Racial Passing as a Social Statement: Exposing Rules, Boundaries, and Prejudices in U.S.

Racial Passing as a Social Statement: Exposing Rules, Boundaries, and Prejudices in U.S.

Society that Contribute to a Power Imbalance between Social Groups

By Alida Bakker

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LAX999M20

Supervisor: Dr. M. Messmer

Word Count: 16.953

1 Table of Contents

Introduction 2

1. Whiteness, Passing, and What Makes or Breaks an American in George S.

Schuyler’s Black No More 18

2. Passing, Racial Violence, and The Paradox of Race in A Man Called White: The

Autobiography of Walter White 31

3. White Privilege, Internalized Racism, and Passing in John Howard Griffin’s Black

Like Me 45

Conclusion 58

Bibliography 61

2 Introduction

The United States has a long history of social and legal constraints against minority groups.

Although the newly created United States sought to provide freedom for its inhabitants, the reality was quite different. Throughout US history, members of various groups have

encountered hostility and exclusion in many forms, with African Americans arguably having been the group that was structurally discriminated against most. Slavery denied African Americans the mere right to be human since they were considered property. The Dred Scott v.

Sandford case (1857) stipulated that people of African descent, free or slave, were not citizens of the U.S. and could therefore not use the constitutional right or privilege of suing in a court.

Moreover, African Americans are only mentioned twice in the Constitution. One clause refers to the right to import slaves, the other clause describes the duty of individual states to deliver escaped slaves back to their former master.

Despite not being counted as citizens and forbidden to vote during a large part of U.S. history, African Americans were counted as inhabitants of states since the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Since slaves constituted a large part of the Southern population, they were counted in the census as three-fifths of a (white) person for the purpose of apportioning representatives for Congress, also known as the three-fifths-compromise (1787).

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) as well as the 13

, 14

and 15

Amendments (1865, 1868,1870) ensured the freedom of former slaves, granted all persons born in the United States the right of citizenship, and forbade the exclusion from the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition

1 Carl Brent Swisher, Historic Decisions of the Supreme Court (New York: Van Nostrand Rheinhold Company, 1969), 55,56.

2 Ibid., 58.

3 Todd Estes, “The Connecticut Effect: The Great Compromise of 1787 and the History of Small State Impact on Electoral College Outcomes,” The Historian (2011), 255, 256.

3 of servitude.”

Yet this does not end the discrimination of African Americans. During

Reconstruction (1865-1877) and the rebuilding of the South, the freedmen were to some extent protected by law and the Union Army. Directly after the Civil War, Southern states, however, implemented the Black Codes (1865-1866), laws that severely restricted the freedmen’s rights.

The Reconstruction Act (1867) repealed these codes and the South was placed under military rule.

Reconstruction also demanded new constitutions for Southern states and, as a result, these constitutions were often progressive.

Male African American suffrage was instituted with the assurance of no financial requirements, some freedmen were elected as U.S. representatives, and public school systems for blacks and whites were

established.

However, widespread race riots and organized anti-black violence were signs that many Southern whites were against these measures.

A number of Supreme Court decisions therefore subsequently succeeded in nullifying civil rights that had been secured during Reconstruction.

In Northern and Southern states alike, segregation not only separated blacks from whites by law, but also extended to other areas of public life, including transportation, public facilities, prisons, armed forces and schools.

These laws, commonly known as the Jim Crow laws, were the tools for creating a segregated United States. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

This decision was eventually overruled by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which stated that

4 U.S. Constitution, amend. XIII, XIV, XV.

5 Barry A. Crouch, “‘All the Vile Passions,’: The Texas Black Code of 1866,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 97, no. 1 (July 1993), 14, 31.

6 F. Michael Higginbotham, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 66.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 65, 66.

9 Ibid., 67, 68.

10 James Daley, ed., Landmark Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006), 175.

11 Ibid.

12 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) in Landmark Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, ed. James Daley (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006), 185.

4 state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was unconstitutional as it “deprived [the

plaintiffs and others] of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth

Amendment.”

The Supreme Court’s instruction to various states in Brown II (1955) was to start desegregation plans immediately.

The US’s long history of slavery and racial segregation demanded, of course, that race was clearly defined. It was necessary for everyone to be categorized as belonging to a specific race or ethnic group. During slavery, the offspring of white masters and their black slaves created a dilemma.

Although they were acknowledged by the term mulatto, children of mixed race were not allotted to a separate category, but were categorized as black instead.

This gave their white fathers the freedom to deny responsibility for the child. “By classifying the mulatto as Negro, [the father] was in effect denying that intermixture had occurred at all.”

This practice is called “hypodescent,” which means that “racially mixed persons are assigned to the status of the subordinate group.”

The concept of hypodescent required a break with English common law which stated that “children follow the status of the father.”

This hypodescent concept is closely related to the so-called one-drop-rule, which suggests that “anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black.”

It can be traced back to laws forbidding interracial marriage, such as a Virginia law (1705) that considered individuals who were one-eighth black as black, and a contemporaneous North Carolina law

13 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) in Landmark Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, ed.

James Daley (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006), 203.

14 Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) in Landmark Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, ed.

James Daley (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006) , 207- 212.

15 Christine B. Hickman, “The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S.

Census,” Michigan Law Review 95, No. 5 (March 1997), 1173, 1174. Citing Helen Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926), 78.

16 Ibid. The first judicial mention, presumably, of the term mulatto was recorded in 1652.

17 Ibid., 1176. Citing Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1986), 178.

18 Ibid., 1163. Citing Floyd James Davis, Who is Black?: One Nation’s Definition (1991), 5.

19 Ibid., 1175. Citing A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter Of Color, Race And The American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (1978), 194.

20 Ibid., 1163.

5 that stated that individuals who were one-sixteenth black should be considered black.

In other states, the one-drop rule basically included everyone with even the remotest trace of black ancestry, thus rendering people with any black genetic ancestry, i.e. with only one metaphorical drop of black blood, as legally black.

