“The Social Antagonism between Whiteness and Antiracism: How and Why White Antiracists lose their Whiteness”

1 Introduction

“Are you Black?” The question bluntly struck at the heart of the confusion the group had over Colin and Andre’s work as antiracist activists. At a large table in an American coffee shop on a busy Saturday afternoon, I [Matthew W. Hughey] sat with Colin, Andre, and a few other White patrons. We talked about a recent incident in which a local White police officer shot an unarmed Black man. Describing their work in a local chapter of “Whites for Racial Justice” (WRJ) a US-based White antiracist organization, Colin dovetailed the discussion of police brutality into the importance of confronting anti-Black stereotypes, while Andre brought up the significance of being aware of implicit biases and of confronting modern forms of structural racism. Various patrons, whom we had just met 30 minutes prior, seemed genuinely intrigued. After Colin and Andre laid out how they came to join WRJ, one White patron stated, “I just don’t think I could do that work. I mean, I, I, I, it’s just, I mean, I don’t think people would really believe me. You said it’s a White organization, but uh, I don’t like mean this in a bad way, I mean it’s not bad, I uh, just want to be respectful here, but so, look, for either of you: Are you Black?”

Based on years of ethnographic research with the members of “Whites for Racial Justice” (cf. Hughey 2012a, 2012b), a US-based White antiracist organization, we recount the story of two White people who – largely because of their truly-determined commitment to racial justice activism – were thought by others as being anything but White. Colin and Andre were not trying to escape whiteness. Rather, their experiences are emblematic of the North American performance of racial “passing” – in which a person legally and commonly recognized as one race is understood as another race. These two cases illumine the relationships between agency, structure, moral obligations, and the ongoing, negotiated process of racial identity formation in the US. By highlighting the counternarrative of White resistance to White supremacy, and the paradoxes of that defiance, we examine the “lost whiteness” (Dreisinger 2008) of unintentional racial “passing” – when people who identify as “White” are repeatedly identified by others as “People of Color” due to their political activities and social commitments. This is not, as Renfrow (2004: 485) asserted, either “proactive passing” in which people initiate passing or “reactive passing” in which “individuals embrace an identity others have mistakenly assigned to them.” Rather, Colin and Andre experienced what Goffman (1963: 79) called a “natural cycle of passing” – they did not always realize they were passing.

In specific, we examine the relationships between unintentional racial passing and antiracist activism. We argue that Whiteness and antiracism were often understood as incommensurate, resulting in a paradoxical social dynamic: Colin and Andre’s attempts to engage in authentic and committed antiracist activism was intimately knitted to their reception as “anything but White”, as one social observer told Author 1. Conversely, when Colin and Andre clarified or explicitly named their White identities, their commitments to antiracism as well as their acumen as seasoned activists was brought into question. This relationship gestures toward prescient questions about the larger social meanings concerning the intersection of Whiteness and antiracist activism as well as to more specific questions regarding both the perils and possibilities of Whiteness, antiracism, and social change in our contemporary moment.

2 Race and Passing

Race is a “biological fiction with a social function” (Hughey 2017: 27). Scholars from across the social, genetic, and biological sciences agree that “race” has no validity as a natural concept (Byrd & Hughey 2015; Morning 2014). This does not mean that scholars see race as merely a myth. Rather, race is a “social fact.” That is, because people believe race to be real, it holds materially real consequences – from the realities of housing segregation and employment discrimination to the stereotypes we hold and the ways we understand our own identities. However, for most North Americans, “race” is a self-evident concept. Most think “race” merely describes the divisions of the human species and applies labels to these groups, such as “Asian,” “Black,” “Latino,” or “White.” Some believe these racial groups reflect inherited and essential characteristics such as skin color, facial features, and hair texture, as well as abstract traits (such as intelligence, physical ability, or morality capacity) (Gossett 1997; Suzuki 2017; Winant 2006).

