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Impurely raced // purely erased: toward a rhetorical theory of (bi)racial passing

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Impurely raced // purely erased: toward a rhetorical theory of (bi)racial passing

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IMPURELY RACED // PURELY ERASED:
TOWARD A RHETORICAL THEORY OF (BI)RACIAL PASSING

by

Marcia Alesan Dawkins

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 Marcia Alesan Dawkins

ii
EPIGRAPH

When the sun leaves dusk
On far horizons,
And night envelopes
Empty seas
And fading dream-ships;
When the stars have eyes,
And their light blends
With darkness—
I stand alone,
Salute and pass
Proud shadows.
--Jean Toomer, “And Pass”

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earning a Doctorate in Rhetoric and Political Communication at the University
of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication has been
steeped with prospects for professional and personal development. In large part
due to the setting, Los Angeles, I have enjoyed the privilege of getting to know
many amazing people from all walks of life.
For the delight of community, and for the pleasure of thinking and
rethinking my work with people I like, I have to thank Kate Pieper, Rebecca
Herr-Stephenson, Jeff and Amber Hall, Deborah Hanan, Karen Bowdre, Marc
Choueiti, Amy Granados, Ric Whitney, Ulli K. Ryder, and Richard J.
Lawrence, Jr. In the middle of USC Annenberg we created an extraordinary
haven of intellectual and personal honesties. I never thought graduate school
would afford me the honor of knowing people of such strength, power, and
complication. A special “shout out” to Ulli and Richard, whom I thank for
introducing me to the power of open source culture and, by consequence,
teaching me the futility of intellectual property and the pleasures of
partnership. I carry their friendship with me as I begin my professional journey
with my new colleagues and students at California State University Fullerton,
who have given me a reason to finish and who have made me a special part of
their outstanding learning community.
I am especially indebted to my committee for not only reading my
work and challenging my ideas, but also for exemplifying, in their work and in

iv
their lives, the truth of what it means to be a scholar. I want to thank Randy
Lake for his uncompromising support and for always reminding me of the
virtue of integrity despite the value of trendiness. I will always be grateful for
his insistence on honesty, exactitude, and self-responsibility. I also thank him
for the rare gift of being a mentor who cared enough about my growth not to
provide answers, especially when those answers would have made things
easier. I’d like to thank Tom Goodnight for believing in my work and its
importance, for being my fierce advocate, and for always treating me as an
equal. I thank George Sanchez for his smile, his leadership and, most
importantly, for being a teacher in the finest sense of that word—a person
whose challenge appears in the form of respect. I would also like to thank my
unofficial committee members: Steve Mallioux, Sandy Green, Stacy Smith,
and Colleen Keough. I thank Steve for providing a fresh perspective on my
work from a mixed race perspective and also for convincing me of the
transformative power of rhetorical analysis. I thank Sandy for teaching me the
importance of managing expectations. I thank Stacy for insisting that I always
remember who I am, what I want, and especially what I can give to others. I’d
like to thank Colleen for reminding me to slow down and be quiet, especially
during the process of negotiation. I hope these words adequately express my
admiration and thanks for their time and energy, the way they conduct
themselves, and the ways they have shared their magnificent lives with me.

v
I’d like to thank Harry Guillermo Mendoza for his love and laughter
and for the gift of binding together the pleasures of hard work and trust. I’d
like to thank Scott Calhoun for being my friend and voice of faith. I’d like to
thank Jason Woodson, Richard Cornish, Shinina Butler-Nance, Amy Rilling,
and Ivette Lora for their unceasing friendship, honesty, and willingness to take
late night phone calls. I’d also like to thank my best cheerleaders Janielle
Zorina Matthews and M. Sara Owen for taking this journey with me from
London and Paris respectively and for our shared experience of growing up
and into women we actually like and respect.
Now comes the hard part. It’s nearly imposible to express my gratitude
to a family whose unconditional love and faith in me continue to provide the
grace that keeps me going and growing. My heartfelt thanks goes to my sister
Lindsay for being there always and without questions, for moving to California
(in part) to get me through this process and for being my lifelong best friend. I
extend my eternal appreciation to my aunts, uncles, and cousins, especially my
cousin Kate Breen and my aunts Leticia Suarez and Peggy Retchin, for helping
me in the real labor of finishing—the hours of time invested in editing this
dissertation. These acknowledgments would be incomplete without also
expressing my gratitude to my late uncle José, whose brilliance, openess, and
courage in the face of insurmountable odds inspired me to go to graduate
school in the first place.

vi
I’d like to thank my parents, Olga and John Dawkins, for giving me
stories and leaving me the legacy of a love for teaching and conducting
original research that matters. They, more than anyone else, have taught me
that at the end of the day my only real possessions are family, faith, integrity,
my Word, and the pleasure of learning with and from outstanding students—
like Ryan Houston, Zainah Alfi, Brad Silnutzer, Tiffany Anastopolous, Rune
Huang, Lauren Moore, Saira Zia, Justin Feldman, Nicolas Gonzalez, Sean
Miura, Elizabeth Hoberman, and the incomparable Omar Bahgat. In their own
way each of these students has taught me that what I do best is tell stories and
that I should use that gift not to tell the story that gets the most awards, but
instead the one that makes the most difference. I’d like to thank Olga Cardona
Matos and Geraldine Ervin Wilson, my grandmothers, for being survivors, for
keeping the faith, and for teaching me that role models don’t have to be on TV
and can have either an eighth grade education or two Master’s Degrees.
And finally, I’d like to dedicate this project to my Grandfather, not only
for being the coolest 98-year-old I know, but also for
being the only 98-year-old I know who still carries a
passion for intellectual rigor that pushes me to think
forward while acknowledging the past. It is because
of my Grandfather, the first member of my family
who chose not to pass as either white or black, that I
am able to write and defend what appears in the pages that follow. I am also
Figure 1: Rev. Rafael Matos Sr.

vii
grateful that his life continues to be a walking argument for finding the Divine
in the process of work and for seeing God’s hand in everyone and everything.
In the end, I dedicate this dissertation to him: to and for Rev. Rafael Matos Sr.,
with all my love, respect, and awe…always.

viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph .............................................................................................................. ii

Acknowledgments ..............................................................................................iii

Abstract ............................................................................................................... x

Chapter One: Running Along the Color Line
Racial Passing and the Problem of Mixed Race Identity .................................... 1
Chapter One References .................................................................................... 71

Chapter Two: The “Craft” of Passing: Rhetorical Irony,
Intersectionality and the Case of Ellen Craft .................................................. 92
Chapter Two References ................................................................................. 129

Chapter Three: “Membership Has Its Privileges:”
Plessy’s Passing and the Threat of Identity Theft .......................................... 135
Chapter Three References ............................................................................... 175

Chapter Four: “She Was Above All Sincere:” (Bi)racial Passing
and Rhetorical Eloquence in Iola Leroy ......................................................... 186
Chapter Four References ................................................................................. 224

Chapter Five: “A Crow that Doesn’t Know How to Be a Crow:”
Reading The Human Stain and Racial Passing from Text to Film ................ 230
Chapter Five References ................................................................................. 272

Chapter Six: Things Said in Passing: Toward a Rhetorical
Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing .......................................................................... 281
Chapter Six References ................................................................................... 316

Bibliography .................................................................................................... 318

ix
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Rev. Rafael Matos Sr. ......................................................................... vi

Figure 2: “The New Eve” .................................................................................... 4

Figure 3: Dramatic Theater of Passing ............................................................. 30

Figure 4: Ellen Craft in Plain Clothes ............................................................... 98

Figure 5: Ellen Craft as Mr. Johnson ................................................................ 99

Figure 6: D. F. Desdunes ................................................................................ 140

Figure 7: Homer A. Plessy .............................................................................. 140

Figure 8: Hopkins as Elder Silk ...................................................................... 255

Figure 9: Miller as Younger Silk .................................................................... 261

Figure 10: Rhetorical Intersections of Passing ............................................... 285

Figure 11: Dramatic Theater of Passing as Rhetorical and Intersectional .... 294

Figure 12: Layers of Meaning: The Dramatic and Tropological Roots of
(Bi)racial Passing ............................................................................................ 295

Figure 13: Neoclassical Elements of Passing.................................................. 298

Figure 14: The Truths of (Bi)racial Passing .................................................... 301

Figure 15: (Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic ................................. 307

x
ABSTRACT
This dissertation develops a theory about the interrelations between mixed race
identification and passing as they pertain to the field of rhetoric and to United
States slavery and segregation settings. I introduce the concept of (bi)racial
passing to argue that passing is a form of rhetoric that identifies and represents
passers intersectionally via synecdoche. In Chapter One I introduce the
rhetorical, cultural, and conceptual significances of passing based on a review
of the literature. I introduce the central argument of the project by proposing a
theory of (bi)racial passing that considers the problems and possibilities of
mixed race representation and mobility as a bridge between Platonic episteme
and Sophistic doxa as well as between the material and symbolic components
of biracial categorization. Chapter Two considers the historical narrative of
Ellen Craft at the intersection of synecdoche and irony to highlight and
transgress real and imagined borders that stretch beyond a simple consideration
of race. Taking up the issue of appropriation through a detailed critique of the
Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, my third chapter considers passing as
an antecedent form of identity theft and as a form of resistance. In contrast to
the cases examined in these chapters, my fourth chapter explores Harper’s Iola
Leroy, as a fictional account of passing that ties synecdoche to eloquence,
articulating the tension between the threat of passing contained in the Plessy
ruling and its relation to contemporary attempts at measuring discrimination at
the intersection of race, class, and gender. My fifth chapter takes a turn by

xi
exploring the literary and cinematic versions of The Human Stain, as
contemporary narratives of passing based on tragedy and synecdoche in the
context of minstrel performance and Jim and Jane Crow segregation. My last
chapter fleshes out the theory introduced in the first, working toward a theory
of (bi)racial passing that rethinks inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa
as well as white vs. black. Then, blending the critical race theory of
intersectionality with rhetorical personae I explain the significances of
synecdoche, metonymy, irony, appropriation, eloquence, and tragedy in the
various instances of passing explored. At a theoretical level, I rethink the
inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. I
conclude with a rhetorical theory of passing based on the fourth persona and
six original passwords that present opportunities for future research.
1
CHAPTER ONE
RUNNING ALONG THE COLOR LINE:
RACIAL PASSING AND THE PROBLEM OF MIXED RACE
IDENTITY

I
On rare occasions I find an expression that is sassy, succinct, and thus sexy
enough to make its accuracy inconsequential. Such is the case with a phrase
posed by a cool blogger from Brooklyn, New York on 18 May 2008: “Racial
Passing—A Concept Whose Time Has Passed.”
1
Or as Huggins and Spickard
phrased it decades ago: “Passing is passé.”
2

Passing, usually understood as an abbreviation for “racial passing,” is
generally used to describe the means by which non white people represent
themselves as white. This kind of passing—though not the only or primary
type taken up in this project—has been a popular area of literary interest since
the days of slavery and reconstruction. Notable novels include James Fenimore
Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie
(1835), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola
Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (1892), and Charles Chestnutt’s House Behind the
Cedars (1900). A host of narratives were also produced during the Harlem
Renaissance, the most notable and critiqued of which include Jean Toomer’s
Cane (1923), Walter White’s Flight (1926), Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928),
and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). The topic also enjoyed attention from
Hollywood with melodramatic films from the1930s through the 1950s, such as
2
Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Pinky (1949), Lost Boundaries (1949), Show
Boat (1951), and two versions of Imitation of Life (1934; 1959). Then came
the 1960s and 1970s, and with them a cultural shift through which many
nationalist ideologies belittled passing and its narratives, making them a
terribly uncool thing of the past. According to the critics, passing was an
antiquated practice that flew in the face of burgeoning racial and ethnic pride.
3

