Passing by Nella Larsen

“She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race…It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved.”

     Nella Larsen’s novella Passing is an oft-overlooked gem of the Harlem Renaissance. The story chronicles the lives of two friends, Irene and Clare, who are both of mixed ancestry but are fair enough to “pass” for white in society. Clare uses her appearance to her advantage, marrying a wealthy white business mogul who also happens to be a thoroughbred bigot. Irene, on the other hand, marries a black man and raises their children in Harlem so that they at least grow up with a supportive black community in the backdrop a racist society.

     I expected the story to dwell more on the injustice of American racism, but at its core, the tale is about Irene and Clare’s complicated friendship and the problem of asserting your individuality when you are doubly oppressed by your identity politics. Irene resents the fact that Clare pretends she is not black in order to live in high society, yet she takes advantage of her marginal access to white privilege when it suits her as well. The story even begins with Clare and Irene meeting each other by chance after years of separation in a “whites only” restaurant. One particularly insightful passage explains, “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with a kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

     Larsen herself was keenly aware of the double-bind of the “tragic mulatto.” Larsen was “passing” in her own right and struggled with being fetishized for her “exotic” complexion and with being a woman at a time when women’s control over their own lives and bodies was limited even among white women.

     The “tragic mulatto” trope is something I can relate to only to the extent that I, too, have both black and white ancestry, and it can be strange navigating other people’s assumptions about what being black or white means. However, I think the “tragic” stem should be dropped. Inter-racial marriages are at an all-time high and more and more people are checking multiple boxes for their ethnicity on the census. Even our current president is biracial. Perhaps this is why the tragic mulatto trope is, at least to my knowledge, an antiquated construction. I can’t think of contemporary film or fiction that frames the issue in a similar way. Of course that means there is now a vacuum, a blind spot in our consciousness since more and more children are being born with multiple ethnicities and there is relatively little material in fiction or pop culture to reflect this new trend. I wonder how artists will address this issue in the days and years to come…

          -Josane Cumandala

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