The novelist David Lodge, who died this month, had a great bit in his campus satire “Changing Places,” the first in a trilogy. English professors play the game “Humiliation,” which requires admitting that they have never actually read a work that they assume all of their colleagues have. One professor admits he has never read “Hamlet” and is denied tenure as a result. One of my “Hamlet” works has long been the historians Barbara and Karen Fields’s widely revered 2012 study, “Racecraft.” I have been kind of pretending to have read it for over 10 years. I decided it was time to get real.
The Fieldses argue that since race is a biological fiction, our conception of people divided into races is no more rooted in reality than witchcraft, thus their clever title. They revile the use of the word “race” where “racism” would be more accurate, calling that tendency “the great evasion of American historical literature.” They argue: “The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is.”
“Consider the statement ‘Black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color,’” they write. “Segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.”
Inevitably I have a quibble or two with this brilliant book. The custom of saying “race” when we mean “racism” isn’t ideal, but it’s not a matter of willful evasion. We do not think, when we read of someone barred from employment “because of their race,” that the cause was their tint alone rather than discrimination upon its basis. We fill in the context, just as we understand that saying someone drinks refers to alcohol. Also, the idea that there is no biological basis for racial distinctions is inaccurate. Tiny components of a human genome can be shown to map with almost perfect accuracy to broad geographical locations such as Europe, Africa, East Asia, Oceania and the Americas that correspond significantly with what we today regard as racial distinctions. Categories can be fuzzy — most surely are — but they remain categories.
The Fields’s larger point, however, is invaluable: that the way we build our perceptions and institutions around that small genetic component has been an unjustifiable muddle. Carol Channing, who we recall as white, had a half-Black father. To the Southern segregationist of yore, she would have been a “quadroon,” which is to say Black. The father of the singer Halsey is Black. Until the term “biracial” was widely embraced in the 1990s, an American orthodoxy would have classified her as Black, regardless of her appearance, and would have described anyone claiming a more complex identity as living in a kind of pathetic denial.
None of this kind of thing has ever made any real sense. It has engendered endless misery and baffled many outsiders. It’s hard to resist the Fields’s case that we would be better off without classifying people into race categories. But following its counsel requires revising not just illusions we retain from the past, but also a whole set of new biases that replaced them, which are currently regarded as not just beliefs but immutable truths.
One person who in her way lived by the Fields prescription was Belle da Costa Greene. She was born in 1879 in Washington, D.C., to Black parents. After they separated, Greene, her mother and her siblings, all of whom had light complexions, moved to New York City, where they proceeded to “pass.” To explain her amber skin color, Greene claimed to have Portuguese ancestry. Brilliant and determined, she rose to oversee J.P. Morgan’s vast library.
Passing was hardly uncommon among very light-skinned Black people in Greene’s lifetime. George Herriman, the creator of the classic comic strip “Krazy Kat,” passed as white after a childhood as a mixed-race New Orleans Creole, and I recommend the podcast series “The Vanishing of Harry Pace” about a Black record executive who made the same kind of choice.
People who passed have long been viewed as suspicious and even broken figures. You can see that attitude in “Imitation of Life,” a 1933 book more familiar from its two adaptations as a film. Peola, described as a light-skinned Black woman, abandons her family in order to pass as white. Her mother dies of heartbreak. In the movie versions, Peola outs herself at the funeral by throwing herself over the coffin and sobbing for forgiveness.
You can see an echo of the old suspicion, updated through a more enlightened set of references, in a review of the current exhibition at the Morgan Library in Manhattan, titled “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy.“ Writing about it in The New Yorker, Hilton Als describes Greene as having forsaken “love in a community she actually belonged to” and “the experience of her race as a cultural power.” By passing, he says, she “became a member of another race — not Black or white but alternately grandiose and self-despising.”
The ample cache of letters Greene left behind, gathered by Deborah Parker in the book “Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters,” tells a very different story. It reveals an indefatigably witty, puckish soul who savored books and art, had an active social life and loved gossip and a good story.
Not a note of Peola: Greene seemed ecstatic to get out of bed every morning, eager to drink in yet more of what the New York cosmopolis had to offer. “The library grows more wonderful (to me) every day and I am terribly happy in my work here,” she wrote. “I must run now — I love this life — don’t you?” she exclaimed in one letter. After seeing an exhibition of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz: “I shall never forget the hours I spent,” she wrote, “nor do I ever again expect to feel such intense joyous — and above all free moments.” Receiving a multivolume edition of “The Thousand and One Nights” in French, “I sat right down on the floor with all I could hold in my lap + the rest around me on the floor — I am impatient to read them especially one which I just glanced at ‘La tendre histoire du Prince Jasmin et de la Princesse Amande.’” She continued, “I immediately went to the phone and broke a theater engagement which I had made for this evening and instead I shall dine quietly at home — put on my most comfortable peignoir and go off into ‘les nuits enchantés.’”