By 1930 most states had adopted these laws, or had adapted their own “racial blood fraction” statutes accordingly.

These laws were part of the Jim Crow laws and were specifically devised against the passing of light skinned African Americans as either white or Native American.

The Virginian “Racial Integrity Act”

of 1924 made one small exception to the one-drop-rule so that whites who were one-sixteenth Native American could still be considered as white.

This became known as the “Pocahontas exception” and was designed to ensure the whiteness of the First Families of Virginia who were regarded as descendants of Pocahontas.

The fourteenth U.S. census of 1920 also determined that mulattos could not be classified as whites, but that the term “white” should only refer to “persons understood to be pure-blooded whites.”

21 Ibid., 1178. Citing H. Leon Higginbotham & Barbara Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia,” Georgetown Law Review 77(1989); Citing Winthrop D. Jordan, “American

Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” William & Mary Quarterly 19 (1962), 183, 185.

22 Richard B. Sherman, “‘The Last Stand’: The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s,” The Journal of Southern History 54, no. 1 (Feb., 1988), 74, 75.

23 Jennifer L. Hochschild and Brenna M. Powell, “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850- 1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (2008) http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlhochschild/publications/racial-reorganization-and-united- states-census-1850-1930-mulattoes-half-br

24 Richard B. Sherman, “‘The Last Stand’: The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s,” 70.

25 Ibid., 77, 78.

26 Ibid.; J. Douglas Smith, “The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 1922- 1930,” The Journal of Southern History 68, no. 1 (Feb. 2002), 78.

27Christine B. Hickman, “The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S.

Census,” Michigan Law Review 95, No. 5 (March 1997), 1187. Citing Bureau of the Census, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, “Fourteenth Census of the United States,” Vol. 3, 1920, 10.

For a few decades, however, between 1850 and 1910, the U.S. census did include a biracial, “mulatto,”

category, but this did not improve their status in any way. See Christine B. Hickman, “The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S. Census,” Michigan Law Review 95, No. 5 (March 1997), 1182, 1183.

6 These various laws and regulations were built on the assumption that race should be exclusive; i.e. that “a person could only have one race.”

“Thus, the idea of being

‘multiracial’ did not officially exist,” yet for multiracial individuals, in particular, passing has become a way to overcome these many forms of discrimination.

Passing can be described as the change of one or more aspects of one’s identity for a specific purpose, and this change can refer to different parts of someone’s identity, such as race, but also gender, sexuality, ethnicity or class. “It is passing when people effectively present themselves as other than who they understand themselves to be.”

Throughout U.S. history individuals of various minority groups, but in particular also African Americans, have chosen passing as a means to escape intolerable forms of discrimination, or to gain access to previously unobtainable positions or possibilities in society, thereby increasing their agency.

The act of passing requires a deliberate effort to conceal or alter aspects of the passer’s identity and is, therefore, not a case of a mistaken identity. To turn the act of passing into a successful one, it is necessary that other people accept the identity that the passer projects, as otherwise, it would constitute “a failed attempt.”

The reasons for passing differ widely.

Passing can be a way for a member of a minority group to escape discrimination or

oppression, and/or gain access to previously unobtainable rights and opportunities that would otherwise only be available to members of the dominant social group. But the opportunity to obtain equal rights is not the only incentive for passing. Another reason can be to seek acceptance by another social or ethnic community than the one someone was born into. This decision is often made with regard to religion or politics, but it may also be desirable to

28Wendy D. Roth, “The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages ,”

Sociological Forum 20, no. 1 (March 2005), 38. Citing Haney López, Ian F., White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

29 Ibid. Citing Sharon M. Lee, "Racial Classifications in the U.S. Census: 1890-1990," Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1993).

30 Brooke Kroeger, Passing: When People Can’t be Who They Are (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 7.

31Ibid., 7, 8.

7 change one’s racial, ethnic, or social affiliation.

A very specific form of passing that relates to this possibility of a voluntary choice of one’s own identity is called “reverse passing.”

This rather controversial variant refers to people who are not part of a minority group but pass for a member of a minority group, in some rare cases in order to try to access affirmative action programs, but more often as a voluntary identification with the minority group because they want to be a part of that particular community, lifestyle, or ethnicity.

Caucasian

Americans are sometimes accused of this when trying to establish roots in the Native American community, which is often regarded as stealing or claiming another’s heritage for one’s own.

There are as many reasons for passing as there are different ways of passing. Passing does not always have to involve a complete break with one’s past and background, and not every passer passes permanently. During the era of racial segregation in the U.S., under the Jim Crow laws, for example, many African American passers only passed as white during the day in order to have better job prospects.

Others would only pass occasionally, say for an evening, to have access to a white restaurant or hotel, which may be called casual passing.

Yet, other forms of racial passing did acquire a more permanent nature, as in the case of slaves, for example. Personal emancipation was the only hope for most slaves to gain freedom, yet some were able to escape the condition of slavery by passing, as Ellen Craft’s story shows. She was the daughter of a master and his black slave mistress who was able to

32David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 117, 120,121.

33Brooke Kroeger, Passing: When People Can’t be Who They Are, 5.

34 Randall Kennedy, “Racial Passing,” Ohio State Law Journal 62, no. 3 1145 (2001), 17.

35 Francie Latour, “The Myth of Native American Blood,” The Hyphenated Life, Boston.com.

http://www.boston.com/community/blogs/hyphenated_life/2012/06/the_myth_of_native_american_bl.html

36 Langston Hughes, “Fooling Our White Folks,” Negro Digest 8.6 (April 1950) in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes Volume 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs, ed. Christopher C. De Santis (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 314.

37 Ibid., 315,316.

8 escape by passing as white.

Passing is not merely something of the past, however. Several contemporary passing stories can be found in Brooke Kroeger’s Passing: When People Can’t be Who They Are (2003). This collection of stories includes examples of racial and ethnic passing, religious passing, as well as gender passing and shows that passing is still considered as a possible solution to dealing with the inequalities and social restrictions of today’s society, in particular as far as homosexuality is concerned.