Whether prophecy or prohibition, these words rang true in the ears of many,
and for a while passing was in fact “passé.”
The roster of recent Hollywood films seems to affirm this view by
suggesting that passing is not and need not be much of a social concern. This
would explain why, with the scarce but significant exceptions of some
independent and/or unpopular films, such as Fakin’ da Funk (1997), Black and
White (1999), and Slow Burn (2005), it looks as if the passing film has passed
on. When passing does appear as an issue worthy of critical attention it is
usually a relic of a bygone era, as in the 1995 adaptation of Walter Mosley’s
Devil in a Blue Dress or the 2003 adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, The
Human Stain. Whether this silence is due to an unpopularity of race films in
general or the emergence of a post-race ideology, the issues surrounding mixed
race identification generally and passing specifically seem to have moved off
the movie screen and into the ether.
Though passing remains passé in U.S. cinema culture, passing is
neither a historical relic nor a simple habit that expresses a superior-
3
subordinate social relationship. It is for this reason that a new “passing
renaissance” has emerged in academic circles. Revived in the mid-1990s,
when cultural studies and rhetorical scholars renewed their foci on narratives
of passing and politics of identity, this renaissance was reinvigorated as
racially ambiguous figures like Vanessa Williams, Mariah Carey, Keanu
Reeves, Tiger Woods,
4
Vin Diesel, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, Rosario
Dawson, Jessica Alba, and Wentworth Miller gained prominence throughout
that decade and into the 2000s. As a late entry into this renaissance, this
dissertation embodies racial passing twenty-first century style. For one, it is not
limited to black-as-white. It includes black passing as Jewish and vice versa,
but also women passing as men, abled persons passing as disabled, enslaved
persons passing as free, mixed race siblings who are passing as white and then
as black unknowingly, and “octaroons” passing and then outing themselves as
insurgents. The acts of passing that I explore are about much more than mere
disguise. They are about reopening a space to look through racial
conflagrations rather than throw in the towel and declare them extinguished.
This is why my focus is on acts of successful passing that were sustained either
part or full time, and on those that broke the cycle of silence to argue for social
and institutional change or for the privilege of self-determination.
So, what shall we make of this “passing fancy?” Nella Larsen provided
one answer to this question in Passing. “It’s funny about ‘passing,’ we
disapprove of it and at the same time we condone it. It excites our contempt
4
and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of
revulsion, but we protect it.”
5
This ambivalence is still reflected in
contemporary debates about mixed race identity and passing. Some critics,
such as Leon E. Wynter, argue that the time for passing has passed because the
U.S. has reached a post-racial moment in which everyone and everything is
mixed.
6
Such post-racial commentaries are not only
inaccurate, as the 2000 U.S. Census reveals that only 2.4%
of all Americans self-report as mixed race, but also fly in
the face of how I consider race in this project: as an
historical, rhetorical, institutional, and personal set of
communication relations that still persists and requires
some working through.
7
Being post-race means that mixed raced people are
presumed to be beyond the traditional concept of race as an observable set of
fixed biological and transhistorical characteristics. If this is the case, then race
can be considered a costume that can be put on and taken off. Because of
their supposed superpower to transcend race, mixed race people are touted as a
new model minority. Constituents who support this post-race perspective
remind mainstream society that multiracialism is not only our destiny but our
reality. They refer to our current generation as “Generation Mix” and also
celebrate several milestones of mixedness.
8
One milestone is virtual
miscegenation in the form of a computer generated “image of the new Eve” as
“the new face of America” on the cover of a Fall 1993 issue of Time Magazine
Figure 2: "The New Eve"
5
(see photo right, above). Another milestone is the “check all that apply” option
on the 2000 U.S. Census as an opportunity to refute the need for future race
based government initiatives. A third milestone is the public presentation of
race as a figment of the social imaginary per PBS in its 2003 three-part series
entitled, Race: The Power of Illusion. The latest milestone is the sensation of
mixed race President-Elect Barack Obama, whose image in the realm of
popular culture is wrongly interpreted as one of racial transcendence instead of
an invitation to all Americans to become less racist by working through issues
of race and mixed race identification.
President-Elect Obama deserves special mention because of the way in
which he mobilizes his mixed race identity to foster unification and eschew a
post-race perspective, specifically by transcending sociopolitical divisions like
political affiliation (Red and Blue states), class distinction, and religious
association. For instance, in March 2008 Obama came under fire for his
affiliation with the inflammatory rhetorician Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was
known for mixing traditional Christian messages with denunciations of the U.S
as a whole and white people specifically. Obama chose not to distance himself
completely from Wright, but instead used his own mixed race identification in
order to call for a national unity and understanding of differences and different
experiences. A brief reading of Obama’s speech delivered 18 March 2008
entitled “A More Perfect Union” supports this point. Obama’s choice not to
6
pass as either white or black becomes an invitation for all Americans to self-
reflect and find out how they fit into the national fabric. Obama declared:
I can no more disown [Rev. Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown
the black community. I can no more disown [Wright] than I can
my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a
woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who
loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a
woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed
by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has
uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These
people are a part of me and they are a part of America, this
country that I love.
9

