Passing

Definition:

We approach the concept of passing considering passing as a deliberate or involuntary process of crossing racial borders through physical actions and behaviors. We discuss the role of passing as being shaped by precarious racial categories and the powerful social, economic, and legal privileges attached to whiteness. Across time, it has served as a strategy for mobility, safety, and inclusion within systems designed to exclude Black people, even as it demanded emotional sacrifice, secrecy, and the constant negotiation of one’s identity. We recognize that passing is a concept prevalent to many identities; however, we will primarily focus on the word in the context of Black people passing for white in America.

Racial Categorization

Before discussing how passing impacted enslaved people’s lives, we must first understand how racial categories were drawn. The emergence of the one-drop rule in the early 1800s demonstrates one of the most notorious ways that racial distinctions were formulated. The one-drop rule operates through the idea of “hypodescent”, meaning that even the smallest amount of African ancestry or “blood” is classified as Black¹. According to Professor David Hollinger at the University of California, a specialist in ethnoracial history, “Keeping the color line sharp facilitated the enslavement of children begotten upon slave women by white men”². The denial of biracial children was a significant factor in the racial categorization of people during slavery. 

However, the anxiety over slaves (whether multiracial or not) being perceived as white was abundant. This fear led to slaveowners attempting to find ways to pinpoint “something that makes a person ‘two-thirds white’ but not ‘pure white,’ or something that would allow an observer knowledgeable about racial difference to detect the ‘one drop’ of black blood”³. The very idea that someone would have to visually identify what makes a person appear “two-thirds white” rather than “pure white” highlights how arbitrary these racial distinctions were. Cutter demonstrates how slaveowners were haunted by the possibility that a person who was defined as Black in one context could look indistinguishable from someone defined as white. Additionally, in the landmark Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals case Hudgins v. Wright, Judge George Tucker created his own racial test for determining whether the Wrights were Black and therefore slaves or Indian and therefore free:

“Besides the difference of complexion, which often remain visible long after the characteristic distinction of colour either disappears or becomes doubtful; a flat nose and woolly head of hair. The latter of these disappears the last of all; and so strong an ingredient in the African constitution is this latter character, that it predominates uniformly where the party is in equal degree descended from parents of different complexions, whether white or Indians.”⁴

Judge Tucker’s attempt to devise a personal “racial test” based broadly on nose shape and hair texture, because color can become “doubtful,” further reveals how unreliable racial markers actually were. The unreliable nature of these markers is precisely what made passing possible. If race required constant interpretation, it could easily be misread by judges and slave owners. Consequently, enslaved individuals could–and did–move across racial boundaries, sometimes intentionally to secure freedom and sometimes simply because their features confounded the categories that White society imposed on them. In this way, passing became a structural consequence of the contradictions within slavery’s allegedly clear racial system. 

Passing During the Era of Slavery

Although slavery in America rested on an allegedly rigid racial hierarchy, people who passed as white revealed the system’s violent contradictions: passing blurred the lines of this socially constructed, often ambiguous, racial hierarchy that slaveholders presented as being natural, visible, and biologically fixed. Although the law insisted that racial lines were fixed, the lived reality of slaves demonstrated their precarious nature. For some, passing became a crucial strategy of escape, as in the case of William Craft, a means of seizing mobility, autonomy, and safety in a world that denied them all three⁵. 

Yet passing was not always a conscious or deliberate act; many enslaved people were themselves uncertain of the full complexity of their ancestry and could be perceived as white without intentionally crafting a racial disguise. Slave owners, too, frequently expressed anxiety and confusion about the extent to which enslaved individuals could manipulate or disrupt racial categories, revealing their own awareness of the contradictions they publicly denied⁶. In this way, passing during slavery unveils the fundamental instability of racial categories, the tactical manipulation of the system, and the lived reality of biracial identity.