In very general terms, passing accounts, be they fictional or autobiographical, thus raise questions regarding the norms and power relations concerning race, sexuality and gender in a given society. Passing reveals dominant social rules, values and boundaries that define a specific society by showing that definitions of, for instance, race or gender are not as stable as they may appear.

The act of passing frequently also questions the authority of one group over another.

It draws attention to the rights of the individual and to the extent to which people are allowed to be themselves and have the possibility to develop their own identity. In this respect, passing may often reveal the (lack of) freedom for the minority-group individual as well as the power of the dominant group.

Passing has been the cause of heated debate. It has been praised as well as criticized because passing has both positive and negative consequences for both the passer and his/her (former) community and is, therefore, a complex subject to discuss.

As Randall Kennedy argues, a positive effect of passing can be the increase in agency and possibilities for the

38 She had “obtained a pass from her mistress, allowing her to be away for a few days” around Christmas. Ellen used this pass to travel North to Pennsylvania with her black husband, William, and in doing so, not only pretended to be white but also male because it was unusual for Southern white ladies to travel with male servants. After several days of travelling, they reached their temporary destination: Pennsylvania, and they eventually decided to settle in Boston, but their former masters traced them even there. Still vulnerable and afraid of being captured as runaway slaves, they left for England and only returned to the US after the Civil War had ended. Randall Kennedy, “Racial Passing,” 1; William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), etext by Judith Boss, Ebscohost, 14, 34, 35, 36, 42. http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy-ub.rug.nl/ehost/detail?sid=924e0cde-d5e6-406b-8786-

a6980e9d69e6%40sessionmgr4&vid=1&hid=10&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=

nlebk&AN=2009390

39 Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 5.

40 Ibid., 7, 8, 9.

41 Ibid., 7.

9 passer. By adopting a different identity, passers can improve their individual position in society and are able to secure rights for themselves that their society would otherwise deny them.

“The successful performance of ‘white man’s work’ by a passing Negro [sic] [has]

upset racist claims that blacks are categorically incapable of doing such work.”

Kennedy asserts that passing figures as an act of individual defiance against a society that supports discriminatory values. It can provide a feeling of triumph to be able to escape the constrains of a hostile society: “Fleeing bondage by passing may have been an individualistic response to the tyranny of slavery but it did free human beings and helped to belie the canard that slaves were actually content with their lot.”

Kennedy acknowledges the criticism that

“passers can be complicit in the regimes they try to escape,” but also argues that it is “at least plausible that some passers have attempted to challenge racist practices from their newly acquired positions of racial privilege.”

He suggests that although the passer has left his/her subordinate community, it is remarkable that passing, in comparison to other reasons for leaving a community, is the only strategy that receives such contempt.

Langston Hughes, a writer and poet and representative of the Harlem Renaissance, displays an ambivalent attitude towards passing. In Fooling Our White Folks (1950), he describes several passing situations and argues that, since “health, wealth, work, the ballot, [and] the armed services” are not equally available for all in the 1950’s U.S., he accepts that passing may be a viable alternative.

It is a way to escape the social and legal constraints of U.S. society, and may even be “the most common means of escaping color handicaps.”

During the Second World War it saved several African Americans from the “humiliations of

42 Randall Kennedy, “Racial Passing,”11.

43 Ibid.,12

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Langston Hughes, “Fooling Our White Folks,” 313, 314.

48 Ibid., 314

10 the military color bar.”

Moreover, passing stories may also function as a source of

encouragement and amusement because they often feature the achievements of the passers as well as the fooling of the seemingly dominant others.

According to Hughes, passing is often approved of by African Americans because it creates a sense of justice, and “as long as white folks remain foolish, prejudiced and racially selfish, they deserve to be fooled.”

It is thus a response to a society that “[has] no business being prejudiced with so much democracy around.”

However, in the short story “Passing,” Langston Hughes portrays the passer as someone who reluctantly accepts the rules of the dominant society and deliberately chooses the path of denial as far as race is concerned. “Since I’ve made up my mind to live in the white world, and have found my place in it (a good place), why think about race anymore?

I’m glad I don’t have to, I know that much.”

Hughes’s protagonist describes the racist remarks of his boss and although he identifies it as “false propaganda,” he doesn’t challenge it.

The passer also fails to recognize his girlfriend’s ignorant and patronizing attitude towards African Americans and believes that both she and her parents are not that

prejudiced.

To some extent, he even believes in the superiority of the white man.

That passing may sometimes result in this particular attitude is one of the main arguments against it.

As a critical tool, passing has most emphatically been embraced by theorists

advocating a postracial or postethnic approach. From a postethnic position as articulated by David Hollinger, for instance, passing is an example of not being tied to “prescribed

49 Ibid., 314.

50 Ibid., 313-317. Hughes mentions, for instance, a brilliant black theology student who became the “white shepherd of a white flock.” Ibid., 314.

51 Ibid., 314, 317.

52 Ibid., 317.

53Langston Hughes, “Passing,” The Ways of White Folks (1934), in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes Volume 15: The Short Stories, ed. R. Baxter Miller (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 47.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 47,48.

11 affiliations on the basis of descent.”

The mere birth into any community, racial or otherwise, does not necessarily mean that an individual should be tied to that particular community for the rest of his/her life. As Hollinger formulates it: “A postethnic perspective challenges the right of one’s grandfather or grandmother to determine primary identity” and “recognizes that most individuals live in many circles simultaneously and that the actual living of any

individual life entails a shifting division of labor between the several ‘we’s’ of which the individual is a part.”

The weight of any ascription of identity depends on the situation one is in and varies constantly. “A postethnic perspective recognizes the psychological value and political function of bounded groups of affiliation, but it resists a rigidification of the ascribed distinctions between persons that universalists and cosmopolitans have so long sought to diminish.”

Moreover, postethnicity “appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups.”

