Written: 1929
Read: 2008
“Passing” (1929) is a novel about passing for white. It was written by Nella Larsen in the days of the Harlem Renaissance. It tells the story of Clare Kendry, a light-skinned black woman who passes for white and marries a white man who hates blacks. It is the tale of a tragic mulatto, of someone who tries to escape her race and comes to a bad end.
Because Nella Larsen herself, the author, could pass for white and because she lived in the Harlem Renaissance, the book gives you an insider’s view of both. That alone makes it worth reading.
Black high society in Harlem in the 1920s seems surprisingly English: a thing of drawing rooms, tea parties and beautiful dresses. The book has that general cast to it, even the spelling! (Ntozake Shange calls her writing “exquisite”. I did not find it so, though it did have its moments.)
It is also a book about blackness and what it is, about the nature of race in America – which is probably why I have been writing so much about those things lately.
What makes you black? Is it in your blood – that one drop, as they say. Or is it a matter of your background and upbringing? Maybe it is a little of both – or something completely different.
Clare Kendry looks white, but she is dark like a Gypsy or a Jew. You would never think she was black unless you saw her with other black people – even if she does have “Negro eyes”.
Clare thinks that if she can live as a white woman she will be happier. She will have more money and life will be easier. People will not look down on her. She can go wherever she wants, eat at the nicest places and so on.
Her friend Irene Redfield could also pass for white, but she chose to marry a black doctor and live as a black woman in Harlem. There is something inside her that does not let her turn her back on her race.
She thinks Clare is playing a dangerous game: if she is ever found out she will lose everything: her husband, her daughter, her wealth, maybe even her life. Clare knows it is dangerous but she likes to live on the edge.
Whiteness does not buy happiness, as Clare finds out. Instead it makes her unhappy. She always feels out of place, she does not feel like she belongs, she does not feel free. She wants to be with black people, if only to hear them laugh again. And with blacks she can be free in a way she never can with whites.
So even though Clare acts white and talks white and even looks white and lives white, something deep inside her is still black. And that in the end is what counts.
– Abagond, 2008.
See also:
Abagond 
This is heavy stuff Ms. Larsen wrote. She wrote the book at the time when Jim Crow, KKK, Nativism, and antimiscegnation laws rule supreme in America.
Could she be talking about some of the Black women who pass for white like the Jones girls, one of whom was married to the aristocratic Kip Rhinelander, of Rhinelander Case fame? I’m looking forward to your answer soon.
Steph
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I have heard of the Rhinelander Case but do not know much about it. So first I will do a post on it and then answer your question.
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No time for a long post or multiple posts, but a couple of items. Please forgive the bare URLs. Apparently, the posting feature here does not enable hyperlinks in text.
Re: Color-blind racism:
I agree with much of Agabond’s post on this issue. This post is thus offered as a supplement, not a rebuttal.
The main engine for this phenomenon has been white liberal PC culture and politics. You can’t change people’s hearts through legislation or social pressure. There are plenty of whites who harbor racism vs. blacks. Liberal PC culture forced any expression of these sentiments out of favor, and liberal PC legislation made expression of these sentiments in some contexts illegal. Thus, it was force it into the DL, where it can fester and perpetuate in secret, like mold growing behind the façade of a house. This process subverts reality and creates a Potemkin Village (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village). As a result, it has lead our nation to ludicrous, almost Pavlovian extremes in terms of elevating form over substance (http://multiracial.com/site/content/view/189/40/).
I would add also that the another prime “contribution” of white liberal PC culture to black American during the second half of the 20th century has been the demolition of intact black working class neighborhoods for the purpose of and replacing them with soul-destroying housing projects, thereby rending the nascent social fabric in many black communities, setting them back decades in terms of social health. All in the name of so-called “urban renewal.” The process is will illustrated in the book “The World of Patience Gromes (Making and Unmaking a Black Community)” by Scott C. Davis. Honestly, if black America feels it is entitled to reparations, let it seek them from the Democratic party.