“Racial passing” is a revealing aspect for how the racial order socially functions in North America (cf. Boladeras 2017; Cutter 2016; Daniel 1992; Kennedy 2001) and in other locations the world over (Kuntsman 2008; Lloréns 2018; Rocklin 2016; Sannon-Levy and Shoshana 2013; Twinam 2013; Wallach 2017). In general, the concept of “passing” refers to instances in which a person classified as one race is accepted or socially passes as a member of another race. Historically, reference to passing primarily refers to People of Color who attempt to pass as White in order to escape economic, political, legal, and social forms of prejudice, discrimination, and racism; a trickery that Langston Hughes once called “fooling our white folks” (1950). In the US, passing was rooted in the concept of “hypodescent” (commonly known as the “one-drop rule”). That is, passing was common among People of Color believed to be the off-spring of “miscegenation” (the deleterious term for mixed-race unions) (Davis 2001). In order to systematically deny privileges afforded only to Whites, people thought to have at least “one-drop” of nonWhite blood from a nonWhite parent were legally designated nonWhite. However, many people attempted to pass as White in order to attain the privileges set aside for Whites. However, some people attempted to pass out of Whiteness. This has been called the “reverse racial pass,” defined as “any instance in which a person legally recognized as white effectively functions as a non-white person in any quarter of the social arena” (Harper 1998:382). This is a growing area of scrutiny, as Beydoun and Wilson (2017:284) confirm, “Until recently, racial passing in the other direction – from white to nonwhite – has garnered little to no attention.”

3 Passing in Story and Society

In fiction and fact, the North American social world is filled with instances of White-to-non-White passing – the “reverse racial pass.” Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Walter White’s Flight (1926), George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), and Langston Hughes’s short story “Who’s Passing for Who?” (1945) are filled with White characters who pass as black. While these are fictional there are many real life instances. For example, in the 1860s, the White Belgian journalist Jean-Charles Houzeau worked as editor of New Orleans’s first black daily newspaper, La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orle’ans (The New Orleans Tribune). Houzeau gained legitimacy as the editor of the paper by passing as Black. He stated:

For myself, who knew how to make myself a proletarian in Europe, it had not been difficult to make myself black in the United States. I think and I feel that which a freedman must think and feel. I do not consider things from the point of view of a protector, but as they have told me a hundred times, I really am one of them. (Houzeau 1984 [1866]: 42)

In 1897 Dr. Clarence King, a respected White geologist, was immediately attracted to a former Black slave named Ada Copeland. King wished to marry Copeland, and given the anti-miscegenation laws of the time, decided to create a Black identity so that he could marry Copeland. King became “James Todd,” a Black Pullman porter from Baltimore, Maryland, and introduced his new racial self to Copeland. They married and had several children as a “Black” couple. After some years and an imprisonment in an insane asylum in 1894, King qua Todd composed a letter to Copeland explaining his true identity (Sandweiss 2009).

Some White musicians also passed as Black in the 20^th century. For example, the Greek American Ionnis Alexander Veliote grew up in a Black neighborhood in Berkeley, California and became “black by persuasion” (in Lipsitz 2010: xviii). He later changed his name to “Johnny Otis” and became a renowned rhythm-and-blues singer, songwriter, and bandleader who was known as the “Godfather of Rhythm and Blues.” Additionally, the White jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow identified as a “voluntary Negro” and shared how, from the moment he heard jazz as a child he “was going to be a Negro musician, hipping [teaching] the world about the blues the way only Negroes can” (Mezzrow and Wolfe 1974 [1946]: 20).

Socially-scientific inflected journalism began to explore passing in the mid-20^th century. For instance, a 1948 series entitled “I was a Negro in the South for 30 Days” was published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The twenty-one articles of the series detailed journalist Ray Sprigle’s four weeks he traveled throughout the US South passing as a Black man named “James.” Similarly, and perhaps most notably, both John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961) and Grace Halsell’s Soul Sister (1969) showcase their attempts to darken the color of their skin and pass as black as they travel throughout the deep South of the US as well as New York City. For instance, Griffin wrote that “This began as a scientific research study of the Negro in the South, with careful compilation of data for analysis. But I filed the data, and here publish the journal of my own experience living as a Negro” (2010 [1962]: i), while Halsell wrote “I bought Black Like Me and plunged into it, discovering that Griffin talked to me like an inner voice, calm, suggestive. ‘I could do that … I could be black’” (1969: 9).