Yet it does not seek to convey a lack of commitment to groups but rather seeks to enable an individual’s free choice of groups, thereby giving the individual the choice to stay or leave a particular group, including a specific ethnic or racial group, but Hollinger acknowledges that this is “more widely accepted in relation to religious than to ethno-racial communities.”

Critics of a postethnic approach often regard history, blood and tradition as a more valid basis for affiliation than individual and voluntary choices.

From a postethnic perspective however, voluntary affiliations (such as passing) are deeper and more important than prescribed ones as they are based on individual choices rather than on

automatic or default memberships.

57 David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism , 117.

58 Ibid., 116, 106.

59 Ibid., 107.

60 Ibid.,116.

61 Ibid., 117, 102,121.

62 Ibid., 119.

63 Ibid., 116

12 Most scholars who take a more critical approach to passing focus on the extent to which passing tends to confirm rather than challenge a society’s current status quo. Due to its individual nature, passing neither alters nor challenges the structural position of minorities in a given society, for example.

Passers may oppose and subvert the inequality that

predominates in a given society through their individual acts of passing, but their invisibility can also be considered to be a resigned acceptance of the societal structures and norms of that particular society because passers have to hide an aspect of their identity in order to receive the treatment that they wish to receive (a passive strategy) instead of actively fighting for equal rights. Leo Spitzer, author of Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation, writes:

[Passing is] an action that, when accomplished successfully, divorce[s] its individual practitioners from others in the subordinate group, and in no way challenge[s] the ideology of racism or the system in which it [is] rooted. Indeed, because individuals responding to marginality through… passing could be viewed as either conscious or unwitting accomplices in their own victimization—as persons consenting to the continuing maintenance of existing inequalities and exclusionary ideologies—it is certainly understandable why they often elicited such scathing criticism from their contemporaries.

Although passers want to belong to the dominant group for various reasons, critics argue that this comes at the cost of the minority group. Minority groups need solidarity to challenge discriminatory ideas and laws, yet passers break these bonds of solidarity because they do not support their community and its struggles for equality. For this reason, the individual escape of permanent passers can create bitterness because they are perceived to have no loyalty towards their (former) community: “Passing … fails to address the collective nature of racial discourse, which derives authority from its ability to unite people of disparate origins and

64 Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line, 7, 8.

65 Leo Spitzer, Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation (New York: Hill

& Wang, 1999), 180.

13 identities under a single ‘badge’ of color.”

The act of passing is therefore sometimes

referred to as a betrayal of one’s roots or background, which in turn may cause contempt from former community members.

At its worst, passing may even strengthen the belief in the dominant group’s

superiority as in the aforementioned short story “Passing,” where the protagonist ultimately identifies with the prejudice of his white employer, his fiancé and his future parents-in-law.

Passers may unknowingly give the impression that the group they want to belong to is superior to the minority group they used to belong to. The case of the Healy children can serve as an example of this attitude. The children of a white planter, Michael Morris Healy, and his black slave Eliza Clark, were sent to the North, where they passed for white, so they could live in freedom.

They went on to have good careers and eventually sold their father’s slaves to acquire further funds.

The Healy children considered themselves to be white and did not identify themselves as African American at all, nor did they assist slaves when requests were made.

They even disapproved of abolitionism and “opposed … racial egalitarianism.”

Another argument against passing is the assumption that passing has the potential to cause psychological problems.

According to Ronald E. Hall, passing erects “a wall between who they are or could be as persons and who they are or try to be amid white society.”

The passer could lose as much as he/she gains. A part of their personality remains hidden, or is erased, and without this aspect of themselves and the support of family or community, stress, loneliness, and feelings of loss could take their toll. Several of the passers in Passing: When

66 Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line, 7. Citing Langston Hughes, “Passing,” The Ways of White Folks (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 49-53.

67 Randall Kennedy,“Racial Passing,” 3.

68Ibid.

69 Ibid., 4.

70 Ibid.

71 Ronald E. Hall, “Blacks Who Pass,” in Brotherman: The Odyssey Of Black Men In America—An Anthology, ed. Herb Boyd & Robert L. Allen (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 475.

72 Ibid.

14 People Can’t be Who They Are comment on this aspect of passing: the need to hide, the restrictions in connecting with others, and the feeling of being a fraud or liar often cause regret and alienation.

“You’ve got this false self going on and that false self not only corrupts that part of you where you have to present yourself to the world, but it also corrupts the relationships that you have with the people that actually do know—including your significant others—because you both have to play out this whole façade;” it affects relationships, including the relationship with yourself.

Further issues that passers may encounter, if they do “inwardly identify” with their (former) community, is the “assault[s] … upon their dignity and self-worth.”

At one point or another they will come upon degrading jokes that “they must either laugh off or laugh at,” consequently “[t]hey must hide the remorse that their own laughter causes them and then must wrestle, alone, with their pent-up anger and with the betrayer’s guilt they feel.”

In the case of long term passing it may be necessary, for health reasons, to convince themselves that “such jokes somehow have nothing to do with them.”

This practice can create a distance between others and the passer, but may also have a depersonalizing effect on the passers themselves.

In the context of passing narratives, there exists a specific sub-group in which the passer passes with the intention of exposure.

The passer thus temporarily assumes a different identity, but only in order to reveal his or her experiences of passing at a later moment. The main purpose of these particular passing accounts is the exposure of societal rules, boundaries and prejudices regarding race, gender, or class, that contribute to a power imbalance between various social groups in a given society. The goal may be, in the case of

73 Brooke Kroeger, Passing: When People Can’t be Who They Are, 159.

74 Ibid.

75 Ronald E. Hall, “Blacks Who Pass,” 475.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid., 476.

79 Donald Reid, “Passings That Pass in America: Crossing Over and Coming Back to Tell About It,” The History Teacher 40, no. 4 (August 2007), 453,454. Donald Reid addresses various forms of passing to expose and educate: race, gender, and class; his primary focus is on the self-transformation and inner dialogue of passing white middle-class individuals.

15 white middle-class passers for instance, to inform the “social group of origin [about] its role in creating and sustaining the marginalization and oppression of the other whose identity they temporarily assume.”