Re: Blackness, Racism and Stereotypes.
Racism of some form has been practiced by virtually every civilization at every point in history. In fact, if there is one thing history teaches us about racism, it is that racism is perhaps the most universal social construct of human societies. This is not stated to justify racism by white Americans against black Americans, by the way. Rather, it is stated to add context to the discussion.
Also important for context is the fact that, in 2008 America, black Americans themselves are quite racist – toward whites, toward Asians, and, sadly, even toward continental Africans. I could spend a long time talking about all of the racist insults hurled toward my South African (from Soweto) GF in East Oakland back in the day – “African booty-scratcher!” Etc. It’s a cop-out to attempt to excuse this behavior by suggesting that blacks learned it from whites, by the way. Blacks learned this activity all by themselves and choose voluntarily to engage in it, just as whites do.
Humans tend to find ways to create distinctions between what they perceive to be sub-groups. As soon as this happens, we then tend to find ways to insult, threaten and even injure the “other.” It appears to be a universal part of the human condition. The definition of “blackness” is nothing more or less than a version of a theme that has played out in human culture for centuries.
Part of this process involves the creation/invocation of stereotypes. As Agabond notes, stereotypes are generally not created in a vacuum. They relate to actual concrete examples. Though we know intuitively that the variation among individuals tends to defy application of a stereotype to them, we nonetheless adhere to them. Did you know that the derogatory term “Dago” comes from a stereotype? It is a derivative of the name “Diego,” a common male name among Italian and Spaniard immigrants. Immigrants of British Isle descent began to refer to any male from this Mediterranean region as a “Diego,” then, gradually, a “Dago.” Same with “Wop,” derived from “Guapo.”
The primary possible (note I don’t say “practical”) solutions to these issues are either (a) separation or (b) assimilation. Within the US, where our most stark racism issue has to do with white Americans vs. black Americans, separation is not a viable solution. The solution thus lies in assimilation. Keep in mind, though, that assimilation does not mean a one-way street. Assimilation is like the orbit of celestial bodies. A physicist will tell you that it is incorrect to say that the earth orbits the sun. Rather, the earth and the sun mutually orbit a fixed point – their center of momentum – that can be determinable mathematically knowing things like the mass of the two objects, their distance and relative velocity, etc. This organic model applies also to the orbit of cultural subgroups around one another. As they assimilate, both groups move toward the focus of their mutual orbits. In the case of the earth and sun, where the sun is so much more massive than the earth, the mutual focus is within the body of the sun itself, somewhere between its center and its perimeter. I would reckon that in black/white America, the focus would in the same way be more toward “white culture” than “black culture,” though in the past decade there have been notable examples of white American culture embracing and adopting elements of black American culture.
Re: “African American”
I’m not aware of any evidence as to the “creator” of the term “African American.” However, it is well established (and, having lived through this period, I can personally remember it) that in the 1980s prominent African American leaders, most notably Jesse Jackson, vigorously lobbied and proselytized for its widespread use and adoption as the “official” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American)term for black people. The thesis of that time period was that black people should reject labels created for them by white people and instead create their own labels. “African American” vs. “black” or “Negro.” “Ebonics” vs. “Black English Vernacular.” Etc. I agree with Agabond, and some of the posters, that the term is unfortunate for several reasons, including the fact that it tends to diminish the distinctions between blacks as to their actual origin, that it ignores the presence of continental Africans, and that it places a false emphasis on the “African” part while the real problem with racism in America stems more directly from the “black” part. White Americans, after all, would not be racist vs. a person whose last name was Botha and whose skin was white, even though his father perhaps emigrated from South Africa. In other words, the fact that one’s ancestors come from Africa isn’t the primary basis for discrimination in this country.
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I put in the links for you. I think they did not work for you because of the parentheses – it made your URLs look like something else to the comment editor.