Here is someone who, it would seem, was as aware of the fiction of race as the Fieldses are. In choosing to pass, Greene was indeed rejecting something, but it wasn’t an individual self. It was a broad social phenomenon — the social construct of race, “the figment of the pigment,” as the expression goes. Greene refused to comply with the senseless witchcraft, so to speak, that this unjust construct would have imposed on her.
It wasn’t fair that she could do this while darker-skinned Black people could not. But Greene, anticipating what the Fieldses suggest, may have been not an arrogant quisling but a progressive pioneer.
Black people weren’t the only ones passing. In Greene’s time and long afterward, there were more “white” people who lived as Black than we might suppose, with race functioning for them as a cultural or legal or political rather than biological matter. On race as on all else, the past is a foreign country, where many of our current assumptions would seem like science fiction.
Sidebar example: Today’s take on blackface is that any rendition of it, be it jocular or even ironic, is a baldly demeaning salute to minstrel shows. But in the new book “Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer,” Richard Bernstein shows that some of Jolson’s contemporaries — even some Black ones — viewed it differently. Bernstein cites Black newspapers calling Jolson “the world’s foremost entertainer” and “undoubtedly one of the greatest of all entertainers.” Among his critics, Bernstein writes, “The complaints weren’t so much that blackface was an insult; they were that whites had stolen Blackness and were being more successful at it than Blacks were.”
The case of Walter White is similarly hard to imagine from today’s perspective. The head of the N.A.A.C.P. from 1929 to 1955, he was a phenom, central to the eventual passage of federal anti-lynching legislation and one of the prime movers of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also utterly Caucasian in appearance, in line with most of his ancestry. He could easily pass for white, but did so only to investigate lynchings in the Deep South and to bring his findings to the wider public.
By the way, you are hardly alone if his name more readily calls up the protagonist of the television series “Breaking Bad.” White died on the early side in 1955, just before the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s, so he did not achieve the lasting fame of those who participated in the March on Washington or its dramatic aftermath. (For those who wish to learn more, a PBS documentary about him, “Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the N.A.A.C.P.,” will air on Feb. 25.) But in his time, he was a rock star. Poor Black Southerners hung his photo on the wall the way they later would Martin Luther King’s and John F. Kennedy’s.
White’s complex identity wasn’t as remarkable in his day as it would seem to most people now. Look at photos of Black college students in the late 19th century and into the 20th, and you might be surprised to see how many of them look like white people who wandered into the photo session by mistake. Race — and the different ways people found their place in it — were often more complex back then than we might suppose from our vantage point. It was often more complex than how we allow people to navigate it now.
My grandfather on my mother’s side grew up in poverty in Atlanta. He had a white father, and could easily have passed. He lived his life as a Black man because he was raised by his mother. To him, the people he looked like were aliens. Whiteness matched his phenotype, but Blackness matched his sense of himself.
In his autobiography, White stated: “I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” I very much doubt that someone who looked like that would today be seen as a legitimate leader for the most august Black civic organization in our nation. Even if raised by and among Black people, he would come in for a good deal of skepticism — from non-Blacks as well as Blacks — about whether he could lay claim to that identity without having experienced the discrimination that people with dark skin had suffered.
In calling for us to get past race, “Racecraft” points us forward, but in some ways, Black Americans living in the Gilded Age were further along in that regard than we are. Belle da Costa Greene and Walter White were by no means postracial. Greene saw herself as white, and White saw himself as Black. But within that dichotomy, they staked their identities on culture and allegiance and refused to allow pigment to define their existence.
It was the bigotry, segregation and disfranchisement at the heart of American life at the time, wielded with casual and homicidal violence, that drove Black people to want to pass. The irony, then, is that it may have been the very rigidity of our racial distinctions that forced us to begin seeing past color as essence.
The Fieldses ask that we continue this perceptual reset, but now for humanistic rather than self-protective reasons. An increasingly wide range of writers have responded to their ideas, from the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams to the podcaster Kmele Foster to the novelist Zadie Smith. Racism persists, but the question is whether it is still so extreme, so determinative, that we need to found identity and allegiance upon it.
The historian Manning Marable wrote of a Black identity founded on “whether we obtain home mortgages, the quality of medical treatment we receive and the encounters our sons may have with the police.” Ralph Ellison, in contrast, had asked whether a people can “live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting?” Ellison was questioning the idea of living with racecraft because even if the biology is insignificant, the construct is real. At what point do we stop letting the construct define who we are as individuals?
I’m glad I finally got to “Racecraft,” and not only because now I can stop pretending to have read it. Although even I have trouble imagining we might someday let go of race, it seems that some of our ancestors had already gotten there.
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