Racial Mobility

Perhaps one of the most notable examples of racial passing as a means of escaping slavery is the story of Ellen and William Craft in 1848. The couple exploited the fraught system of racial categorization to escape slavery in Macon, Georgia. Their performance was elaborate and challenged the boundaries of race and gender to pass as free⁷. For the Crafts to travel together without arousing any form of suspicion, their escape depended on Ellen. Ellen was light-skinned enough to pass as white, and she took that opportunity to pass as William’s white male slaveholder. Using much of their life savings, William purchased high-quality men’s clothing to dress Ellen in a manner befitting a Southern white gentleman⁸. In Figure 1, Ellen is depicted wearing a top hat, cravat, jacket, tartan, and tassel, all clothing that signified her status as a slaveowner and planter.

To truly pass as a white man, however, Ellen Craft would need to do more than dress in an elaborate costume; she would also need to simulate the language associated with upper-class white masculinity. To hide her illiteracy, she “bound her arm in a sling so that she would not be asked to sign her name in hotel registries or in the Custom House book in Charleston”¹⁰. In addition, she also had to repeatedly excuse herself from conversations, as being a white man also meant engaging in “intelligent” conversation (conversation associated with educated, white, upper-class men) that she was not capable of. Ellen’s passing underscores that racial passing was a multidimensional practice extending far beyond physical appearance. It was not sufficient for her simply to wear the clothing of a white man; she also had to carefully manage every aspect of her performance, including her speech and demeanor, to avoid revealing her true identity. The Crafts were able to successfully pass as white and secure freedom, illustrating how racial passing functioned as a form of racial mobility, allowing the enslaved couple to cross racial boundaries that might appear rigid but were actually malleable. 

The Craft’s success in passing to escape slavery illuminates a larger structural phenomenon: passing was possible because racial identity was permeable and determined through subjective judgment. As mentioned previously, antebellum lawmakers and communities repeatedly confronted cases in which racial identity was not so easily discerned, leading to the rise of improvised “tests” to determine who counted as Black. As Daniel Sharfstein’s research shows, “the constancy of racial migration, undeterred by ‘embarrassment and difficulty,’” was visible across numerous communities, where families of ambiguous ancestry crossed the color line to secure freedom¹¹. Additionally, he notes how enslaved and free whites journeyed together and how “by accident and by design, geographical mobility often translated into racial mobility”¹². For example, Thomas Jefferson’s third child with Sally Hemings, Eston Hemings, moved to Ohio and then Wisconsin and “established himself as white” in a new community. Interestingly, white individuals in communities often recognized that certain individuals were racially ambiguous, yet they frequently disagreed on how to classify them¹³. In this way, Hemings’s story shows that racial passing could rely on geographic movement and the readiness of new communities to accept and affirm reaffirmed racial identities. 

The ability of individuals like the Crafts or Eston Hemings to redefine themselves, whether through performance, geographic relocation, or the uncertainties within community perception, demonstrates that the racial order of the antebellum South was far more unstable than laws claimed. Their stories begin to expose how the act of passing did more than secure individual freedom, but also reveal the contradictions at the heart of racial classification. However, intentional passing to secure freedom represents only one side of the coin. Passing also surfaced in less deliberate ways, especially in the language and assumptions in runaway slave advertisements. 

Passing & Runaway Slave Advertisements

In May 1845, an enslaved Black woman named Fanny escaped from her owner on a plantation in Alabama. In several runaway slave advertisements, Fanny is described by her enslaver as “white as most white women,” noting that she had light skin, straight hair, and blue eyes¹⁴. She is also described as “pious” and “very intelligent,” descriptions that, within the logic of the slave market, served to increase her economic value¹⁵. The tension between describing her as white as any white woman and then insisting she is Black highlights the fundamental inconsistencies with racial classification. Fanny’s advertisement illustrates a level of unintentional passing when enslavers themselves described fugitives in terms that aligned more with whiteness than Blackness.