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I agree that the assimilation would be mutual – that has already been going on: blacks are whiter than they were 50 years ago and whites are blacker. Simple proof of that is in the way they talk. They are both approaching some point that is in between where they are now.
What I do not like is that that point is far closer to white than black. It brings me back to what Shark-fu said about acceptable blackness. I feel like blacks have to give up too much because whites are too narrow in their thinking.
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I address this point in my analogy to the mutual orbit of objects in space. The focus of the two orbits will always be closer to the center of the more massive object.
This is natural and organic. In the context of assimilation, it is not a function of the narrow-mindedness or broad-mindedness of people.
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“You will be assimilated”. Like the Borg!
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Here’s the article on the book, Love On Trial, by Heidi Ardizzone and Earl Lewis that discuss the racial/class/gender aspect of IR of Alice and Kip Rhinelander and the implications of the trial:
Love and Race Caught in the Public Eye
From: University of Michigan | By: Heidi Ardizzone and Earl Lewis
In 1925, an annulment trial involving the son of a privileged, aristocratic New York family and a working-class woman of mixed-race ancestry gripped the nation. Whether she had misrepresented her race was the crux of the trial; however, the larger, more complex question of how racial identity is constructed became the focus of the American public’s eye.
Here, historian Earl Lewis, dean of the graduate school at the University of Michigan, and Heidi Ardizzone, visiting assistant professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, discuss the discoveries that led to the writing of Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White.
Lovers seek to create a place that they can inhabit together against the obstacles of the world. Marriage promises that they will live in that place forever. What happens, though, when love cannot keep out the world’s strictures? What happens when the bond severs, and the nation serves as a witness to marital separation? And what happens when a culture’s notions about love and romance come into conflict with the lines dividing races and classes?
Alice poses for reporters, November 1924.
In 1925 Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander found themselves painfully trapped in this conflict between love and family, desire and social standing. Their marriage had the trappings of a fairy tale–wealthy New York scion marries humble girl from New Rochelle–yet the events that led to their estrangement provide an unusual window into the nation’s attitudes about race, class and sexuality. Their sensational annulment trial scandalized 1920s America and opened their private life to public scrutiny, amid cultural conflicts over racial definitions, class propriety, proper courtship and sexual behavior, and racial mixing.
As a Rhinelander, Leonard was descended from several of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families. Had he followed in the family tradition, Leonard might have attended Columbia University, joined the Rhinelander Real Estate Company, and made his mark on New York society through philanthropy and support of the arts.
By contrast, Alice’s parents immigrated in 1891 to the United States from England, where they had both worked as servants. George Jones had had some success in his adopted country; he eventually owned a fleet of taxicabs and several small properties. Alice, her sisters, and their husbands worked primarily as domestics and servants–solid members of the working class.
Despite this pronounced class difference, Alice and Leonard met and began dating in 1921. Their love deepened over the next three years, tested by months and years of separation as Leonard’s father tried to keep them apart. Philip Rhinelander’s efforts were in vain, however. From 1921 to 1924 the lovers exchanged hundreds of letters and visited when possible. As soon as Leonard turned 21 and received money from a trust fund, he left school and returned to Alice. In the fall of 1924, they quietly married in a civil ceremony at the New Rochelle City Hall.
Had reporters from the New Rochelle Standard Star ignored the entry in the City Hall records, the couple might have lived their lives away from the public spotlight. They did not. Someone eventually realized that a Rhinelander had married a local woman, and it was news. And once they discovered who Alice Jones was, it was big news. The first story appeared one month after their wedding, announcing to the world that the son of a Rhinelander had married the daughter of a colored man.
Or had he? Well, at least he had married the daughter of a working-class man, and that was enough to start a tremor of gossip throughout New York. Reporters rushed to sift through the legal documents and contradictory accounts of and by the Joneses and the newlyweds. Despite the confidence of the first announcement, there was confusion for quite some time as to George Jones’s–and therefore Alice’s–precise racial identity.