These passing narratives portray the different treatment the passers received whilst passing, the altered attitude of society towards them, but also their own insights into their temporarily changed identity and their own responses to this experiment. In this way, these passing narratives can be said to counter the major point of criticism levelled against acts of passing: that they only benefit the individual passer but do no challenge structural forms of racism, sexism or homophobia. It is these structural forms of discrimination that this specific type of passing account tries to reveal.

In my dissertation, I will discuss three such accounts in which a racial passer later on reveals his/her experiences of passing: Black No More (1931) by George S. Schuyler, A Man Called White: The Autobiography Of Walter White (1948) by Walter White, and Black Like Me (1961) by John Howard Griffin. My goal in analyzing these three texts is to demonstrate the manners in which these texts use passing as a tool or method to challenge racism and reveal white privilege. In these stories, I would argue, the act of passing has the power to transform people’s ideas of race, power and privilege. It becomes a method of investigation to provide information and to access and document new territory. Negative racial assumptions are made visible and confronted on several levels. Whereas one text may use passing to focus on and dispute the alleged biological superiority of whites, another will use it to call attention to whiteness and white values as the default or norm. Internalized racism, also in

sympathizers, is yet another aspect that is touched upon. I will, therefore, argue that in contrast to the more traditional form of passing—hiding and concealing a part of one’s identity—these authors use passing as a tool to critique and criticize U.S. society in various ways, thereby uncovering prejudice regarding the biological or moral superiority of whites,

80 Ibid., 454.

16 the disdainful treatment of African Americans, and limiting rules and boundaries, which all contribute to the inequality and power imbalance between different racial groups.

The three accounts by Schuyler, White, and Griffin, all employ passing for the specific goal of commenting on societal rules and limitations regarding African Americans and race.

In these accounts, passing is used as a canvas to paint a bigger picture of social critique; in many historical passing stories, passing is often portrayed as a tragic choice and as a (racial) betrayal but in these accounts it serves as an eye-opener to the structural racial inequality in the U.S from the 1930’s until the late 1950’s. In these decades, the ideas of the Eugenics movement were influential; the Harlem Renaissance spurred new ideas about race and politics; and the Great Depression caused an increase in poverty and unemployment.

Segregation continued to impair the lives of African Americans as did the nation’s lack of interest in race issues. Although each text has its own specific concern, they all address issues of (the fluidity and construction of) race, ethnicity, and agency (or lack thereof) during this time and under these circumstances. The main focus of this thesis thus lies on passing accounts that take place before the Civil Rights Movement succeeded, i.e. before an effort was made to remove some of the structural forms of institutionalized racism and the mind-set behind it.

These specific passing stories aim to question these measures precisely because they ensured unequal treatment.

In the first chapter, I will explore how the alleged biological superiority of whites is disputed and ridiculed in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) by means of the main character’s passing as well as the effects of mass passing on U.S. society. This satirical novel

81 In my search for this specific kind of passing account I couldn’t identify any female- authored texts for my chosen historical time-frame or subject as this type of text seems to be a rarity in itself. As my main concern is with race and structural racial exclusion, passing accounts that mainly focus on other forms of discrimination are not within the scope of this thesis. However, as observed by Gayle Wald, racial passing may have a gendered component which could perhaps extend to the notion that racial exclusion may also have a gendered component whereby male-authored texts which feature male protagonists could still provide some insight into this aspect of racial exclusion. The connection and/or association of whiteness with masculinity is an aspect of significance in these accounts and will be addressed as it is closely related to the issue of agency. See: Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 16.

17 begins with the story of a doctor who has found a treatment that will turn people’s skin

white.

Many African Americans decide to get that treatment, which has an enormous effect on U.S. society because almost an entire racial group disappears in a short amount of time.

The idea of the biological superiority of Caucasians, lies, therefore, under attack while the experiment itself also seems to serve as a parody of contemporaneous Eugenics experiments.

The second chapter will focus on A Man Called White: The Autobiography Of Walter White (1948), which relates the passing experiences of Walter White, president of the

NAACP from 1931-1955. Walther White passed on several occasions to investigate racially motivated killings on behalf of the NAACP by pretending to be a white journalist.

In the autobiography, passing is considered a means to expose the practice of lynching in the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

In the third chapter, I will argue that John Howard Griffin’s passing in Black Like Me (1961) creates an awareness of not only societal boundaries and prejudices regarding race and people’s belief in the moral superiority of whites but also of his own internalized racism. In his non-fiction passing account, the author, a white journalist, uses special medication to darken his complexion and passes as an African American travelling through the segregated American South for a number of weeks.

The autobiographical text vividly shows the different treatments and attitudes he is confronted with, solely based on his racial

identification. But his main insight centers on realizing his own internalized racism, which becomes apparent when he visits the city of Mobile where Griffin notices that his period of passing has altered his own perception of both African Americans and Southern whites alike.

82 George S. Schuyler, Black No More (Mineola, New York: Dover Publication, Inc., 2011), 8.

83 Ibid., 39.

84 Walter White, A Man Called White,: The Autobiography Of Walter White 1948, reprint (Athens and London:

Brown Thrasher Books, The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 49, 57.

85John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me 15^th ed. (New York: Signet, 2010), 6, 7.

86 Ibid., 101.

18 Chapter 1: “At last he felt like an American citizen:”

Whiteness, Passing, and What Makes or Breaks an American in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More

The satirical novel Black No More takes place in the future. It was first published in 1931 but describes events that happened in U.S. society from 1933 onwards. Black No More is built on the premise that African Americans’ skin color is their only hurdle to a fulfilling American life—or the American Dream—hence removing any visible signifiers of their race promises to achieve this apparent “chromatic perfection.”

The story begins when scientists have

succeeded in developing a method to change people’s skin color permanently.

The novel relates the life of Max Disher, a young African American man who decides to undergo the treatment that will whiten his skin in order to win the affections of a white woman named Helen Givens.

