictate that she be straight—that she feels herself, in submitting to them, merely to be “passing for black.” As a result, she is afraid to advance her relationship with out-and-proud Women’s Studies professor Caitlin Getty for fear of being “found out” as an improper member of her cultural group. But Angela’s tragic affliction and suffering stem not from her own dissimulation but rather, from the (real and imagined) misrecognition of those who refuse to acknowledge her as both queer and black. Legal scholar and memoirist Kenji Yoshino’s theory of covering and reverse covering²⁸ is useful in analyzing the nature of Angela’s particular and post-modern (but not post-racial) identity conflict. The contemporary corollary to passing, covering is concealing the more obvious indicators of one’s cultural identity and is, according to Yoshino, the newest way to become disenfranchised. While covering would force a black subject to assume Eurocentric speech and gestures and eschew black vernacular or expressive acts, reverse covering would dictate that the black subject emphasize the presumed speech and actions of black culture. Angela submits to the dictates of reverse covering by using words like “sistah,” as well as by denying her queer identity, and it is such insincere and exigent expressions of being to which critics like Appiah object.

Yet Yoshino offers his notion of covering to oppose the way society dictates the behavior of those it deems marginal, not to provide evidence for the perpetual contingency [End Page 290] of identity. Rather, he argues for the subject’s right to define, circumscribe, and express—through narration—her identity as she sees fit.²⁹ Yoshino explicitly poses the question of how others might be recognized as “being themselves” without being reduced to any narrow set of proscribed behaviors. And in offering both a black subject seeking to define her own way to be black and a transgender subject seeking to define herself as female, Villarosa implicitly responds to Yoshino’s call.

Outraged by the queer and feminist communities’ policing of its members, specifically, the transgender women and men who wish to take part in a lesbian sex conference directed by Cait Getty, Angela empathizes with her similarly disregarded peers—those who are also deemed inauthentic by members of their own communities. Angela’s objection to discrimination against transgender folks demonstrates Passing for Black’s stand for transgender rights. And the transgender avowal that all people have the right to define themselves situates the novel as a revision of the traditional passing tale, in which the passing subject is poised to be unmasked by an authoritative arbiter.

By dint of an awkward subplot, in which Angela’s best friend Mae is mistaken for a transgender woman when she and Angela enter the lesbian conference on sexuality, Angela and Mae are directed to the “Transgender Safe Space”: a trailer on the outskirts of the conference domain. “Uh-oh,” muses Angela, “I guess this was their not-so-subtle way to keep men—former and future—out of the conference. My God, why did transgender people need a ‘safe space?’; was there some danger here?”. ³⁰ In the transgender trailer, Angela happens upon a heated debate about the status of transgender folk within the queer community. But before she hears this debate, with its requisite proclamations of transphobic vitriol, she reveals her own anti-trans bias. Although Angela wants to be an ally to the transgender community, empathetic to those who feel out of place in their own communities, her judgment of transgender women reveals her discomfort with and misunderstanding of transgender identity. At the helm of the trailer stands African-American security guard Rhonda, whose gender Angela struggles to locate and hastens to judge:

She was wearing a crisp blue uniform, the creases of her pants sharp as cut glass. A curly wig, ringlets piled high, was resting uneasily beneath her official-looking cap. The package was incongruous—eyes heavy with liner, she looked like a dancer, back row of the chorus line in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but costumed like a Confederate soldier. Her name tag read Rhonda. Man? Woman? Not clear.³¹

Angela’s anxiety over not being able to “read” Rhonda is evident. As Rhonda offers a stereotypically feminine presentation of coiffed hair and heavy makeup, she is recognizable [End Page 291] to Angela as feminine, if not female. Yet to Angela, Rhonda is an unsettling study in contrasts: her “ringlets” are plentiful yet sit “uneasily” atop her head; she seems like a dancer but is dressed as a confederate soldier.³² In sum, Angela finds her “incongruous,” which is to say, not simply indeterminable but implausible as a woman. Angela’s obsession with “reading” transgender women and men is only magnified as she looks around the room: “I had to stare pointedly and openly at hair, clothing and bodies to sort out gender.”³³

Angela’s desire to penetrate the surfaces of transgender women and men reflects her parochial desire to maintain strict gender lines and also her belief that cultural identities, in particular, should be easily located in the public sphere. Angela’s insistence on her right to recognize and evaluate the gender identifications of others anticipates the more deliberate expressions of transphobic bias to which she bears witness: “‘The rules are no penises and no “men born men” . . . ’” shouts one of the cisgender conference attendees. A transgender woman retorts that she is a woman, to which another woman tells her that she can’t become a woman by “’buy [ing] a new body.’” This heated debate over the status of transgender folk within the queer community intensifies as a transgender man named Patrick laments that the lesbian community represented by the conference is “‘my community, the place I call home.’” “‘Nothing has changed except my body,’” he continues, to which a woman named Sheila says in response: “‘That is exactly what HAS changed—your body.’” “‘You are not a lesbian anymore. Go to a men’s sex conference. That’s where you belong now.’”³⁴ This dialogue recalls a real-life and ongoing instance of transphobia in the lesbian community and establishes Passing for Black’s critique of second wave feminism’s anti-gay bias.³⁵

Moreover, this debate over transgender rights is framed in the rhetoric of location, a central element of the passing narrative. While the logic of passing presumes that to shift the location of one’s identity and then, to conceal that shift, is to breach social and ethical protocols, the logic deployed by Sheila suggests that with a shift in the expression of one’s identity (for example, a person born male assuming the dress, speech, and behavior ascribed to a woman), must come a parallel shift in the location of one’s person. Both positions posit a seamlessly causal relationship between identity and its location. The first argues that your historic location dictates your identity, and that even when you change that location, you cannot change your core identity, while the second maintains that if you do manage to shift your identity (i.e., become a different gender or religion), then you must shift your location in turn.