Leonard initially stood by his wife during the tumult of national coverage of their cross-class, possibly cross-racial, marriage. But after two weeks, he left her and signed an annulment complaint that his father’s lawyers had prepared. The suit charged Alice with misrepresenting her racial identity to her would-be husband. She was black, the document asserted, but had tried to pass as white. She was not the woman Leonard thought she was when he married her.
Our interest in the Rhinelander case began more than 18 years ago, when Earl came across newspaper accounts of the trial in the Norfolk Journal and Guide. The story pulsed with the complexities of race and identity in Jim Crow-era America, and he couldn’t pull himself away from it. A dozen years later he mentioned the story to Heidi, who began tracking down more information but eventually decided not to incorporate it into her dissertation. Instead, we decided to try a collaborative effort, and Heidi began a series of trips to Westchester County and New York City, tracking trial records, legal documents, and New York newspaper coverage and looking for surviving members of the families involved. We produced an article and quickly turned to writing a book.
Every researcher knows that of the many paths of inquiry planned, some will inevitably lead nowhere. We were, nonetheless, quite surprised to find that, despite repeated inquiries, our research failed to produce an extant copy of the court transcript in the Westchester County courthouses or their archives, or in the appellate courts, newspaper archives or lawyers’ offices. Tantalizing hints of its existence materialized, including an index of testimony and documents from subsequent legal challenges. Unfortunately, none of the courts could produce the transcript.
Without a transcript, we turned to newspaper coverage of the case. We culled pertinent coverage from several dozen national newspapers–black- and white-published–including dailies and tabloids from New York City and neighboring communities. From these sources we re-created the trial, sometimes overlaying numerous accounts of the same event to reconcile discrepancies or omissions. Our ability to do so was aided immensely by several daily newspapers’ habit of reproducing each day’s court record alongside their summaries, editorials, photographs, and cartoon coverage.
The regional and racial diversity of the sources gave us a more highly textured story than we first imagined, one that enabled us to gauge how the nation responded to its unfolding. Depending on newspapers made us aware not only of the immense popularity of the case but also of how the story reached different audiences with different messages and, to some extent, how the readership responded. Our book became a study of the cultural response to the trial and the issues it raised as much as it was an analysis of the trial itself.
Another path we hoped to pursue lay in finding Alice or Leonard or family members who might have more information about their relationship and lives after the trial. We quickly learned that Leonard had died in 1936, but we had no idea if Alice had remarried, had had children, or still lived. The New York Times had no obituary for her, nor did the New Rochelle Standard Star. While Alice was listed in city directories until the 1960s, apparently still living in her childhood home, thereafter she either moved or maintained an unlisted address. Local people remembered the case, but no one knew where she was.
One day in New Rochelle, after pursuing several unfruitful leads, Heidi stopped by the local cemetery, where she knew Alice’s parents were buried. The office had no record of Alice being buried with her family, but Heidi decided to visit the family plot anyway. As she walked around reading the graves, she literally tripped over a small flat stone lying almost flush with the grass. There was Alice’s grave. She had died in 1989.
More so than the absence of a transcript, the inability to interview participants and observers of the events left several still-unanswered questions. (Though more distant Rhinelanders did reply to our inquiries, most family members could not be found or declined to respond.) Most importantly, how did George and Alice define themselves racially? At the beginning of the trial, Alice’s lawyers said that Alice “had some colored blood in her veins.” Although the lawyers said they had only made the admission “for the purposes of the trial” and were careful never to call her black, most Americans understood that having colored ancestry meant she was black, albeit of mixed ancestry.
Her sisters both acknowledged on the witness stand that they were colored, and that they had never denied it. Their mother, Elizabeth, who was white, made a sharp distinction between having colored blood and being black. She was surprised that her husband was considered a Negro in the United States. She believed he was a mulatto but not black. This distinction, of course, contradicted white America’s system of popular and legal racial classification, which held that just one drop of black blood made one black. As a rule, Americans made few distinctions between colored and Negro by the 1920’s; gradations in mixed blood had given way to absolutes.