As a white man, his life alters considerably, as he is able to build a good career and marry said Helen, thus obtaining everything white supremacy has denied him:

wealth, status, influence, and the objectified white woman.

In the meantime, a considerable percentage of African Americans also becomes white, which affects U.S. society as a whole:

more white facilities are needed, black stores and neighborhoods are abandoned; job

competition grows at high-end positions whereas some low-end positions are not filled at all, and monopolies of both white and black companies are broken.

These societal changes do not go unnoticed, and an outrage against the Black No More treatment soon follows:

politicians, church leaders, and leaders of industry cooperate in an attempt to stop Dr. Junius

87 George S. Schuyler, Black No More, 23.

88 Ibid, v.

89 Ibid. v, vi, 7.

90 Ibid., 7.

91 Ibid., 65.

92 Ibid., 51, 85, 86, 87.

19 Crookman’s controversial efforts of improving the lives of his fellow African Americans.

Although Dr. Crookman succeeds in his work, racial segregation returns as the whitest whites are now branded to be inferior.

The novel is narrated against the backdrop of two influential movements of the 1920s and 1930s: the Eugenics movement and the Harlem Renaissance (a.k.a. the New Negro Movement). Black No More criticizes racial essentialism in both the ideology of the Eugenics movement and in representatives of the Harlem Renaissance by challenging the alleged biological and moral superiority of whiteness in the form of

comparisons between Caucasians and passing African Americans. Schuyler’s genre of choice for discussing these themes in Black No More is that of satire. The hyperbole of mass passing and its effects provides the opportunity to reveal white privilege in U.S. society by

exaggerating common practices, ideas, stereotypes, and beliefs. Passing thus becomes a tool to shine light upon the inequality between the races in the U.S. as well as the circumstances and beliefs that strengthen and enforce racial inequality.

Eugenics—the idea of improving a population or race along Social Darwinist principles through sterilization and selective breeding—was quite popular in the US during the first quarter of the 20

century.

The concept was developed in 1869 by a Francis Galton, a British scientist who discovered that superior intelligence and abilities where inherited disproportionately, thus resulting in the belief “that the study of heredity would yield a viable technique for improving mankind.”

The movement began in the U.S. during the 1880’s, gained in influence during the 1900’s, and peaked during the 1920’s and 1930’s with “Fitter Family” contests and warnings against the “deterioration of the ‘American race.’”

Genetics

93 Ibid., 50, 58, 59, 95.

94 Ibid., 148,149.

95 Devon Stillwell, “Eugenics Visualized: The Exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1932,”

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 2 (Summer 2012), 210, 211.

96 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “Francis Galton’s Statistical Ideas: The Influence of Eugenics,” Isis 63, no.4 (Dec.

1974), 511.

97 Richard B. Sherman, “‘The Last Stand’: The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s,” The Journal of Southern History 54, no. 1 (Feb. 1988), 71; Devon Stillwell, “Eugenics Visualized: The Exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1932,” 208.

20 were deemed to be the cause for many social problems, including alcoholism, criminality, or feeblemindedness, and various ethno-racial groups were considered inferior, including

African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, and Italians.

This led to the implementation of laws forbidding interracial marriages, sterilization laws, and restrictive immigration controls with the common goal of creating a healthier, stronger, and racially purer US population.

In Black No More, Schuyler mocks various key ideas of the Eugenics movement: his response to the idea that whiteness or white people are threatened by a growing non-white population is whitening the black population.

The logic behind this is summarized by Dr.

Crookman: “Obviously, he reasoned, if there were no Negroes, there could be no Negro problem. Without a Negro problem, Americans could concentrate their attention on something constructive.”

Dr. Crookman wishes to do what “agitation, education and legislation had failed to do,” by challenging structural forms of racism, such as the

impossibility to vote for African Americans despite a legal right to do so.

By becoming white, African Americans would have access to better housing, schooling, and jobs, as well as to actual equal treatment before the law.

What the reader suspects—and Dr. Crookman soon realizes—is the uncomfortable fact that institutional change is not in everybody’s best interest, and therefore his plans are attacked by the media, churches, and politicians.

The call to make his treatment illegal grows louder, his treatment centers are attacked, his life is in danger, yet all of this only furthers his resolve to continue his work at an even higher speed.

Crookman’s experimental treatment can be read as a parody of contemporaneous Eugenic

98 Allen E. Garland, “The Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris 2 (1986), 225, 249.

99 Ibid., 247; Richard B. Sherman, “‘The Last Stand’: The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s,”

72, 92.

100 Jane Kuenz, “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930, Schuyler’s ‘Black No More,’” 178.

101 George S. Schuyler, Black No More, 28.

102 Ibid., 28.

103 Ibid., 30,31.

104 Ibid., 39, 45, 95.

105 Ibid., 49,50.

21 experiments with their focus on the improvement of an Anglo-American racial ideal.

Jane Kuenz identifies two core beliefs of the movement in the US: “The white U.S. population was simultaneously the strongest, most adept for modern life and the most threatened by unsupervised reproduction.”

According to Eugenics ideologist Clinton Burr, African Americans should therefore ideally live on reservations, and immigration should be halted, to ensure the “undiluted purity of the white race.”

Similar rhetoric can be found in Black No More as Rev. Givens, founder of the Knights of Nordica, identifies “preserving the integrity of the white race” as the US’s most important goal.

The massive passing and ensuing invisibility of African Americans in Black No More and the strong outcry against the treatment, may, therefore, be read as an example of the particular sense of threat that can occur when white superiority is challenged and stable racial identities are questioned.

As white superiority is debunked through the mass passing of African Americans and its aftermath—with no indication of who used to be African American—, supposed biological differences are also demystified. Racial essentialism, which assumes that clear or even

measurable signs of difference exist, is radically dismantled: in Black No More, “Negro dialect” does not exist, “plenty of Caucasians … have lips quite as thick and noses quite as broad” as African Americans, and only around twenty percent of African Americans do not have any Caucasian ancestry.