The compatabilist perspectives outlined in Obama’s argument engage intimacy
and hope by challenging the historical narrative of mixed race alienation and
the current post-race narrative. In so doing Obama demonstrates the ways in
which sincere expression of a mixed race identity can be used to acknowledge
racial division as well as its predicaments and awkwardness. Such
acknowledgement brings with it the potential for change by creating a sense of
universal identification that is also rich with particulars.
Obama’s audience finds “no disavowal, but instead a new assertion,
and a new challenge” in these words.
10
According to Dumm, Obama engages
a transformation of terms that links racial justice to economic justice by
observing that we all suffer because of traditional social practices based on
misperceptions. In order to accomplish this, Obama uses his mixed race
identity, which gives him membership in black and white communities, to shed
light on shared economic concerns and expose misperceptions on the parts of
black and white Americans alike. The primary black misperception is that
7
systemic racism represents the racism of all white Americans. The primary
white misperception is that government programs like affirmative action have
done away with institutional racism and moved society beyond equal access to
opportunity and into an era of “reverse racism” and discrimination.
11
Dumm
fails to acknowledge that Obama also addresses the primary misperception
among blacks and whites—that we can have a conversation about race that is
just black and white. Thus, Dumm’s critique falls victim to the myth that by
invoking a mixed race persona that is both black and white, Obama is
somehow making a post-race ideological move. This assertion is not only
incorrect and a red herring, but dangerous insofar as it reinforces the popular
critique that Obama uses eloquent rhetoric to pass as a bonafide politician
despite his lack of experience and clear planning initiatives. In other words, the
common critiques of Obama as post-race and eloquent but unfit as a politician
make him a modern day Sophist. As argued in the pages that follow, the link
between passing and Sophistry is one byproduct of the failure to address
passing from a rhetorical perspective.
President-Elect Obama’s mediated and political images as a mixed race
person and passer become even more profound when juxtaposed with post-
race, anti-Affirmative Action legislation (such as California’s Proposition 209,
Washington’s Initiative 200, and Ward Connerly’s various Racial Privacy
Initiatives). Obama responded to this issue in “A More Perfect Union” when he
stated that: “we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an
8
exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed
liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”
12
This misperception of
Obama as a post-race figure that either benefitted unreasonably from or
succeeded in spite of such legislation allows many to assert that a heightened
focus on mixed race issues and passing has become the emperor’s new clothes.
In other words, to quote Ralina Joseph, “racism and racialized identities [have]
become conjoined notions so that in the state imagination, eliminating
racialized categories of identity leads, without any structural change, to
eliminating racism.”
13
Nothing could be further from the truth. To be blunt,
the U.S. is not post-race but it may be less racist. While the racial climate in
the U.S. does reflect some progress, as Obama’s position evidences, passing
and issues of mixed race identification force us to confront the legal, symbolic,
and socially constructed residues of slavery and segregation with important
implications for contemporary human relations.
By focusing on the ways in which individuals and societies can create
positive change, Obama’s message presents an occasion for Americans to
reconsider what mixed race sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois called “the problem of
the color line.”
14
The color line, arguably the most dreadful and enduring
social problem in U.S. history, began as our forefathers authored a Constitution
that, according to Obama, was “ultimately unfinished.” In a Du Boisian
tradition, Obama explains that our Constitution set the color line in place.
It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question
that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a
9
stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to
continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final
resolution to future generations.
15

Future generations have largely kept the color line as a distinguishing and
enduring element of U.S. life. As will be argued in the pages that follow, the
color line worked in conjunction with the “one-drop rule” to effectively
exclude anyone of African descent from full participation in mainstream
society. History reveals the ways in which this legalized discrimination caused
suffering and turmoil for all parties involved, especially during the slavery and
Jim and Jane Crow segregation eras. African Americans were barred from
voting, from attending schools, from particular modes of transportation, from
attaining mortgages, and from careers in public service. Obama’s description
of these events makes the suffering concrete. In addition they were the
subjects of pseudo-scientific racist studies concluding they were soulless
beasts, a threat to civilization itself, a drain on the economy, and a generally
cursed people. These sinister images became the basis for a biological theory
known as “hybrid degeneracy,” which claimed that mixed race people were
emotionally unstable, irrational, recalcitrant, and sterile.
16
According to
Wiegman, this theory became a biological fact in Western discourse based on
pseudo-scientific observation and comparative anatomy, especially of the
brain, skull, and reproductive organs.
17
As a result of these sociological and
pseudo-scientific findings, white/European Americans were instructed to
dissociate from African Americans in social life in order to maintain their
10
purity. It is therefore unsurprising that blacks and whites who dared to cross
the color line in any way, whether to attend school, vote, or mix with one
another romantically, were the subjects of torture and abuse. Such physical
and juridical policing of the color line is why the study of passing and mixed
race identification remains important. Those of mixed race who passed as
either white or black (like Du Bois himself) demonstrated that the color line
promoted suffering on both sides and in the spaces in-between, making it at the
same time all too real and extremely unstable.
18

The instability of the color line is at the heart of Obama’s optimistic
message and persona. His perspective as a person who identifies as both black
and white is one from which to engage racial disputes and restore some
measure of harmony by focusing on fairness and equality. Moreover, his
mixed race perspective highlights and argues against the fallacy that any
person must identify as either black or white only. It is for this reason that
Obama can remind his audiences that the U.S. Constitution also contains a
method for “final resolution” of the color line and its stains. Perfecting it over
time through amendments, coupled with hands-on action by those looking to
end suffering, can “narrow the gap between our ideals and the reality of their
time.”
19