There have also been controversial instances of White-to-Black passing, such as the 1983 case of Mark Stebbins. Stebbins was elected to the city council in Stockton, California (a city with over 80 % Black and Latino residents at the time). Stebbins had passed as black throughout his campaign, but after the election, it was discovered that his birth certificate listed both his parents as White. People demanded a recall, to which Stebbins retorted that because he “felt” Black, because he was both “more at home among blacks than whites” (in Rafferty 1984: 14), and because his wife was Black, that he was more than qualified to be Black. Stebbins lost his seat in the recall election.

There are additional examples in which people otherwise identified as White are labeled as Black because of their proximity to political or cultural activities marked as Black. For instance, British historian and broadcaster David Starkey appeared on a 2011 episode of BBC2’s “Newsnight” and commented on the White youths participating in public protest against the police killing of Mark Duggan, a Black man, which soon morphed into a larger disruption known as the “2011 London Riots.” Of those White youths, Starkey stated:

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country (BBC Newsnight 2011).

Response to Starkey’s remarks was swift and critical. His co-panelist Dreda Say Mitchell retorted that such logic makes sense only by essentializing and reducing Blackness to a uniform and static identity: “Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures” (in Quinn 2011), while Labour Party MP Jeremy Corbyn afterward asked the BBC, “Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged?” (in Quinn 2011). While Starkey’s conflation of Blackness with rioting, dysfunctional culture, and foreign unbelonging reveals the extent to which anti-Black ideologies regularly traffic, he reiterates the notion that Whiteness can be racially adjusted relative to participation in activities that hold a racialized meaning of Blackness (Schmitt 2018). Conversely, Starkey’s logic also implies the possibility of Black persons passing as White. In the same discussion, he argued that Black Labour Party MP David Lammy had adopted White culture, audible in his way of speaking: “If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white” (BBC Newsnight 2011). Starkey’s argument betrays a belief in a static racial binary of Whiteness and Blackness, with distinct and essential qualities ascribed to each. It is indicative of a desire to locate individuals and groups within an ordered, normative system, with race as a fundamental signifying system. As Ann Phoenix has argued, this binarization “creates afresh an old racialised hierarchy of belonging” (Phoenix 2021: 63) and ignores intersectional aspects of social identities, such as class and gender – both of which played crucial roles in the English Riots (Phoenix 2012: 65). At the same time, however, Starkey’s argument inadvertently implies the potential subversion and deconstruction of these very binaries and hierarchies that is also inherent in the notion of racial passing.

In the US in 2015, Rachel Anne Dolezal worked as the Spokane, Washington NAACP chapter president and a part-time instructor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University. In a televised interview, it was revealed that Dolezal’s parents were White. Dolezal had prior identified herself as “mixed-race” as well as “black” and claimed that an African American man was her father. After her biological parents were confirmed as White, the University did not re-hire her and she resigned from the NAACP. The controversy fueled a national debate about racial identity. Despite this, two years later in 2017, Dolezal published In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World (2017: 271) in which she wrote, “I still identify as black … For me, being Black isn’t playing dress-up. It’s not something I change in and out of or do only when it’s convenient. This is who I am.”

More exposés of “reverse racial passing” in American academe followed in 2020. Bethann McLaughlin, who is White and worked as a professor of neurology, was outed for constructing an online identity as a bisexual, Native American, anthropology professor (Bromwich & Marcus 2020). Jessica Krug, a White, Kansas-born, associate professor of history was exposed for racial passing at various points in her life: from claiming she was half-Black Algerian and half-White American to being a Bronx-bred Afro-“Boricua” (Afro-Puerto Rican) who went by the self-described “La Bombalera” (Krug 2020; Lumpkin & Syrluga 2020). And CV Vitolo-Haddad, a “Southern Italian/Sicilian”-descended doctoral candidate in journalism – who had publicly critiqued Krug as a “Kansas cracker” with a doctorate in “performing blackface” – was discovered to have passed as both “italo habesha” (of Italian and Eritrean or Ethiopian descent) and as Latina and Afro-Latina, while speaking of their family’s history of being “colonized” (Flaherty 2020). These recent cases suggest not only the continued attraction of racial passing, but a profound anxiety over the sacrosanct character of American racial identity as well as the central importance of social observers to doggedly enforce racial boundaries. As Julia S. Charles (2020: 7) writes in That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing:

… in the year 2020, because custom supersedes law … the practice [of passing] not only continues but has shifted shapes – and perhaps terms – since the legal end of segregation. While the enterprise of crossing the so-called color line may seem rare in this contemporary moment, Rachel Dolezal reminds us that though the stakes have changed, the practice still occurs, with the major difference being time – that is, innovative technologies. In this digital age, racial performances are cataloged and made forever available for public consumption and commentary. Nearly gone are the days of stealthy racial crossers, who, when “outed,” could pack up and make their home in other locations.