Something important to note is the extent to which passing was intentional or not, a question that becomes especially relevant when examining runaway slave advertisements and how they described perceived racial ambiguity. Some advertisements suggest that enslaved individuals intentionally passed for white, showcasing their ability to control and manipulate the conventions of racial identity. For example, in an advertisement published in The New-York Weekly Journal in 1747, it describes a biracial man “with his Head commonly shaved in order to make himself pass for a white man”.¹⁶ While this wording clearly shows that the writer sees the fugitive slave as intentionally passing, not all advertisements recognize intentional passing on the part of the escapee. For example, Figure 2 depicts an advertisement from 1780 for a man named Will.

This particular advertisement describes an enslaved man who was “frequently seen both in Kingston and Port Royal, and passed for free”. In this case, passing may not have been deliberate. Still, the language of the ad shows that slave owners were aware of the possibility that someone’s appearance could allow them to potentially be misinterpreted as free. Another example of potential unintentional passing is in an advertisement published in the Virginia Gazette in 1769 by Thomas Jefferson (see Figure 3).

This ad highlights an enslaved man who is described as “a light Mulatto Fellow”, with an emphasis on his “complexion light”. The choice of descriptors such as “mulatoo”, “light”, and “his skin under his clothes very white” indicates that his physical appearance allowed him to potentially pass for white. The insistence on noting when someone looked white enough to escape notice shows how precarious racial categories truly were. By warning others that a fugitive might pass, slaveowners exposed their own fear that the racial order could be disrupted if an enslaved person could successfully move across the very boundaries meant to contain them. Although these antebellum advertisements reveal early forms of the concept of passing, they mark only the beginning of a much longer and evolving history of passing. After the Civil War, the idea of passing took on new meanings and motivations, with the rise of Jim Crow segregation, new racial ideologies, and shifting social and economic opportunities.

Passing during the 1920s

Nella Larsen & the Harlem Renaissance

The book Passing by Nella Larsen, published in 1929, as well as her other works, such as Quicksand, are radical in their exploration of racial identity shaped by capitalism and class, specifically in the 1920s. In 2021, the novel was adapted into a film, which we will revisit later on. Passing explores the stories of Clare and Irene, two black women who are able to pass for white, but only Clare does. There are different lenses through which Larsen’s work can be viewed, including how Larsen portrays the complexities that come with biracial individuals passing as white specifically within the context of 1920s higher class capitalist society.¹⁹ Set in Harlem, New York, Larsen captures the shifting implications of contemporary racial identity that came with the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural and artistic boom that celebrated Black identity and worked against racial stereotypes. Passing is associated not only with separating racial identity, but also with upwards social mobility and class distinctions (Harper, 1998). Larsen’s work underscores the broader implications of how an individual’s decision of whether or not to pass impacts their community and place in society. Larsen’s work, alongside the literature of other notable figures of the time, such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, was pivotal in shaping contemporary significance of the practice of passing, and has influenced modern art, as seen in Figure 4.

Shoshanna Weinberger, a widely exhibited Caribbean-American artist, references “passing” and the work of Nella Larsen in the title of her 2020 exhibition, “Passing Between the Lines.” The use of stripes in her abstractions evokes the idea of the barriers that come with intersectional racial identities.²¹ Additionally, Weinberger comments on how her work was influenced by the idea of women’s experiences with cultural ambiguity and “navigating on impulse to shape-shift among society to survive or ‘pass’ between the lines of race.”²² The experiences of Larsen’s characters evidently continue to resonate with biracial women and individuals today, illustrating the timelessness and central role her work takes on.

Civil Rights & Black Power Movements

Over the years, the Civil Rights Movement, ideas about race, and the effects of societal pressure didn’t disappear, but transformed. With the emergence of legal rights that allowed for the introduction of educational, political, and economic mobility among Black individuals, the internal tension of trying to racially fit into an environment where discrimination persisted had consequential implications. For many during this period, a Black person affirming their race publicly was a sign of dignity and collective liberation, while those who chose to pass as white were seen as assimilationist.²³

The Rise of the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s, 1970s came as a continuation and a critique of the established Civil Rights Movement. Through acts of self-determination, cultural nationalism, and community cultivation, the movement encouraged Black Americans to reclaim their identity as a source of political strength rather than a position of imposed inferiority.²⁴ Embodying those actions was the iconic Black Panther Party. Their main fight towards liberation came from building their own institutions that served Black communities to grant Black people the chance to define their own future.

