Passing (racial identity)
[2] Although these mixed-race people were often half white or more, institutions of hypodescent and the 20th-century one drop rule in some states – particularly in the South – classified them as black and therefore, inferior, particularly after slavery became a racial caste.
[4] These same people that were able to pass as white were sometimes known for leaving the African American community and getting an education, later to return and assist with racial uplifting.
Author Charles W. Chestnutt, who was born free in Ohio as a mixed-race African American, explored circumstances for persons of color in the South after emancipation, for instance, for a formerly enslaved woman who marries a white-passing man shortly after the conclusion of Civil War.
Some fictional exploration coalesced around the figure of the "tragic mulatta", a woman whose future is compromised by her being mixed race and able to pass for white.
"[5]: 29 The writer and literary critic Anatole Broyard saw his father pass in order to get work after his Louisiana Creole family moved north to Brooklyn before World War II.
This idea of crossing the color line at different points in one's life is explored in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
In the 20th century, Krazy Kat comics creator George Herriman, a Louisiana Creole cartoonist born to mulatto parents, passed as white throughout his adult life.
[10][11][12] The aforementioned 20th-century writer and critic Anatole Broyard was a Louisiana Creole who chose to pass for white in his adult life in New York City and Connecticut.
"[13] Mae Catt, a queer Asian-American writer for Young Justice, added that when shows are not run or written by people of color, Black characters are "surface decoration" with racial representation going "very similarly to queer representation" as the cultural identity of characters is not shown, with an "unspoken implicit destructive bias" that their behavior is "correct," behavior that is "inevitably white.
"[13] Edward Stirling, one of the early British settlers in South Australia, was the illegitimate child of a Scottish slaveholder in Jamaica and an unidentified woman of colour.
[17] In the iconic autobiography My Place, a central theme is Sally Morgan, whose family passed as Indians, discovering her Aboriginal heritage.
Hahn Beer wrote a memoir called: The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust.
There are also examples of the opposite: some persons such as Misha Defonseca, Laurel Rose Willson or the author who wrote Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood falsely claimed to be Jewish Holocaust survivors after 1945.
Marie Lee Bandura, who grew up as part of the New Westminster Indian Band in British Columbia, was orphaned and believed she was the last of her people.