Cases of White-to-NonWhite passing litter both American literature and society. Yet, there are few examinations of the intimate and micro-level dynamics of both “reverse racial passing” and when such passing is unintentional.

4 Crossing the Color-Line

What unites the different scenarios mentioned just prior? The scholarship on passing gives us some clues. Most scholarly investigations pertain to literary and media representations of racial passing (e. g. Belluscio 2006; Cutter 2020; Goddelin 1998; Nerad 2014; Schmitt 2018; Sugimori 2008) and on how People of Color, especially African Americans, historically negotiated the color-line by intentionally trying to pass as White (e. g. Bettez 2012; Crothers & K’Meyer 2007; Ehlers 2012; Hobbs 2016; Petcharuer 2015). A few studies examine multiracial people who pass for monoracial people (e. g. Harris 2018; Khanna and Johnson 2010) and a small handful of studies analyze Whites who pass as People of Color (Broady et al. 2018; Dreisinger 2008; Gaines 2017; Harper 2008; Lott 1993; Wald 1996).

In regard to the latter, Wald (1996) contends that intentional White to nonWhite passing, such as what is documented in Griffin’s Black Like Me, entails not a disruption of the social order but an act that “solidifies these hierarchies through its inscription of ‘blackness’ as an object of surveillance, even though the motivation for this surveillance is its author’s concern with documenting and critiquing social inequality” (Wald 1996:155). Even more radically, Lott (1993) contends that the act of White to Black passing unveils both the racial mythologies Whites hold about People of Color and demonstrates how frail and anxiety-ridden Whites are over questions of racial identity: “to cross the [color] line is to encounter one’s imagined other head-on, throwing whiteness into jeopardy. Or into self-mimicry … the internal division, the white self impersonating itself, that is the consequence of white men’s fantasized proximity to black men” (Lott 1993: 491). And similarly, in Black for a Day, Alisha Gaines writes that White to Black racial passers often foreclose “any real possibility for true antiracist work … using overdetermined black experiences to overshadow structural inequality … [defining] blackness based on feeling and pain” (Gaines 2017: 168–69). And Gaines’ attempt to explore Whites’ “empathetic racial experiments in blackness … this unsettling spectacle of racial impersonation” (2017: 2) leaves her with the conclusion that this form of racial passing holds a unique specificity. White to Black passing is non-comparable to either People of Color passing as White or with the concept of “transracialism”:

Transracial is exclusively one-directional – from white to black. In its (il)logics, blackness becomes the space of racial play, performance, and affect, whereas whiteness does not. American whiteness remains pristinely unimpeachable. If a person of color felt an instinctive or spiritual connection to whiteness, that feeling would never fully guarantee the protection of white privilege. Even with a consideration of the long and understandable histories of racial passing from black to white, a tenuous and precarious option for black and brown folks seeking to escape the consequences of violence, stereotype, racial synecdoche, terror, surveillance, and/or suspicion, this option is not equally available to all. If the police stopped a person of color, their stubborn insistence, “I identify as white,” would never be a viable alibi. (Gaines 2017: 170)

In contrast, Godfrey and Young’s edited volume Neo-Passing (2018) contains occasional discussion of Whites passing as People of Color, but these are largely submerged in favor of examining the repercussions of racial passing writ large. As Gale Wald (2018: xii-iii) writes in the book’s foreword: “The relevant issue now, it seems to me, is not that passing persists but to what end [emphasis in original]. What motivates a woman of European descent to claim black identity and, in so doing, to covet ‘black’ skin and hair?” Beydoun & Wilson (2017: 292) offer a possible answer, writing in the UCLA Law Review that “the stakes to ‘reverse pass’ are high for whites. Such ‘reverse passers’ seek to access the associated (and perceived) legal and cultural benefits of nonwhite identity concomitant with increased mandates for more diversity.” They differentiate between “legal reverse passing” or the process by which Whites “present themselves as “nonwhite on legal and administrative documents” and “cultural reverse passing” in which “whites disavow their white identity and present themselves as nonwhite in cultural spaces” (Beydoun & Wilson 2017: 310). In either “legal” or “cultural” cases, Broady, et al. (2018: 105) highlight the socio-economic incentives for the “appropriation of various aspects of Black culture and White to Black passing.” From aligning with the “preference for lighter skin in the Black community [that] is derived from concrete social advantages” (112) to White Americans’ “attempts to exoticize and/or fetishize Blackness” (114), they conclude that “the potential for the acts of abandoning White privilege and taking on a Black identity to be odious, despite the passers’ apparent identification with the Black struggle” (Broady et al. 2018: 119).