Yet neither position considers the method by which, extrapolating from Elam’s description of the passing subject, the sincere subject invites society to ideally—auspiciously—apply [End Page 292] its criteria for cultural identification.³⁶ While Villarosa’s allusion to contemporary life shows her impatience with egregious acts of discrimination, she is less adept at moving beyond the issue of procedural breaches of ethics in order to address the philosophic assumptions upholding them. Despite Angela’s ability to empathize with Patrick’s search for a home, she, in the process of reflecting upon the pain she has heard, makes troubling misstatements about transgender men and women, which curtail their agency and undermine her potential as an ally:

I looked around the room taking in the messy, eccentric jumble of anger and over-the top personalities. Where did they [the transgender people] fit in? Where was their home? Not this tacky trailer. Could they ever just blend? I glanced at poor Helen. She was still new to being a girl, and was overcompensating. She had all the trappings but none of the history, a work in progress as far as her female authenticity. Despite their high-fem exteriors, Helen and the other male-to-females exuded a kind of pushy air of assumption that screamed, ‘I’m always going to be a man.’ And Pat, though she had all of the tough-guy accessories of a man, wasn’t wearing them well. She and the other female-to-males still possessed a mannered tentativeness that whispered ‘woman inside.’³⁷

Here, Angela’s sympathy for those consigned to the trailer devolves into paternalism, as she echoes classic transphobic stereotypes. How could Angela determine whether “poor Helen” possessed “authenticity?” First, Angela suggests that the “trappings” of femininity do not constitute the female, reflecting the false wisdom that some kind of natural identity exists outside of its expression via signifying gestures. Equally troubling is the false link Angela posits between biology and behavior, insisting that to act assertively is to be masculine, while to act tentatively is to be feminine. Although Angela believes that transgender people should not be denied access to the queer (or any other community), she proves herself invested in crude beliefs about gender: that it is seamlessly derived from biology, that it is easily codified and made legible, and that it might reasonably determine personality and behavior. Such outmoded beliefs are specious and obscure the complexity and pliability of gender. Most troubling, however, is Angela’s belief in her prerogative to judge the authenticity of others and to determine where they are most appropriately housed. Angela may be right to object to her transgender peers being relegated to a “tacky trailer,” but she is wrong to assume that it is within her purview to assign them a more suitable locale.

Angela’s misguided judgment of others is especially baffling, given her own history of contending with narrow racial proscriptions. Indeed, while listening to the transgender stories of alienation, she is reminded of her own struggle to be herself and meditates upon the limitations of an identity secured by authenticity: [End Page 293]

I think I understood this transgender pain better than most. Though I had been ‘black born black’ for almost thirty years, every day I wrestled with the tyranny of striving for authenticity. Being black—or black enough—was much harder to pull off than being a real woman or man.

Feeling out of place helped me understand the struggle to belong. Growing up, I had never felt really black. Despite having a black ‘she-roe’ of a mother, or because of it, I had spent much of my life being called ‘white girl.’ Being black, the right kind of black, was difficult. It was like being in a cult—no—a secret society with rules as fluid as waves. You had to know the right language, the right music, the right dance steps, and, of course, the right handshake. But it all kept changing.³⁸

I quote from this passage at length because the progression (so to speak) of Angela’s thoughts is noteworthy. Her declaration that authenticity constitutes “tyranny” is perceptive. Yet her next declaration that being “black enough” is more difficult than being “a real woman” is truly absurd. First, Angela has just witnessed firsthand the rejection of transgender members from their queer community for not being “queer or female enough.” Moreover, as I have previously stated, gender is as over-determined a cultural category as race. One might easily replace the “right language” and “right handshake” about which Angela frets with her own expectations for the “right gestures” and “right style of dress” for women. Clearly, Angela struggles to express her black identity without being circumscribed by others. Yet, even as she sinks beneath the weight of rigid demands for proper blackness, drawing on them as the foundation for her nascent solidarity with transgender persons, she seeks to authenticate the identities of transgender women and men, a fact which, ironically, seems lost on her. In essence, Angela unfairly characterizes Rhonda as if she were merely “passing” for female, although she has suffered from similar skepticism about her own black identity. Unaware, both of her contribution to anti-transgender prejudice and her investment in the rhetoric of passing, sustained by the act of misrecognition, Angela strains to the breaking point the bonds of empathy she means to forge.

To better understand the desires of those who suffer from mis- or non- recognition, one might turn to the comments of Charles Taylor, who notes the important link between recognition and identity: “The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others. . . . Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”³⁹ Such insight mediates Appiah’s concerns about essentialism; the distortions and reductions of misrecognition are thwarted instances of interpellation. [End Page 294] Importantly, Taylor links his theory about the significance of recognition to the history of ideas constituted in the wake of the Enlightenment. For example, philosophers like Rousseau and Hegel emphasized the subject’s distinctive identity. That the philosophical context of early Modernism also saw the emergence of the ideal of textual originality⁴⁰ allows me to draw an important link between personal and textual autonomy. Plumbing this analogy between an authentic self and a sovereign text is useful as it helps to re-imagine the self as a text to be interpreted—not as extensively as possible, but rather, within a reasonable contextual field. (This is a point to which I will return.)