The illogic of such definitions did not go unnoticed by many blacks and some whites. Still, George Jones’s skin was dark enough that all who saw him agreed that in the American racial lexicon he could not be called white. He claimed only to know that his mother was white and his father had been a subject of the British colonies. But his daughters’ appearances were more ambiguous. Interviews with family members, neighbors, and friends did not clarify matters much. They offered conflicting stories of what people thought they were, how they presented themselves, and whether they defined themselves as black, white, colored or something else entirely.
Whether or not George and Elizabeth thought he was black, the family was clearly considered mixed by most people in their community, and their union threatened settled assumptions in Jim Crow-era America. By the 1920s, prohibitions against interracial marriage existed in more than half of the states. Most of these statutes also tried to define who was black and who was white–most using the one-drop rule, some offering a specific blood quantum (such as anyone with at least one-eighth black ancestry was black).
Although the US Supreme Court had refused in Plessy v. Ferguson to provide a definition of black and white, it did offer an opinion in 1924 on whether Asian Indians were white. The case in question involved an Indian immigrant, Bhagat Thind, who argued that he was Caucasian and therefore white and therefore eligible for US citizenship, from which Asian immigrants were excluded. The court agreed with him on one count: He was Caucasian. The majority concluded he was not white, however, since the perceptions and beliefs of the average man defined whiteness by pale skin and European ancestry. The Thind case made clear that American legal racial categories were socially constructed, not based in scientific racialism. It also highlighted the racial fissure many immigrants like George Jones experienced as they found themselves placed in a different classification in the United States than they had previously occupied.
Alice sails for Europe, 1926.
At the conclusion of our research it had become quite obvious that “passing” did not adequately explain Alice’s life. She and her family seemed to live in between the worlds of black and white, a difficult but not unknown act in the age of social and legal segregation. In admitting colored blood but avoiding identification as black, the Jones family raised serious challenges to the meaning of race–social, cultural and biological.
Alice’s admission of colored blood did not solve the ambiguity of her racial identity. In a state that had never made interracial marriages illegal, the primary issue turned on whether Leonard had known she wasn’t white when he married her. The question became not was she black or white, but how could he and other white Americans know? Thus, the case continued to expose many of the nation’s contradictory definitions of race.
Leonard (right) with family intimate and attorney Leon Jacobs, who appeared as a witness in the trial.
Throughout the trial, reporters carefully scrutinized Alice’s deportment, clothing and appearance. They searched for any detail that might explain who she was and give a fuller hint of her race. They also looked to see if she betrayed any lingering affection for Leonard. The reporters characterized her as “fair” or “slightly tanned” or “dusky” or even “ebony,” her skin tone waxing and waning with the tides of evidence and scandal. At perhaps the most memorable point of the trial, Alice, at the request of her lawyer, partially disrobed before the court, baring her breasts, back, and legs. Although no reporters were actually in the judge’s chambers when she exposed her body, all were sure she had proven her attorney’s point: that Leonard must have known from viewing her body prior to marriage that she was not white.
While she gave a few interviews to the press, Alice never actually testified, never told her story for the court record. She won her case, however. The annulment was denied, and the marriage was upheld. Editors generally agreed that the weight of evidence had been on her side, although some were surprised that Leonard’s race and class standing didn’t sway the jury. After another round of appeals Leonard disappeared, amidst continued speculation that the two had reunited. In 1930 Leonard resurfaced alone in Nevada, where he won a divorce that was recognized only in that state; they later signed a separation agreement in New York.
According to the terms, Leonard paid Alice a $32,500 lump sum and $3,600 per year for life. In return, Alice forfeited all claims to the Rhinelander estate and agreed not to use the Rhinelander name, nor to lecture or write publicly about her story, pledges she honored the rest of her life. Her parents and Leonard all died during the 1930s, events that recalled the trial for local and New York City newspapers.