Even as he makes these hopeful assertions, Obama acknowledges that
we live in a time where the ideals of justice and social innovation appear less
promising than attaining economic and political power. Unfortunately, certain
11
social groups have built their power on the backs of others. Ours is “a
corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices,
and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special
interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”
20
Obama
implies, but does not acknowledge directly, that the economic structure has
been impacted by race, racism, and racial hierarchies, adding another level to
the playing field that needs to be leveled.
21
In other words, the residue of the
color line prevents us from dealing with economic troubles that can and should
anger both whites and blacks alike. Because race has not been and will not be
transcended in the foreseeable future, Obama invites us to look at one another
and address the suffering caused by racial and economic injustices
simultaneously through honest and ethical communication.
Though important and insightful, I argue that a post-race interpretation
of Obama’s image and perspective requires a more adequate working through
of race and the color line than is currently in vogue. Thus, the questions I am
asking are of a very different nature: Could it be argued that mixed race
identification is allowing us to finally come to grips with the idea that, though
we may be less racist, we are not post-race at all? Is race itself a way of
thinking and speaking as well as a way of seeing and not seeing? To rephrase
and summarize: Instead of post-race, are the problems of mixed race
identification and passing better understood as enactments of the ever
morphing conceptions of what race actually is and can be?
12
Few phenomena embody these morphing conceptions—that race is a
symbolic social construction, a fixed biological and material truth, and a
political, social, and civil institution that can be changed—like passing. But
therein lays the paradox. Because passing capitalizes on the absence of
reliable evidence of difference, it begs the question of whether we know
anything about race now that differs substantially from what we have known
about it historically or rhetorically. In light of this I doubt that it is prudent to
suggest that passing has passed on, a casualty of newer and better theories
about racial formation, racial prejudice, and mixed race identification. Ask
some of my students, like Zainah and Ryan, who still find benefits in
passing—whether visually or discursively—often aided by communication
technology. Ask members of our growing mixed race population who appear
racially ambiguous, like Kate, Ben, Teresa, and Danielle, and are constantly
picked at and probed while being asked: “So, what are you exactly?” Or ask
those who moved to revise the U.S. census because they felt boxed in by
demographic forms demanding only one choice for identification. To say that
passing is passé is to presuppose that the concepts of race and racism that beget
passing are also passé. That is one presupposition this dissertation will not
affirm.
So where can we find some resolution to these mixed race questions?
Obama’s image and life as well as the life stories presented herein suggest that
resolution can be found in rhetorical discourse and performances of the
13
symbolic social self. In other words, communication is the key. However, in all
honesty, the case studies constructed herein, which object to our biracial
fascination, also perpetuate this fascination. Does this call then for imposed
silence and secrecy on the part of passers and researchers alike?
I think not. Consequently, I present this dissertation as a series of
interpretive frames that enact a new theoretical perspective based on Charles E.
Morris’s “fourth persona” rather than a post-race ideology.
22
This “fourth
persona” perspective provides a bird’s eye view from which to see passing as a
problematic yet legitimate expression of identity that invites richer and more
complex readings of race, mixed race, and of rhetoric itself in the United
States. This perspective enables us to work through passing in order to divulge
its secrets rather than perpetuate the myth that mixed race individuals either
wish to be or are already beyond race. I also believe that, if conducted
carefully, such a study can facilitate sincere communication and create healing.
In the chapters that follow I strive to analyze passing from a rhetorical
perspective that can explain to and extricate us from some of the dilemmas of
identification and representation in our present historical and cultural moment.
It seems to me that a moment of resolution has been found in Obama’s rhetoric
as part of a larger story about mixed race identity and passing. But, in order to
understand that moment of resolution we must dig deeper into related cultural
moments of the past. My hope is that a willingness to work through rather
than simply declare transcendence over historical meanings of mixed race
14
identification and representation will further bridge the gaps between theory
and practice, material and symbolic, episteme and doxa, as well as black and
white, not to mention the actual and the ideal.
II

The first issue that must be addressed in any project that purports to work
through (what I call) the thickets of passing is passing’s meaning, today and
historically. The etymological roots of passing are found in the thirteenth
century Latin verb passare or passus meaning “to step or walk.” However, a
backward glance into its colloquial use in the United States reveals a means of
dividing and connecting varied interests through the bodies of racially mixed
individuals.
23
A brief historical account of passing in the United States begins
in the antebellum South because the enslaved were required to obtain travel
passes in order to move about unaccompanied.
24
Hence, some of the earliest
references to the concept appeared in advertisements for runaway slaves who
were passing as free.
$100 reward will be given for my man, Edmund Kenny. He has
straight hair, and a complexion so white that it is believed a
stranger would suppose there was no African blood in him. A
short time since, he was in Norfolk with my boy Dick, and
offered him for sale. He was apprehended but escaped under
pretense of being a white man.
25

Runaway, a bright woman, named Julia, about twenty-five-
years-old. She is white and very likely may attempt to pass for
white...$200 reward, if caught in any Free State and put into any
good jail Kentucky or Tennessee.
26

15
Many of the enslaved were able to “pass” through checkpoints without the
required documentation because they appeared, and often were in part, white.
White skin color became symbolic and material evidence to support one’s
claim to whiteness and therefore to freedom and mobility. Conversely, black
skin color required authentication by a white agent affirming the enslaved’s
status as property. The macrocultural presupposition was that the enslaved, by
virtue of their characteristics and especially their color as black or gradated
shades thereof, deserved and required enslavement. In this context, passing
was considered an attack on the historically and socially determined racial
division of labor and liberty, on the color line, and on racial polarization at the
heart of U.S. slave owning and segregationist society.
27

Passing confirms that skin is a sign of humanity and that skin color is
the symbol used to create material separations among racialized individuals
and their families. Dworkin explains:
The skin is a line of demarcation, a periphery, the fence, the
form, the shape, the first clue to identity in a society (for
instance, color in a racist society), and, in purely physical terms,
the formal precondition for being human. It is a thin veil of
matter separating the outside from the inside. It is what one sees
and what one covers up; it shows and it conceals; it hides what
is inside.
28

Dworkin’s claim, that skin both “shows” and “conceals” because of the
meanings and powers we assign to it, is supported by the existence of racial
passing itself. Since passing is visible evidence of previous interracial
intimacy, it has been used historically to respond to the separation created by
16
the use of skin color as visible evidence for the perfection of “black” or
“white” as linguistic categories for racial identification and racial worlds on
opposing sides of the color line. It is a way in which passers, understanding
what the color of their skin means in relation to the color line, work to self-
determine their racial identities and life chances. More generally, it highlights
the tensions between interiors and exteriors played out in the history of
rhetoric, a point to which I will return in the sections that follow. Over time,
therefore, it is not surprising to note that racial passing was practiced in a
variety of scenarios for a host of purposes. Such purposes include, but are not
limited to, escape from slavery, dignified and humane treatment, geographical
and social mobility, housing and employment opportunities, self-reinvention,
investigative reporting, interracial romance, racial uplift, the pleasure in
withholding information from the group with which one attempts to affiliate,
and acceptance within that group.
29

Conventional readings of racial passing demonstrate its frequency and
importance to white and black racial communities alike. For example, in his
1933 essay “Passing,” Hughes claims that passing is both a disappearing act
and a trick of light.
Dear Ma, I felt like a dog, passing you downtown last night and
not speaking to you…It’s funny I was the only one of the kids
light enough to pass…I used to feel bad about it, too, then. But
now I’m glad...I’m going to go ahead and get all I can out of
life. Ma…I won’t get caught in the mire of color again. Not
me. I’m free, Ma, free!
30