This photograph of the Black Panther Party captures their influential strength. Their disciplined stance, matching uniforms, and assertive presence outside of the New York City courthouse, a building associated with the criminalization of Black people, symbolized a switch in perspective from being surveilled and silenced to organizers and political actors who demanded accountability. Drawing on Peniel E. Joseph’s point that embracing one’s racial identity becomes a political act, this image shows that racial self-definition was no longer just personal but part of the larger liberation struggle.²⁵

A more recent retelling of the evolving negotiation of racial identity appears in the later portion of the video, The Secret Lives of Black Folks Who Passed as White (starting at 9:15), examining the continuance of passing after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The section after the 9:15-minute mark moves the video from discussing historical examples to a deep analysis of the emotional, familial, and psychological results that came from the late twentieth century.

The stories told reinforce the strain felt by those during the Black Power Movement, a time when racial pride was used as political opposition. People struggled in constant battles of heavy moral judgments and fear of being perceived as betraying their community. The video, which chooses to focus on modern repercussions of passing rather than the earlier historical moments, illustrates how the identity pressures amplified by moments like the Black Power Movement did not fade during escalation but instead reshaped the interest of self-identification in the post-Civil Rights era. 

The Civil Rights and Black Power movements have reshaped what passing meant by explicitly confronting social, economic, and legal privileges attached to whiteness. As organizations like the Black Panther Party rejected assimilation and created a range of spaces to embrace Blackness, they challenged the long-standing idea that many Black people believed that the only approach to mobility and potential required proximity to whiteness. The Black Panther Party’s stance was rooted in the belief that white institutions remained racist and, therefore, liberation would not come from blending in with those institutions but from asserting and defending Black identity in new ones. The politicization that came with racial pride complicated the emotional landscape of passing. Choosing to pass as white, during a moment when being openly and unapologetically Black was made to seem as an act of resistance, automatically set someone as an enemy.

Passing in the 21st Century

While the 21st century has seen an increase in social justice and education around race, passing is still incredibly relevant, and our understanding of the word is still changing. 21st-century films have begun to see an increase in movies and actors coming from more diverse backgrounds. Alongside the rise of streaming, kids and adolescents can now watch an array of stories from their couch. Young audiences sometimes choose what to watch motivated by “identity exploration and gratification .”²⁶ Popular stream services like Netflix allow people to watch important films exploring race and gender for a subscription fee. Revisiting her classic story, Nella Larsen’s Passing saw an adaptation for the screen in 2021. Available on Netflix, the film illustrates the same story set in the 1920s, casting Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, two light-skinned black women, as Clare and Irene. Casting two actresses of similar skin tones shows how skin color is not the end-all, be-all when it comes to passing, it is instead how one assumes class through elements of speech, costume, and hair and makeup (See Figure 7).

The film is shot in black and white, a decision to further highlight how this is a racialized narrative commenting on the polarity of the experiences of Black women and White women in the 20s. In this clip, Hall decides to frame the women separately during their conversation. This cutting back and forth allows the audience to further feel how the stark societal difference between Whiteness and Blackness is reinforced by racial passing. This concept of passing is personified in how the costume design performs physical indicators of race. Irene has darker, more natural appearing hair, defined eye brows, a less assertive tone of speech, and a cloche hat²⁷ with a brim that both draws a shadow on and hides her face. On the other hand, Clare sports a light colored wig pinned to expose her face, dyed eyebrows, and a calculated confidence within her proper speech. Larsen’s portrayal of the simultaneous polarization and similarities of Black and White bodies in the context of racial passing is accentuated and brought back to life by the increase of diversity in modern-day representation and filmmaking technologies of the 21st century. 