So did a series of trials between Alice and the Rhinelander heirs over her annuity, which Alice again won. By the time she died, the print media and their readers had forgotten the case and her past notoriety. No one noticed that upon dying, and without speaking, she would get the last word. Her gravestone reads “Alice J. Rhinelander”–a reclamation of her identity as Leonard’s wife.
When we started our book, Love on Trial, we knew that the issues of racial identity raised by this case would resonate with contemporary readers. We had noted the rise of popular and political interest in the role and identity of children of mixed-race marriages in the post-Loving v. Virginia generation. The Rhinelander/Jones story offered an opportunity to bring the historical context of such contemporary concerns to a nonacademic audience.
However, in a trial laced with moments of high drama, if not melodrama, we did not want to replicate a series of caricatures–innocent Alice, vamping Alice, Leonard the dupe, Leonard the seducer. In a trial in which the vaudeville star Al Jolson testified, women were cleared from the courtroom because of the explicit nature of two of Leonard’s letters to Alice, and Alice partially disrobed before the jury, it could become easy to lose Alice and Leonard. We needed to communicate their depth and humanity, to explain both their path to love and their path to public spectacle.
Among colleagues, our joint research project leading to Love on Trial prompted almost as much interest as the story itself; collaborative authorship in history unfortunately is still uncommon. We had agreed to be equals in the process, to be free to challenge each other, edit passages, alter ideas, and settle on a joint sense of what the project meant. On the surface such a compact may appear straightforward, but for several of the years of our partnership, Earl served as Heidi’s dissertation chair, a reminder of a difference in status, experience and seniority. Despite these differences, however, we found that a shared commitment to the project made the collaboration work.
While Alice got the last word in her own story, we do not expect to do so with our book. Even now, a previously abandoned research path has reopened. This latest twist came just a few months ago, long after we had turned in the manuscript. We heard from the literary scholar Werner Sollors that one of his former students, Jamie L. Wacks, had obtained a copy of the trial transcript from the New York Bar Association. In March, after an initial report that it did not exist there either, we received a copy of the transcript.
Did finding it change anything? Yes and no. We now have the full texts of Leonard’s two letters that no newspaper was willing to print in full due to their explicit sexual nature. We can also answer a few other questions of detail, which we plan to do on a website. So far we have found nothing that would alter either our narrative or our overall analysis of the Rhinelander/Jones case. In fact, we are convinced that the route we took, while more difficult, made for a richer story.
And what about the other paths we could not follow? Will publication of this book prompt Alice’s heirs or other Rhinelander family members to tell their story? That would be a fascinating development, indeed. What might we learn about Alice and Leonard’s relationship? The Jones family’s thoughts about race and their own identity?
Alice’s family must have played a role in placing her married name on her gravestone. Perhaps Alice would get the last word once again.
__________________________________
Stephanie B.
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Wow, thanks!
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Blanc2:
What you said about mutual assimilation got me to thinking, so much so that I wrote a post on it:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/mutual-assimilation/
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I read this book several years ago in Af Am Lit class. All I remember is that I was the only one who found the nickname “nig” for his passing wife amusing.
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Fun fact: Heidi Ardizzone teaches at my university–She taught my History Seminar Freshman year. 🙂
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very basic interpretation of the text, i think both irene and clare are much more complicated. possibly based on nella larsen herself, she was daughter of african american man and dutch woman, her mother later remarried dutch man.ideas of identity pretty central to text, as with the majority of modernist texts.
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More complicated how?
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This book is a gem. Time and again while reading it I had “Ah ha!” moments. Aside from the story, it is an interesting historical snapshot of the black upper class and a time when one might “pass” for an hour to gain entrance to a restaurant…
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“Passing” is NOT about Claire, it is about Irene. I disagree about the claim that it is a tale of a tragic mulatto as well, other than the fact that she dies, there is nothing “tragic” about the way Claire views her life. You should learn how to analyze good literature
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