Baz Dreisinger’s Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (2008) is the most sustained treatment of the issue. Through analyzing novels, films, autobiographies, and pop-culture discourse, she concludes with a more optimistic tone than others:

With their essentialist leanings and their forays into exoticism, white passers have their glaring flaws. But at their best … they have the power to cultivate double consciousness not just within themselves but within a culture that is too often mired in the rigid racial thinking and stubborn color blindness that are the legacy of America’s literal and figurative color line. (Dreisinger 2008:150)

Also sanguine, and the only scholar to address non-deliberate White to nonWhite passing, is Harper (1998), who finds that the forced “passing” of racial misrecognition often results when the subject fails to explicitly racially identify at all. The social “audience” often uses “specifically material and socioeconomic concerns which not only often drop out of cursory considerations of passing’s significance, but which also are not effectively addressed by means of the strategy of silence” (Harper 1998: 396).

From this modest corpus of scholarship on passing, one can glean several takeaways. First, scholarship is conflicted as to whether passing in general and “reverse” passing either destabilizes or strengthens the rigidity of racial categories, even as most are skeptical that passing lessens racial inequality and discrimination. Next, examinations of passing reveal the continued tension over the meanings of race. On the one hand, some analyses of passing reify an essential racial self that is disguised or hidden underneath a patina. On the other hand, some treatments of passing understand race as little more than a fictive, floating signifier, myth, and ideology. Third, even as more instances of “reverse” racial passing are documented the scholarship has not kept pace. Relatedly, most instances of “reverse” passing are willful and strategic, leaving the unintentional instances of passing less examined. Together, these reveal a research gap in examining why and how Whites are unintentionally passing as nonWhite. Lastly, scholars indicate that passing is a function of both proximity to the color-line as well as the reception of racial performativity. This two-fold focus requires extended discussion.

5 Proximity and Performativity in Passing

Central to racial passing in North America are notions of proximity (cf. Dreisinger 2008). In each of these instances there is a certain closeness to the proverbial White/nonWhite color-line. And it is this propinquity that reveals the concurrent fluidity and rigidity of race, whereby claims to being a certain race are always tenuous, and become even more fragile when near the color-line. Troy Duster (2001:114–15) explains:

How can race be both structural and embedded yet superficial, arbitrary, and whimsical – shifting with times and circumstances? The best way to communicate how this is possible is to employ an analogy – to water or, more precisely, H₂0 … H₂0 in its vapor state can condense, come back and transform into water, and then freeze and hit you in its solid state as an ice block; what you thought had evaporated into the thin air can return in a form that is decidedly and consequentially real … Race, like H₂0 can take many forms, but unlike H₂0 it can transform itself in a nanosecond … race can be simultaneously Janus-faced and multifac(et)ed – and also produce a singular dominant social hierarchy

Seen in this light, passing can expose a paradox in the common North American understandings of race. Passing reveals that even though many conceptualize race as something biological or physical, passing is primarily about social space, boundaries, and transgression. That is, rather than race being understood as solely a set of traits within the body, it is culturally, ideologically, socially, or morally transmittable between social relationships. Consider, for instance, that the etymology of “passing” may root to the word “to spread.”^[1] White-to-non-White passing (the “reverse racial pass”) reveals much about race in general, and Whiteness in specific, which is most visibly distinct when it is disputed or lost via transgression.