But, it is important to mention that this representation of race and identity in media and entertainment is not exclusively characteristic of this rigid Black and White contrast. Due to the rise of social media in the latter half of the 2000s, the constantly expanding globalization of world markets, and the increase in minority populations in the US, there has been an increase in different background stories being told and subsequently heard. This emerging idea of “cancel culture” has brought an increased sensitivity to racism, creating boundaries of what you can and cannot do in consideration of one’s race and skin color. With this has come an increase in studying passing, not only in Black and White contexts, but also in how many different racial groups experience passing in different ways. To learn about passing in the context of all races, we must first acknowledge how the experiences of Black individuals passing for White have shaped how we understand racial passing as a whole. From the 1800s to the 2000s, we’ve identified how passing exists within the lengths people will go to survive under the racialized scrutiny of American bodies in the wake of colonialism and slavery. From the one-drop rule to the Black Panther party, to Netflix adaptations of literary classics of racial discourse, we’ve shown how, in the context of Black people passing for white in America, passing was and is a irrefutably relevant process in social status, social justice, the workplace, policing, education, entertainment, and other systems and infrastructures that are influenced by systemic racism.

Contributors

• Selene Solari-Cis
• Simran Allana
• Freydy German
• Luka Zorich

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2. Hollinger, “One Drop Rule”, 20. ↩︎
3. Cutter, Martha J. “‘As White as Most White Women’: Racial Passing in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the Origins of a Multivalent Term.” American Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 73–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44982355. ↩︎
4. Ian Haney-López, “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 29, no. 1 (1994), 2. ↩︎
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6. Cutter, “White as Most White Women”, 93. ↩︎
7. Marshall, “Endeavor to Pass for Free” ↩︎
8. Marshall, “Endeavor to Pass for Free” ↩︎
9. Image From: Barbara McCaskill, “William and Ellen Craft,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Jul 17, 2020, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/william-and-ellen-craft-1824-1900-1826-1891/ ↩︎
10. Marshall, “Endeavor to Pass for Free” ↩︎
11. Sharfstein, Daniel J. “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007): 592–656. https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/627.
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12. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line”, 633. ↩︎
13. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line”, 595. ↩︎
14. Cutter, “White as Most White Women”, 74. ↩︎
15. Cutter, “White as Most White Women”, 74 ↩︎
16. Cutter, “White as Most White Women”, 84 ↩︎
17. Image From: Sam Newman, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica”, William & Mary Quarterly/Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2021, https://oireader.wm.edu/open_wmq/hidden-in-plain-sight/hidden-in-plain-sight-escaped-slaves-in-late-eighteenth-and-early-nineteenth-century-jamaica.
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18. Image From: “Thomas Jefferson Advertises for Self-Emancipating Enslaved Man”, Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, 2025, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/346hpr-068d545eeba2ae2/. ↩︎
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20. Image From: “Passing Exhibition Page — Long Gallery Harlem.” Long Gallery Harlem, www.long.gallery/passing-btw-the-lines. ↩︎
21. Weinberger, Shoshanna. “Passing between the Lines.” shoshanna weinberger studio. Accessed December 13, 2025. https://shoshanna.info/?page_id=100. ↩︎
22. Weinberger, ““Passing Exhibition Page — Long Gallery Harlem.” ↩︎
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24. Harris, Jessica C. “Revolutionary Black Nationalism: The Black Panther Party.” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (2001): 409–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/1562458. ↩︎
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26. Ellithorpe ME, Bleakley A. Wanting to See People Like Me? Racial and Gender Diversity in Popular Adolescent Television. J Youth Adolesc. 2016 Jul;45(7):1426-37. doi: 10.1007/s10964-016-0415-4.
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27. Dargis, Manohla. “‘Passing’ Review: Black Skin, White Masks.” New York Times. (2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/movies/passing-review.html ↩︎