17
Hughes’s claim is typical: It defines passing as inherently dehumanizing
because it only provides means of escaping discrimination by becoming
something different than what one already is. Therefore, Hughes explains, it is
an act rife with suffering for all those involved. Similarly, Kennedy defines
passing as a form of social climbing, “a deception that enables a person to
adopt certain roles/identities from which he would be barred by prevailing
social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct.”
31
Squires and
Brouwer describe it as an individual’s decision to assert a privileged identity
over a non privileged identity, a matter of concealment.
32
Mullen depicts it as
an apparatus for the operation and reproduction of hegemonic racial images of
whiteness and blackness.
33
Elsewhere I have adapted Buller and Burgoon’s
Interpersonal Deception Theory to examine portrayals of passing in prominent
Hollywood film as a violation of the “truth bias” in terms of falsification,
equivocation, and outright denial.
34
In all of these cases, the passer is assumed
to be a black person passing as white, like David Matthews, who “from late
elementary school until well into his twenties…got into the habit of presenting
himself to the world as white,” taking the white side of his identity to represent
the whole. David is said to have passed because “black is the identity our
culture assigns or ascribes to [him] without reflection or comment” on his
identity as mixed race (black and white).
35

These depictions of racial passing are wedded to the rule of
hypodescent and to a rhetorical logic guided by essentialized racialism and
18
ultimately institutionalized as the color line. Also known as the “one-drop
rule,” this reductive standard holds that any person with any trace of black
ancestry is classified as black, and any person is white if he or she has no trace
of black (or other non-white) ancestry.
36
Various states qualified the
determinant blood fraction standards for black classification at 1/8, 1/16, and
1/32.
37
The premise of such standards is that mixed race identification is
fundamentally an algebraic and genetic problem. Therefore, main purposes of
this rule were to eliminate miscegenation, to ensure white racial integrity, and
to solidify a biracial hierarchy that forbids mixed race individuals from
choosing or claiming a mixed race identity. The concurrent rhetorical effect is
that the term black connotes contamination and overwhelms other identifying
terms such as biracial, mixed race or multiracial. Like the color line itself,
black racial identity remains insecure because an individual’s black forebear
need be black only on account of one other black forebear any number of
generations back. At the same time whiteness becomes a whole that cannot be
reduced to its parts because it is treated “as a matter of kind, not of degree.”
38

From this standpoint, white racial identity becomes the “fixed center” from
which blackness is marginalized and mixedness is denied.
39
Consequently,
Zack explains, these racial concepts exist in tension because “whiteness is a
negation which rests on indefinite blackness.”
40
This tension is exploited and
exposed in any act of passing.
19
These mutually constitutive and unstable symbolic definitions of white
and black are institutionalized to construct a social order based on opposing
racial identifications of either white or black, also known as the color line. This
kind of racial reduction leads to what Burke refers to as a “paradox of purity,”
wherein race assumes such power that it becomes fundamental—the category
from which all of an individual’s characteristics and motivations are derived.
41

Individuals become collections of categories that are judged accordingly
despite their own self-concepts or desires. Within this environment a challenge
to white racial identities constituted “a fearful blow...[for] the knowledge
of…tainted blood was more than [some] could bear…they were as much killed
by the blow as if they had been shot.”
42
The underlying assumption is both
biological and epistemological: that a person can be “tainted” by mixed blood
without any knowledge thereof.
I will return to the rhetorical power of these assumptions as they pertain
to motives for passing in Chapter Four. For my present purpose it is sufficient
to mention that such conceptions of mixedness as injury are unsatisfying
because they solidify the color line and one-drop rule and, perhaps unwittingly,
serve the interests of white supremacy and its scion of post-race ideology. This
well-intended error in judgment is exemplified by the recent description of
famed New York Times writer Anatole Broyard, a man of mixed race whom
Gates eulogizes in the following manner:
Broyard was born black and became white, and his story is
compounded of equal parts pragmatism and principle. He knew
20
that the world was filled with such snippets and scraps of paper,
all conspiring to reduce him to an identity that other people had
invented and he had no say in. Broyard responded
with…ambiguity and equivocation. Society had decreed race to
be a matter of natural law, but he wanted race to be an elective
affinity, and it was never going to be a fair fight.
43

Such descriptions are predicated upon an “either-white-or-black-only”
categorical taxonomy and the rule of hypodescent, thus enshrining a definition
of passing as essentially deceptive. As discussed previously, this logic
supports the myth that paints black racial identity as taint and white racial
identity as pure. Moreover, it rejects mixed race individuals, at best reducing
them to tragic, manipulative, and sometimes villainous characters. These
“tragic mulattoes” are forced, in what some might call tyrannical fashion, to
create racial identifications that fail to articulate a more complete version of
their racial identities as mixed.
44

Though provocative and penetrating, the aforementioned accounts of
passing—as deception, escape from discrimination, bypassing the one-drop
rule—leave much to be desired. First, these accounts are inadequate because
they do not explore the ways in which a biracial hierarchy rests on an economy
of unstable evidence measured in verbal as well as visible terms. They evaluate
acts of passing primarily in terms of phenotype and genotype, compensation
and loss. Only recently has the link between rhetorical-linguistic practices and
racial identity been considered as a component of passing. For instance,
Burcholtz suggests that eloquence is a key component of racial passing.
“Speakers may be able to pass linguistically even if they lack the ability to pass
21
physically” and in so doing can surmount certain economic and racial
barriers.
45
This focus on eloquence as a tool for aural passing is helpful but is
ultimately incomplete because it overlooks the ability of eloquent passers to
bring black and white worlds together. I will take up this ability in the chapters
that follow, exploring the ways in which rhetoric is used to challenge mutually
exclusive racial categories and social institutions in which passing occurs, the
contemporary post-race claim that race and racism only exist when explicitly
referenced in law, literature or life experience (and that, if we would just stop
talking about them, they would go away), the ways in which passing highlights
the mutually constitutive relationships among race, gender, sex, sexual
orientation, disability, and class, and that “the way a thing is said does affect its
intelligibility.”
46

Second, conventional accounts are inaccurate because they equate
passing with a form of creative assimilation that also, paradoxically, attempts
to move beyond race. In so doing, they ignore the fact that passing is only
plausible because, for mixed race individuals, assimilation is impossible. The
cases analyzed in the chapters that follow will show that mixed race
individuals, themselves a metaphor for assimilation, were historically
inassimilable into either the white or black racial category. These cases affirm
mixed race author Danzy Senna’s argument that to be mixed race is to be
insubstantial as a ghost, disembodied and “incomplete—a gray blur, a body in
22
motion, forever galloping toward completion…half-cast, half-mast and half-
baked, not ready for consumption.”
47