The role of performativity in relation to transgression is important to mention here. Consider subcultural spaces, with their particular semiotics of style, in which idealized notions of race are maintained through specific performances. For instance, Leila Taylor described her experience as an African American woman who as a youth identified as Goth and felt both ostracized by her Black family and friends as well as by members of her newly found, predominantly White peer group of “Goths.” The former frequently accused her of “acting White” or of being an “Oreo”^[2] while the latter occasionally voiced dislike for Black people like herself who dared to enter a social and cultural space that was supposedly reserved for an exclusively White cultural transgressiveness: “There’s an acceptance of white weirdness, an assumption that there will always be white folks on the fringes of society … But being Black in America is already kind of weird” (Taylor 2019: 26). Being Black and goth thus can constitute a doubled transgression. Accordingly, Taylor argues that the study of subcultures can expose the performative character of race: “Both goth and Blackness are performative identities with foundations in transgression … Otherness is Blackness” (Taylor 2019: 31).

Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological study of “Agnes”—who Kristen Schilt’s calls “the first sociological case study of a transitioning person” (in Goldberg 2019)—is illuminative of the import of performativity to passing. For Agnes to “pass” as a woman, she had to gain mastery of the social expectations of gendered relations that hold implicit values. As Garfinkel wrote, she “was required by specific performances not only to establish mastery over this arena, but by her performances to establish her moral worth as well. For her the morally worthwhile person and the ‘natural, normal female’ were identical” (1984[1967]: 176). Like gender, race is an “ongoing accomplishment” (Garfinkel 1984 [1967]: vii) that depends on continued interactive performances coming across as both authentic and meaningful. Garfinkel wrote that the dynamics of Agnes’s “passing is entirely comparable to passing found in political undergrounds, secret societies, refugees from political persecution, or Negroes who become whites” (1984[1967]: 136).

These insights draw attention to the import of the relationship between subject and audience – the focus of Goffman’s (1967, 1959) dramaturgical analysis. Goffman viewed social interaction and identity as a “performance” that provides the social audience with distinct “impressions” (1959: 17). Regardless of the intentions of the subject, an audience reads the subject’s performance and may accept it as natural and seamless. Passing, then, is elusive. The “mark of passing successfully is the lack of a mark of passing” (Tyler 1994: 212). However, if the performance is questioned as forced or otherwise ersatz — again, regardless of the intentions of the subject – passing does not occur.

The notion of racial passing offers a way to interrogate the persistent tension between understandings of race as a biological fact (a myth which, however, still persists in many forms to this day) and the attempt to explain race as a discursive effect. As Stuart Hall has pointed out, it is not sufficient to establish that race is not so much an actual biological fact but the product of socio-historical developments. Race might be a “sliding signifier” (Hall 2017: 31), “[b]ut we still have to explain why these racial classificatory systems persist, why so much of history has been organized within the shadow of their primordial binaries […], all continue to operate with this apparently weak, unsubstantiated, untenable, nearly but not quite erased ‘biological’ trace” (Hall 2017: 43). Hall, who has worked on race in the British, North-American and global postcolonial context, points out that it is not enough to explain race as a discursive effect. Rather, researchers need to account for the interplay of discursive effects (that is, race as a signifying system of difference) and the “experiential” and “evidential” dimension of race (2017: 45). Throughout his writings, Hall has made use of Louis Althusser’s notion of “interpellation” and has argued that subjects are being “interpellated”, that is, “hailed or summoned by the ideologies which recruit us as their ‘authors’, their essential subject” (Hall 2016: 134). In other words, humans speak the language of race as much as the language of race speaks them. This is the fundamental paradox that Judith Butler has addressed in their theory of performativity. For Butler, the “I” that speaks itself and articulates itself as a subject can only do so because it is constituted in ideology and discourse a priori: “the ‘I’ only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated […], and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’ […]. Indeed, I can only say ‘I’ to the extent that I have first been addressed, and that address has mobilized my place in speech” (Butler 2011: 171). Thus, for Butler, every articulation of the “I” is always a “citation of the place of the ‘I’ in speech” (2011: 171). The concept of passing for Butler is a test case for this discursive subject constitution, and they consequently draw parallels between racial passing and sexual queering. In their reading of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, Butler identities passing as constituting the “spectre of racial ambiguity” (2011: 126) that unsettles the “territorial boundaries” of Whiteness and triggers “racial anxiety” and attempts at “racial purification” (2011: 137). For “Bellow”—the White male racist in Larsen’s novel—racial ambiguity is dangerous because it threatens to transgress the binary distinction of White and Black that the racist paradoxically needs to constitute himself: “he cannot be white without blacks and without his constant disavowal of his relation to them” (Butler 2011: 126). In this context, racial subject positions become readable as performative citations through which humans come to know themselves as raced subjects. As can be seen in the following, passing must be understood in relation to such discursive citational interpellations through which subjects are being “hailed” in the signifying system of race. Thus, to paraphrase the title of Butler’s book, bodies come to matter in the discourse of race.

