Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation

Abstract

Race OffThe fantasy of race transformation Namwali Serpell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Genevieve Gaignard, People Make the World Go Round, 2019. [End Page 44] What if you could change your race? Some disturbing scandals of late have put this hypothetical to the reality test. A cluster of white American academics and activists, all women it seems, have been revealed to have spent years cosplaying a different race—Latinx, North African, black—deceiving their colleagues and comrades. The valedictorian of this recent class of racial fakers remains Rachel Dolezal, the former college instructor, activist, and president of an NAACP chapter, who was outed by a reporter in 2015. She confessed that she was "born white to white parents," but still declares herself to be "racially human" and culturally black. [End Page 45] Such deceptions are nothing new. Racial hoaxes have been around for a long time, as Laura Browder explains in Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (2000). In the mid-nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum showcased people of concocted races, such as "the Circassian Beauty," and promoted a "Negro" who claimed to have discovered "a weed that turns a black person white." Newspapers at the time called out runaway slave imposters, who went around "soliciting money," "purchasing relatives and friends." White writers published fake slave narratives, with some unconscious tells, according to Browder: their narrators tend to discover that slavery is bad (as if this were not obvious) and to betray both "disgust with the African-American body" and "an obsession with physical pain." As late as the 1920s, the Britishborn Archibald Stansfeld Belaney disguised himself as Grey Owl, a Native American man. In his 2017 history Bunk, Kevin Young notes that "the hoax regularly steps in when race rears its head—exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real." Indeed, historical evidence and scientific consensus tell us that race is a social rather than a biological reality. Yet we harbor a nearatavistic obsession with the mechanics and psychology of race impersonators. How do they change their skin color, their hair texture, their voice? And why? Is it minstrelsy? Is it racial self-hatred, white guilt, the fetishism of others? In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis diagnoses the new crop of race fakers with "social Munchausen syndrome," likening it to the condition in which a person fakes an illness in order to garner sympathy. Others have argued that being not-white has come to seem politically profitable in our present moment. Hence the co-optation of social justice rhetoric in what we call the "Oppression Olympics" and "white grievance" politics. To wit, suffering is now a form of cultural capital. While history, psychology, and sociology provide some context, we can also see these women as the latest players in a game I call the fantasy of American race transformation. If we take a lead from Barnum, we can taxonomize this genre along various axes: when these texts appeared and who produced them, which race [End Page 46] gets transformed and into which race, what mechanism catalyzes it and how, whether it's imposed or self-motivated and to what end, whether it's reversible or permanent, and so on. While there's a veritable circus of racial chimeras to consider, I'll train my spotlight on the transformations between black and white people, in popular narrative works created by black and white Americans, from the 1850s to now. From "passing" to cross-racial reportage to speculative fiction, the fantasy of changing your race cuts an electric line—thrilling, dangerous, illuminating—through the American popular imagination. At first glance, there's something radical in the very idea of changing your race, which assumes that race is changeable and therefore unfixed: in short, a construct. But all the aesthetic energy in race transformation stories—their alchemy, ambiguity, and absurdity—springs from the surprise of a black person "inside" a white person or vice versa. And this assumes an essential racial self or soul lurking within the lightened or darkened skin. To change your race either becomes a kind of thought experiment, geared to make you empathize with another race or to punish...