The novel further states that genetic variation within races can be as, or even more, diverse than between races, and therefore, “it is readily seen that there cannot be the wide difference in Caucasian and Afro-American facial characteristics that most people imagine.”

Both the novel’s dedication, which is aimed at all white Americans that can confidently claim to have no black ancestry over ten generations, and the results of an

106 Jane Kuenz, “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930, Schuyler’s ‘Black No More,’” 178.

107 Ibid.

108 Clinton Stoddard Burr, America’s Race Heritage: an Account of the Diffusion of Ancestral Stocks in the United States during Three Centuries of National Expansion and a Discussion of its Significance (New York:

National Historical Society, 1922), 153, 160.

109 George S. Schuyler, Black No More, 38.

110 Ibid., 11,12.

111 Ibid.

22 investigation into the US’s racial ancestry—done on behalf of a politician who aims to use the findings to discredit his opponent’s racial background—reveal that a startling number of white Americans may have a “Negro ancestry:” a shocking discovery in the novel as the assumption of the researchers was that merely some, and only members of the lower classes at that, would have African American ancestry.

As it turns out, however, most white

Americans have such ancestry, including senators and “first families;” they are not only descendants of passing African Americans, but also of convicts and prostitutes, which means that their superiority, both on racial and class grounds, has no historical basis.

The ending of the novel pushes the absurdity of racial distinctions to the extreme when it is made public that the new Caucasians, i.e. the ones that had had the treatment that allowed them to pass for white, are in fact a shade whiter than the old Caucasians, resulting in “a society that had been taught to venerate whiteness” suddenly being eager to be not “so

white!”

Paleness becomes suspect as it can be “evidence of the possession of Negro blood,”

and a whole new group begins to experience discriminatory measures.

According to specialists, pale citizens should be segregated on account of being “mentally inferior,” and pale children are said to be in need of separate schooling, one of the arguments being that

“Nordic peoples had been in savagery when Egypt and Crete were at the height of their development.”

The same prejudice that African Americans had faced is now used against (the) white(st) Americans, which induces people to look for measures to darken themselves, such as sunbathing or beauty products, hereby completing the circle and suggesting that U.S.

society has changed tremendously yet at the same time has not changed at all.

Race is still an—if not the most—important tool to distinguish and judge people.

112 George S. Schuyler, Black No More, 118, 119, 120.

113 Ibid.

114 Ibid., 148.

115 Ibid., 149.

116 Ibid.

117 Ibid., 149, 150.

23 Schuyler’s views on the place of African Americans in U.S. society can also be

interpreted as an extension of a previous debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B.

Du Bois. Whereas Booker T. Washington argued for the assistance of white Americans in the social progress of African Americans and did not seek total equality for the time being so as to ensure racial cooperation, Du Bois argued that this approach would simply enable white oppression to continue.

Washington believed that if African Americans became

indispensable to US society, their status and rights would improve in time, whereas Du Bois wanted to take political action to secure equal rights.

While Du Bois sought full integration into white society, Washington at least temporarily favored a separate position, as was

outlined in his “Atlanta Compromise,” which called for a just treatment of African

Americans as laborers and consumers but explicitly did not aspire to further political or social rights, such as the vote.

During the Harlem Renaissance, this debate was extended to the question of the usefulness of a specific African American aesthetics.

In this debate, Schuyler and Langston Hughes held opposing views. In “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain,” Hughes argues that the longing to be mainstream, or merely “American,” can be viewed as a

(subconscious) longing to be white, and he therefore emphasizes “the importance of a [black]

racial aesthetic.”

According to Hughes, membership in the mainstream signifies a “desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization,” with the intention of

118 Mark Bauerlein, “Booker T Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Origins of A Bitter Intellectual Debate,”

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 46 (Winter 2004, 2005), 106, 107.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid., 107.

121 Ernest Julius Mitchell II, “‘Black Renaissance’: A Brief History of the Concept,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010), 645, 646.

122 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain,” Nation 122 (June 23, 1926) in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes Volume 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs, ed.

Christopher C. De Santis (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 31, 32; Joseph Mills,

“The Absurdity of America: George S. Schuyler’s Black No More,” EnterText 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 129.

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/111330/Joseph-Mills,-The-Absurdity-of-America-George- S-Schuylers-Black-No-More.pdf

24 being “as little Negro and as much American as possible.”

Schuyler’s stance, on the other hand, comes closer to Du Bois’ notion of “double-consciousness,” which saw the American and the African as two parts of the same identity yet (seemingly) at odds with each other:

“two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,”

which need to merge so that it would be possible to “be both a Negro and an American.”

Like Du Bois who wants to overcome the African American’s “double consciousness,” and insists that there is neither the need to “bleach [one’s] Negro blood,” nor to “Africanize America,” Schuyler believes that both the African and the American side of one’s identity should and could merge and need not be separated.

According to Schuyler, African Americans, as “products of cultural conditioning,” do not differ that much culturally from white Americans as their identities are shaped by a similar “education and environment,” and, therefore, they do not necessarily need their own distinct niche of art.

Schuyler argues that a strong focus on Africa to create a different identity filled with racial pride could hurt

African Americans and their cause as it plays into the dichotomy between Africans and Americans in U.S. society and foregrounds racial essentialism. His own experiences in Africa had taught him exactly how American he himself, and by extension African Americans in general, was/were.

Racial essentialism, white or black, was therefore rejected by Schuyler, who regarded “the insistence on a distinctly black sensibility as no different from, indeed perhaps originating in, the racist beliefs of whites who insist on ‘fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences’ between the races.”

123 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain,” 31, 32.

124 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk,” in Brotherman: The Odyssey Of Black Men In America—An Anthology, ed. Herb Boyd & Robert L. Allen (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 36.

125W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk,” 36.

126 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain,” 31, 32; Joseph Mills, “The Absurdity of America: George S. Schuyler’s Black No More,” 129.

127 Joseph Mills, “The Absurdity of America: George S. Schuyler’s Black No More,” 135, 136. Schuyler visited Liberia to research slave trade described in his book Slaves Today.

