I have Rape-Colored Skin

[Marcuse]

45. Many light skinned people identified as white, but privilege came at a price.

The ability to pass oneself off as white—to choose between living with their existing identity or adopt the dominant racial identity—is the most extreme colorism privilege. It’s not an option to which the vast majority of black Americans has access. In an ethnic group in which “selling out” or being an “Uncle Tom” are major taboos, it’d be understandable if the discussion of passing focused on the supreme selfishness of the act. Passing is, at its essence, abandonment of the group to better the individual. And yet, the intra-community discussion about passing tends to avoid the question of the morality of the act. Instead, within the black community, family passing stories often serve other purposes: as a way of emphasizing the absurdity of race; as an example of a family’s access to the privileges of colorism; as a trickster performance of the ultimate racial transgression.

Like many African American families, mine is pale as hell. Always has been, going back over a century. Most of my ancestors passed the notorious “brown paper bag test,” used by social clubs within the black community to discriminate against any person darker than a literal brown paper bag. My relatives were pale enough that, to people outside the black community, they might be confused for Latino or Native or mixed. But while genetically they were mixed with a combination of mostly African and European ancestry, ethnically and racially, they were black. It’s just that some didn’t look it. Because they were all descendants of generations of nonconsensual sex between the slave-owning class and their slave captives.

With the energetic discussion of mixed-race identity in the modern era, it’s important to point out that there’s not a damn thing new about mixing between black and white people. Not only is it not a new phenomenon, it was a primary feature of American slavery. As a result, on average, African Americans have up to 24 percent European ancestry. By the end of America’s 246 years of slavery (1619–1865), there was so much generational intermixing, that there were a small minority of black slaves who, in all appearance, who looked 100 percent European.





https://www.topic.com/passing-in-moments