Third, given the one-drop rule and phenotype, and in order to maintain
a biracial hierarchy with racialized class differences, it can be argued that as
many mixed race individuals ultimately were forced to take the black part of
themselves for the whole and pass as black as were forced to pass as white.
48

Yet passing remains synonymous with passing as white, and condemned as “an
evasion of racism, an escape that is available only to individuals who can
successfully represent themselves as white.”
49
These evaluations ignore the
multi-dimensional subtleties that passing inherently implies (e.g., mixed race
identification practices, passing as black), as well as the more covert effects of
racism that instantiated the practice, especially after Plessy v. Ferguson
legalized the color line. Moreover, they fail to see how passing is part of “the
active construction of how the self is perceived when one[’s] racial identity as
mixed] is ambiguous to others” and therefore denied.
50

In contrast, the cases examined in this study demonstrate the ways in
which passing is embroiled within a structure that relies upon and confounds
messages presented by blood, jurisprudence, social performance, and
expectancy violation from a heretofore underdeveloped perspective derived
from “the fourth persona.” My study also moves beyond juridical definitions of
a passer’s racial identity—as essentially black with white-like appearance—
that deny a passer’s identity as mixed race regardless of appearance. Powell
23
claims this denial is because mixed race identity “implies a connection to and
family relationships with white [and black] people—something anti-
miscegenation laws and racial classification were designed to destroy.”
51
As
Obama continues to remind us, mixed race identity is white and black,
irrespective of appearance as predominantly white or black.
Obama is not the first person with the courage to articulate this
perspective publicly. In 1928, Charles W. Chesnutt explained that those who
identify themselves on the color line are freer than those who identify
themselves with either side of it. Chesnutt turned the link on the traditional
biological and epistemological assumptions of racial identification that
nullified mixed race identity by arguing that a person can have an unique
sensitivity and knowledge-base grounded in his or her status as mixed race
regardless of appearance. Chesnutt also asserted that a mixed race perspective
is vital to any attempt at racial reconciliation.
My physical makeup was such that I knew the psychology of
people of mixed blood in so far as it is different from that of
other people, and most of my writings ran along the color line,
the vaguely defined line where the two major races of the
country meet. It has more dramatic possibilities than life within
clearly defined and widely differentiated groups.
52

Chesnutt’s argument is embodied in another person for whom knowledge of
mixed blood presented an opportunity to work through rather than transcend
race. Walter White—an individual with 5 known black and 27 known white
forebears—described himself as a man with white skin, blond hair, and blue
eyes who identified as black during the Jim and Jane Crow era.
53
White’s
24
passing hinges on the rule of hypodescent and on the existence of black or
white identification as symbolic figures and material racial categories. White
appropriates a black racial perspective while passing in the Jim and Jane Crow
South “as a statement of black moral superiority” in order to uplift the race and
otherwise atone for wrongs done to blacks by whites in both the present and
the past (e.g., lynching).
54

In his autobiography, White recounts the typical reaction to himself as
“the thing perceived” after those whose perceptions label him white are
introduced to him as a black man:
the sudden intake of breath, the bewildered expression of the
face, the confusion of the eyes, the muddled fragmentary
remarks—‘But you do not look…I mean I would never have
known…of course if you didn’t want to admit’… Sometimes
the eyes blink rapidly and the tongue, out of control, says, ‘Are
you sure?’
55

When introduced as black, White confronts cognitive dissonance produced by
the paradox of purity. As a result, he witnesses others’ attempts to evaluate him
according to a blackness they now know exists but cannot locate. In recounting
the meanings of such experiences, White acknowledges the epistemological
and biological assumptions of race; exposes competing modes of symbolic
interpretation of his skin color; willingly takes on a “subordinate” position in
the biracial hierarchy; embraces suffering; recognizes the social mobility
afforded by his white skin as privilege; and shows that discursive mediation—
rhetoric—is the ground for social meaning and racial identification. Audiences
who are open to persuasion may find themselves convinced of “the power of
25
words” as they bear witness to his “coming out” of the racial closet because he
“ends the sentence a different person.”
56
The tragedy is that even this “different
person” remains tied to a biracial hierarchy because of the one-drop rule,
which reduces race to a single and simple axis of identification that denies the
possibility of mixed race identity.
White’s anecdote forms the basis for more “progressive”
57
definitions
that attempt to address the particularities of passing, described by Wald as a
“struggle for control over racial representation.”
58
The struggle is manifested
as passers acquire the ability, but not necessarily the desire, to affiliate with the
U.S. color line. Kroger suggests that we can know people are passing
when people effectively present themselves as other than who
they understand themselves to be…[and] when other people
actually see or experience the identity that the passer is
projecting, whether the passer is telegraphing that identity by
intention or by chance.
59

