In the Summer of 2017, I went to see the European premiere of the Braden Jacobs-Jenkins play An Octoroon. Based on the 1859 melodrama by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, it was staged at the Orange Tree Theatre in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. A truly bombastic production that lampooned the tropes of the “tragic mulatto” story in a way that was confrontational, incredibly inventive and tonnes of fun. Sparked up by what we had just watched, the biracial man who was my date for the night, regaled me with the tale of his adoption by white parents in the North of England over a drawn-out meal at the white and blue Italian chain restaurant, Pizza Express, immediately afterward. As two unambiguously Black Britons, one might expect our feelings on the play to be more similar than they actually were. That night the awareness and emotional nuance that the actresses Lola Evans and Bafta Nominee Vivian Oparah (of Rye Lane fame) was not as readily apparent in my date. He diminished the cultural relevance of the production to us, warning me against using American racial perspectives to analyse the realities of how we are racialised in Britain. I did not listen.
My father is Zimbabwean. My mother is Jamaican. Raised in a pan Africanist household, my understanding of blackness was quite necessarily diasporic. All Black experience is of intellectual interest to me—including the experience of those who may not be perceived as Black. They cause me to ask questions of myself. Does the ambiguity of someone’s blackness negate its validity? Does my unambiguous blackness immovably place me at the top of a hierarchy of authenticity, irrespective of my internalized anti-blackness? Does someone who comes to know themselves as Black later in life, value their identity more, or maybe just differently, to the way I do?
My debut novel The Library Thief has a British main character who passes as white. To be more specific, she is “white presenting” as she is unaware of her African ancestry at the outset of the story. I concocted her story out of the novel The Long Song by Andrea Levy imagining the tale of the daughter descendant of the kidnapped light skinned baby Emily, as detailed in my Author’s note. Black women of all shades have been bleached out of Britain’s history whenever our presence is deemed incoherent, inconvenient or irrelevant. By telling the story of a woman who would definitely be described as ‘an octoroon’ in Victorian times, I was able to explore the way someone who presents as white with African ancestry could fight for agency and survival in a country that sought her literal and figurative erasure. I wanted to explore the experience of someone expanding their sense of self by discovering their blackness and the moral implications of that. In a white supremacist world, why wouldn’t one simply deny or neglect one’s blackness given the option of clear material rewards? What is gained by claiming one’s blackness if one has the chance not to?
White passing and white presenting are mistakenly used interchangeably in modern parlance, when in fact historically there was a clear distinction. To live one’s life “passing as white” requires a clear decision to leave one’s Black life behind, potentially cutting oneself off from family and community in order to obscure one’s African ancestry. To be white presenting doesn’t necessarily require this denial—it’s more neutral, in that one is only “perceived as white” in daily life, irrespective of whether one denies any color in one’s ancestry.
A Chosen Exile by Allyson Hobbs
The title is as concise a definition of passing as one can imagine. A chosen exile being “a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another.” The book details how those whose blackness was ambiguous enough, would use their lighter skin as an opportunity to reach for freedom and opportunities that would have been summarily denied them otherwise. There are unexpected and unconsidered stories held within too. Those who sunk into a drowning melancholy grieving for the blackness they lost. Family, community, culture, richness and love. Stories of those who used their lighter skin to free darker members of their family and bring them to freedom. Stories of those who gave up passing after a period of time because the loss was too great for them to bare and/or whatever intended goal had been achieved and was deemed enough. To have such a thorough academic work as this is essential for those seeking to know exacting stories of those who rode the edge of existing racial categories and finagled their way into lives with as much agency as they could muster.
Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo
The nail-biting story of how an enslaved couple, where the wife passing as another race and gender to escape bondage in Georgia and become campaigners for abolition as escapees from recapture in Great Britain. Their story is a thrilling account that demands a cinematic rendering with its wily near misses and enslaving villains chasing them at every turn through the Carolinas, Virginia, Philadelphia, Boston and eventually to them having to take flight across the Atlantic. A tale of endurance and political principal where even before their freedom was fully secured their life’s purpose was consistently focused on securing the freedom of those they were compelled to leave behind.
The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe
The hopes and ambitions of post-Civil War Reconstruction era were repeatedly thwarted by the realities of Jim Crow and the terrorism of lynching. Nevertheless, the Northern states have never been able to get off scot-free convincingly. Racial segregation not even being more visibly polite in spite of claims to the contrary. The institutional discrimination faced by Black people, even at a time when W.E.B. Dubois had already graduated from Harvard, meant that the first Black female student at Vassar needed to conceal her blackness if she had any hope of admission. The novel teems with charged tension as Anita Hemmings’ pursuit of a decent education is constantly under threat from her fears of being caught in her whitest of lies. The guile and charisma of her senior year roommate entwining her into potential calamity that leaves the reader’s back damp with perspiration from the stress of it all. It’s been seven years since it was announced Zendaya will produce and star in the film adaptation of the novel renamed A White Lie.
Passing by Nella Larsen
The now seminal text portraying vignettes into the life of the ridiculously reckless Clare Kendry and the endlessly anxious Irene Redfield has captivated readers for a century. A sky-scraping achievement from a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, the queer coded depiction of a woman who uses her ability to pass as white to play in the face of a racist, will continue to be argued as an act of Black feminist defiance. Snatching racial privilege out of the mouth of the lion in the age of Gatsby which lasted only as long as it could. My mind remains made up, but I’ve never recovered from the “did she or didn’t she” of the last scene. Possibly the most perfect novella ever written.
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
The collaboration between Heather Terrell and Victoria Christopher Murray yields an immensely personal biographical fiction of Belle da Costa Greene who curated the library of J.P. Morgan. Completely upturning the assumption that librarians in the main have a desire to live quite quiet lives, the story wields its temerity with everything taking place just above the scandal. One of America’s most brilliant archivists finally gets the light shone on her that she always deserved.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
My most purchased book ever. Why? I could depend on anyone I purchased the book for, texting or calling me about it and thus the gifting of it became a request for intimacy. Bennett’s research and sensitivity sings itself into the reader’s bones, in a page turner of a book infused with all the stories that have come before it. The chicken stock of “Passing.” The herbal aromas of “Imitation of Life.” Twin sisters: one who chooses to pass for white for more than her own personal gain, and the other who chooses to remain Black in spite of the cost. The fracturing of a family bubbling up lava between the shifting tectonic plates that shake the foundations of the characters all the way through the story. A page turner of the highest order that left me reeling at the end with memories of the locations I was lucky enough to read it in. A sensational masterpiece!
We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Things will only get better? Will a skin lightening procedure that’s less dermatologically dangerous than our current skin bleaching practices cause more or less harm? Penning provocative satirical prose in one of the boldest debuts of recent years, Ruffin’s warning of a potential future is nowhere near as ridiculous as one wants it to be. How should one deal with discomfort, desperation and longing? Is a father’s desire to help his biracial son escape the racial reality his own bourgeois accomplishments prove is doggedly inescapable, an act of love or madness? Some readers will feel more lanced than others but unfortunately it’s a story that implicates us all.