128 Ibid., 130. Citing George S. Schuyler, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” Nation 122 (June 16, 1926) in The Negro Renaissance: An Anthology, ed. Arthur P. Davis and Michael W. Peplow (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1975), 470.

25 Schuyler’s stance was not a popular one as he was frequently portrayed as an “Uncle Tom” and accused of denying his racial identity.

However, this was not the case. “He repeatedly insisted that arguing against a ‘peculiar’ Negro art or psychology was not the same as denying a black heritage.”

The same equation that for many Americans made white a synonym of American also rendered black and African as synonymous yet Schuyler strongly opposed this as it effectively stripped African Americans of their identities as US-Americans and presumed a conflict between these two identities.

The dichotomy between African and American was also used by white supremacists; the previously mentioned Burr, for instance, believed that “being black effectively removed one from the category ‘American’” as the concepts of liberty and democracy were incomprehensible to African Americans.

In Schuyler’s view, “insistence on the ‘Americanness’ of the Negro did not imply a desire to be white, but rather that the ‘blackness’ of America be acknowledged.”

According to

Schuyler, this is crucial, as blackness constitutes an integral part of U.S. national identity.

To discredit whiteness itself is not Schuyler’s intended goal, but to dismantle white privilege and equality is: “To be free in a white world [with] full and immediate citizenship rights under the constitution,” is what Schuyler desires for all Americans.

In Black No More, this distinction between whiteness and white privilege is made clear when the

admiration and imitation of whiteness through the use of various beauty products is mocked yet the benefits of whiteness are highly sought after.

Various black race leaders are accused of admiring whiteness: Madame Sisseretta Blandish, for example, is elected as a race leader because she is successful “in making Negroes appear as much like white folks as possible,”

129 Ibid. Citing Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 89.

130 Ibid., 131.

131 Ibid., 131,132.

132 Jane Kuenz, “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930, Schuyler’s ‘Black No More,’” 180; Clinton Stoddard Burr, America’s Race Heritage: an Account of the Diffusion of Ancestral Stocks in the United States during Three Centuries of National Expansion and a Discussion of its Significance, 153.

133 Joseph Mills, “The Absurdity of America: George S. Schuyler’s Black No More,” 132.

134 George S. Schuyler, “Do Negroes Want to be White?,” Mercury 82 (June 1956), 55-60.

135 George S. Schuyler, Black No More, 31.

26 and Dr. Crookman, likewise, “[is] so interested in the continued progress of the American Negroes that he want[s] to remove all obstacles in their path by depriving them of their racial characteristics.”

Schuyler calls them out on being white-identified, as they, in their efforts to help their race, also attempt to erase their racial identity. Race leaders’ hypocrisy when dating “yellow” or “octoroon” women whilst celebrating their darker counterparts is another example.

Schuyler ridicules the fact that these black race leaders are held in such high esteem even though they do not practice what they preach. Their visible success seems to be of higher importance to them than their integrity.

In addition, the novel also exposes the fact that white economic prosperity was to a large extent furthered through racial segregation. When segregation loses its purpose, since there is hardly an African American population left to segregate, this connection becomes apparent. As the white population increases, there is an urgent need for more white facilities—as the existing black facilities are deemed unfit for whites—resulting in a tax increase in order to pay for better housing, new schools with all teachers paid the same, and new train stations and wagons.

In the South, an entire economic class disappears almost overnight, leaving no-one to do the “dirty work.”

The improvement in facilities and pay rises to ensure white standards in Black No More clearly indicates that the “separate but equal” doctrine was anything but. This acknowledgement that existing facilities and salaries do not reach white standards simultaneously also reveals the lesser status and circumstances of African Americans.

Patricia Hill Collins’s neo-Marxist explanation of the relationship between culture and societal structures and practices offers a useful tool to elucidate the treatment of racial

136 Ibid., 54, 28, 31. The character of Sisseretta Blandish is believed to be based on Madam C.J. Walker; the first African American woman to become a self-made millionaire with her line of beauty and hair products. See Jane Kuenz, “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930, Schuyler’s ‘Black No More,’” 170.

137 George S. Schuyler, Black No More, 29, 2.

138 Ibid., 29, 53.

139 Ibid., 86.

140 Ibid., 85.

27 segregation and class exploitation in Black No More. According to Collins, a dominant

ideology will only survive if it is embedded in the domains of “social institutions (structural domain), their organizational practices (disciplinary domain), and the level of everyday social interaction (interpersonal domain)” as well.

“School curricula, religious teachings,

community cultures, and family histories have long been important social locations for manufacturing ideologies needed to maintain oppression.”

Black No More exemplifies this production of ideology by means of politicians, religious leaders, and businessmen who successfully use racist ideology to maintain their power and to obscure class inequality.

“Times were hard, [the white workers] reasoned, because there were so many white Negroes in their midst taking their jobs and undermining their American standard of living. None of them had ever attained an American standard of living to be sure, but that fact never occurred to any of them.”

In this quote, Schuyler launches an attack against class inequality and illustrates how racial ideology, combined with a segregated workforce, harms white laborers as well since their investment in the racial ideology of white supremacy effectively deflects their attention from worker’s rights and from improving their own circumstances.

The disappearance of nearly an entire economic underclass creates both a lack of low paid workers but also a sudden realization that previously, race privilege had obscured class inequality.

As the number of white citizens continues to increase, the white worker’s former race

privilege becomes obsolete, thereby exposing the uncomfortable truth that African Americans had “served as a convenient red herring for the upper classes when the white proletariat grew

141 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 10^th revised ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 284. Patricia Hill Collins discusses the many ways in which African American women face oppression in these various domains of power in the U.S. today but she also states that the “matrix of power” can be applied to oppression in general, whether it is based on race, gender or class. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 10^th revised ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 275.

142 Ibid.

143 George S. Schuyler, Black No More, 38, 60, 87, 99.

144 Ibid., 68.

145 Ibid..

146 Ibid., 85.