White-to-nonWhite passing has to do with straying too far from the ideals of Whiteness and too close to varied notions related to the supposed essential and authentic traits of people of color. With the latter, these ostensibly “authentic” understandings relate to varied aspects of racial identification which are often laced with anti-Asian, anti-Black, and/or anti-Latino logics, as well as notions of racial pride and guilt, physical appearance, cultural heritage, familial ties, friendship networks, moral commitment, and more. And the reasons for passing are also varied and can extend to how some actively attempt to claim an Asian, Black, or Latino identity, whereas others may simply never disavow one, while still others may find it something thrust upon them as either a near-permanent status or as a fleeting and accidental happenstance.^[3]

Accordingly, we next recount two White members of a White antiracist organization, who were repeatedly identified by other people across the color-line as nonWhite, particularly as Black and/or Latino. We argue that Whiteness and antiracism were often understood as paradoxical: Colin and Andre’s attempts to engage in antiracist activism was connected to their reception as People of Color. Conversely, when Colin and Andre explicitly named their White identities their moral commitments and intellectual prowess toward antiracist activism were brought into question.

6 Analysis

7 Conclusion

Some may read Colin and Andre’s racial passing as an astonishing and enlightening experience that calls attention to how mean, narrow-minded, and provincial people can be in their treatment of those who engage in a truly-determined commitment to work along the color-line. Our assessment deviates from such hyper-individualism and cognitive reductionism to embrace a more cultural-structural analysis that is, perhaps also, more cynical.

Colin and Andre attempt neither to purposefully perform behaviors or demonstrate attitudes associated with people of color, in what Ishmael Reed has called “cultural tanning” (1988: 7) nor are they involved in what Michael Awkward has called “transraciality,” defined as “the adoption of physical traits of difference for the purpose of impersonating a racial other” (1995: 19). So also, such drafting did not spring only from the lips of “Archie Bunker”-type racists,^[10] color-blind advocates, racial nationalists, or people of color who perhaps hold a healthy skepticism of White people proclaiming an antiracist agenda. Rather, such interpretations ran the gamut—young and old, liberal to conservative, and across all racial groups. Such understandings are part and parcel of the dominant ways we make meaning of those who dare walk along the color-line, especially those White folks who are truly-determined to fight for racial justice no matter how flawed, naïve, self-congratulatory, or successful their endeavors may be.

Examination of the cases of Colin’s and Andre’s “lost Whiteness” indicates how at least three strategic interpretations—often replete with caricatured racial stereotypes about race, racial traits, and racial differences —are employed in patterned repetition. First, one is likely to believe in either an essentialist and biologically-determinative concept of race and/or a naturally-begot racial hierarchy. These beliefs are most frequent among Whites, but are also shared by People of Color (e. g., Hunt 2007; Mandalaywala, Amodio, and Rhodes 2018; Shelton 2017; Telles and Bailey 2013). From this stance one reads the actions of Colin and Andre as not only drastically divergent from normal White behavior, but as inferior, less-than, and stigmatized—what Baz Dreisinger describes as “assimilating and internalizing the degraded and devalorized signifiers of racial Otherness” (1995: 13). Importantly, one does not have to hold these beliefs or attitudes in a coherent or invariant fashion. Rather, contradictory statements and positions from specific individuals or groups may emerge in relation to specific social contexts, which can then become potent mechanisms for racializing oneself and others (cf. Hughey 2022).

Second, one maintains racially essentialist views that intense moral commitment toward racial equality and people of color’s interests that can only be born out of, and faithfully supported by, people of color. In this vein, morality grows out of racialized experience but is simultaneously only melanin-deep. Third, one is allegiant to notions of racial purity in either biological or cultural forms. Here, White folk and people of color are understood as two wholly distinct if not diametrically opposed communities with divergent modes of thinking, sentiment, and experience.

