Abstract
In his 1946 essay, The World and the Jug, Ralph Ellison claims that although the sociologists tell us that thousands of light skinned Negroes become White each year undetected, most Negroes can spot a paper thin 'White Negro' every time.' Ellison's assertion of an almost intuitive faculty of recognition, by which members of an in-group-a term I use to designate the group from which one has passed-are privy to visual codes that evade the duped spectators of the pass, will be the subject of this essay. As a member of a group from which one passes, Ellison makes a typical claim. Throughout the literature of racial and sexual passing, members of the in-group insist on a distinctive location that allows them to recognize a never truly hidden prepassing identity.2 As one brash
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