A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Abstract

As Allyson Hobbs writes in her fine new book, most of what we know about racial passing comes from literature and visual culture. But now, thanks to her creative mining of sources, we have a historical account and a method of thinking more deeply and precisely about the meaning of passing in a racialized society, where the lines and landmarks are always changing. The idea of traces is key here. The practice of passing relies on the erasure of precisely the kinds of evidence that historians typically require. Hobbs makes an art of following clues that have marked literature (e.g., Nella Larsen's Quicksand [1928] and Passing [1929]), painting (Archibald J. Motley Jr.'s An Octoroon Girl [1925] graces the cover) and photography (from P. B. S. Pinchback and Josephine Bruce to Fredi Washington and Jean Toomer) into the absences that hover on the margins of many black family stories. Asserting that “this is a book about loss,” Hobbs parleys these fragments and gaps into a nuanced narrative that reaches back to the colonial period and forward toward the challenges of racial identity in a post–civil rights twenty-first century (p. 4). Throughout, Hobbs refuses to look “down” on the experience of passing from the point of view of the racial regime but “bring[s] into focus what passers saw when they looked out onto their own worlds” (p. 17).