But there is no natural racial order, there are no authentic racial morals, and there are no pure “races” with cognitive, emotive, or homogenous traits and experiences. We are the race we and others believe us to be. Simply put, we are all “passing.” We are “passing” in that we can never fully and autonomously speak ourselves as subjects within the discursive field of race. The case discussed in this article thus offers an opportunity to confirm and reassess sociological theories of the performativity and semiotic and discursive construction of race. The notion of passing and, more specifically, the issue of unintended passing, is instructive for theorizations of racial identity as the processual effect of complex semiotic and social practices. We are, to return to Hall and Butler’s concept, “hailed” as racial subjects within a discourse that precedes us and constitutes us as subjects a priori. In that respect, race has always been a political project, and given the anxieties over White people’s place in antiracism and racial justice more generally, the view of passing we are taking opens up the possibility to see the boundaries of Whiteness change or at least becoming a bit more ambivalent and unsettled. Such a view of Whiteness can thus also be connected to historical examples of “becoming” White, such as the changing perception of the Irish as more and more “White” by English colonizers vis à vis Black slaves and the Irish development from “subaltern to elite minority” (Garner 2004: 81) in the Caribbean (cf. also Ignatiev 2009 on Irish Whiteness; Brodkin-Sacks 1994 on Jewishness and Whiteness; Bonnett 2000c on the Whiteness of the English Working Class). Passing, seen in this historical context, thus is not exclusively about the “wrong” decoding of physical and biological markers of ethnicity and the literal “misreading” of bodies. Rather, passing exposes race as a historically and socially contingent “sliding signifier” and threatens its assumed stable boundaries and meanings. This realization does not render race any less real. The reality of race lives in how these social beliefs and practices dictate what institutions we enter, interests we pursue, to what ideologies we hold fast, and how we interact with one another – either affording one another dignity, humanity, and the benefit of the doubt … or not.

The concept of (reverse) passing shows that it is especially in moments of performative ambiguity and the transgression of norms that our notions of race and ethnicity become at the same time glaringly visible and precarious. Sociological theories of ethnic identity that emphasize the performativity and social construction of racial and ethnic identities thus must take into consideration these precarious moments of faltering. Passing as a concept that is constituted by what bodies perform and by how these bodies and performances are being read and named by others thus shows that “what we learn to recognize as categorizations of race and class are not just classification or social positions but an amalgam of features of a culture that are read onto our bodies as personal dispositions – which themselves have been generated through systems of inscriptions in the first place” (Skeggs 2004: 1).

These findings generate new directions for future inquiries. Comparative analysis of unintentional racial passing across regions, countries, and cultural contexts could yield new insight. Are there social dynamics that are either generalizable or transferable to other contexts or is the phenomenon of unintentional passing wedded to specific contexts? How do the dynamics of unintentional racial passing for US Whites compare with People of Color, both in the US and elsewhere? Moreover, how are instances of unintentional racial passing constrained or enabled by other forms of activism, political orientations, and social categories? Also, more work on social and cultural paradoxes is in order. Here, a burgeoning literature promises new insights and tools for social analysis. For example, Silva (2008) found that US military women’s agency is enmeshed in a push-pull between their expectation to perform traditional gender roles and the hypermasculine norms of military service. They respond by privileging traditionally feminine aesthetics while doubling-down on their alignment with patriarchal norms. In another example, Hughey (2010b: 674) found People of Color in the historically White US fraternity and sorority system engaged in a “paradox of participation”: “their ability to appear as equal and belonging members is intimately crocheted with the patterned reproduction of their racial identities as naturally different and inferior.” The emphasis on one’s racial identity undermined their belongingness in the fraternity or sorority and vice versa. Finally, if we understand race to be a social construction, it is important to specify how the formation of these categories is un-ending and “always already” (Althusser 1970) structured by unequal resources and “meaning in the service of power” (Bonilla-Silva 2003: 25). Racial projects must be continually interrogated for how they depart from, rely upon, or are enmeshed in paradoxes regarding hose progressive, transformational, essentialist, and even “antiracist” prerogatives.^[11]