Robinson affirms Kroger’s definition and argues that any act of passing is a
“powerful… occupation” that can be an accidental, incidental, or committed
action.
60
When committed, this action involves a choice that produces
identifications and persuades multiple audiences of a projected identity to the
extent that the identifications are accepted and authenticated.
From this place of recognizing multiple perspectives, intentions, and
responses this project is launched. My overarching proposition is that racial
passing is most accurately and sensitively understood rhetorically as a response
to strict biracial definition and differentiation of the color line: to mark my
26
meaning, passing in this study is not synonymous with racial passing but with
(bi)racial passing.
A (bi)racial definition of passing takes a step beyond the current
conversation because it addresses the performance techniques through which
passers themselves grapple with the biological and epistemological
assumptions of racial determination embedded in the color line and one-drop
rule. Further, a (bi)racial definition explains the ambivalent dimension from
the perspective of the passer. On one hand, passers are accepted when they
attempt to reconcile their limited opportunities as mixed race with their
idealized life goals of economic independence and equality with (those
labeled) white, or with racial community and common socio-political interest
among (those labeled) black. On the other hand, passers are rejected. As
mixed race outcasts, they shed light on their own estranged relationships to
whites and blacks and to so-called objective means of racial identification.
Alienation and ambivalence explain why passing was, for many mixed race
individuals, “the solution, the secret to [their] secret…[A]s a heretofore
unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America’s undesirables,” they could
somehow, finally, “make sense.”
61
Passers experienced what psychologist
Maria P. Root has called the “squeeze” of oppression as people of color from
whites and by people of color.
62
As a result of this pressure passers sought
coherent racial intelligibility that would afford a recognizable public status.
This status could then be traded for a public and private “sense of racial
27
comfort and safety,”
63
for the luxury of looking into the eyes of another and
seeing themselves reflected back. This updated definition of passing as
(bi)racial, multi-perspectival, and therefore inherently transactional, begs the
question of how passing should be approached and analyzed herein.
III
The purpose of redefining passing as (bi)racial is to portray more accurately
the nuance and sensitivity that is owed to the characters of passers’ lives. In
one respect these lives support Robinson’s claim that “the visible is neither
definitively nor simply a mark of identification.”
64
As such they confound the
Platonic logic that argues for a reality based on definable and differentiated
identities.
65
This logic is highly relevant to slavery and segregationist settings
in the U.S. context because those considered black were enslaved because of
their blackness (a sign of their inherent barbarity and inferiority) and not
because of the demands of the racist capitalist institution.
66
Alcoff’s
ethnographic research updates this view for the segregation era. She reports
that passers made the “Jim [and Jane] Crow system” transparent in a very real
way “for, through the experience of having racist whites unknowingly accept
[them], [passers] could see all too clearly the speciousness of the biracial
systems of exclusion.”
67
(Bi)racial passing, therefore, also alludes to a
conception of the passer’s racial identity as neither white nor black, but as
white and black.
28
As aforementioned, this mixed race identity—“uniqueness as an entity
in itself and by itself”
68
—as both white and black has been historically and
legally denied in the United States cultural context. Consequently, mixed race
people exist(ed) in a state of irresolvable status ambiguity, with injurious
effects. According to Roth, persons of mixed race had “no separate
identities…no such subtleties allowed, and the impact was devastating.”
69
As a
means of alleviating this devastation, (bi)racial passing emerges as mode of
communication by which the passer is persuaded of the honor and advantage
that will accrue to him/her if (s)he chooses to initiate a particular action for the
future. In other words, it is a deliberative tactic by which mixed race
individuals immerse themselves in a shared past and in some kind of racial
community or ideal of common interest. For, as Birdie, a mixed race
adolescent in Danzy Senna’s passing novel Caucasia, expresses “‘they say you
don’t have to choose. But the thing is, you do. Because there are consequences
if you don’t…’ ‘[A]nd there are consequences if you do.”
70
There exists no
racial middle ground for mixed race individuals, quintessential symbols and
occupants of “racial borderlands.”
71

Robinson is the first to explore multiple perspectives of these racial
borderlands and push beyond race, including gender and sexuality. For
Robinson, identification is a function of the eyes that perceive it. Her theory of
triangulated dramatic theater demonstrates how racial passing is a process of
29
reading competing identifications differently depending on the positions of
audiences produced in response to the pass.
In the many textual incarnations of passing, a triangular event
appears with conspicuous regularity. Three participants—the
passer, the dupe, and a representative of the in-group [a
“clairvoyant”] enact a complex narrative scenario in which a
successful pass is performed in the presence of a literate
member of the in-group. As a standard feature of the passing
narrative, such a triangle poses the questions of the passer’s
‘real’ identity as function of the lens through which it is
viewed…The pass emerges as a [rhetorical] encounter between
two epistemological paradigms [knowing and telling].
72

Symbolic markers of consubstantiality with the dupe and in-group clairvoyant
create racial identification as white or black. According to Robinson, these
identifications are the bases for further communicative action—either
“knowing” that a passer is who the passer says (s)he is as the dupe does, or
“telling” that passer is not who the dupe says (s)he is as the in-group
clairvoyant often does. In-group recognition determines the success of a pass.
It also “serves as an accomplice to ontological truth-claims of identity in which
claiming to tell who is or is not passing is inextricable from knowing the fixed
contours of a pre-passing identity.”
73
Only the in-group member’s
collaborative silence will continue to constitute the dupe as the dupe.
Therefore, Robinson’s entire triangle depends on the passer and on both
audiences who will interpret the pass. This means that racial passing is
persuasive only insofar as the passer identifies or connects his/her needs and
interests to his/her spectators, making persuasion an effect of identification.
30
Dupe
Passer
In-group
4
th
Persona
As illustrated by the figure below, Robinson’s treatments of
identification and passing are taken a step further when Morris explains that
dupes are persuaded by a “subversive enthymeme: an appeal that manipulates
the assumptions of normativity to achieve the telos of… secrecy.”
74

I envision this enthymeme as suppressing the premise that equates skin color
with reliable visual evidence of racial identity because of the one-drop rule and
color line—symbolic social constructions that marked bodies as well as the
institutions of slavery and segregation. Therefore, the enthymematic argument
asserts that, because skin color does not change racial identity is unchanging
and unchangeable. But why does this matter? What is the goal of this
subversive enthymeme? Is it to keep the secret that dupes facilitate the
performance through which they are duped? Is it to keep the secret that a
passer is white, that a passer is black, both? Or is it, as Powell proposes, to
keep the secret that no U.S. citizen is “legally obligated to call himself ‘black’
or ‘white’ and the ‘one-drop rule’ depends almost totally on self policing?”
75

Regardless of the answer the relevant point is that successful passing
presupposes the concealment of some observable and knowable racial identity
that can never really be altered.
Figure 3: Dramatic Theater of Passing
31
In addition to pointing out the flaws in externally imposed identities
reflected in conventional treatments, Morris also includes issues of gender and
sexuality as well as issues of audience in a more rhetorical conception of
passing. He argues that the dupe is the second persona, the intended audience
birthed through rhetorical action that performs and repeats the social norm.
76

This audience constructs or deconstructs the pass. The in-group clairvoyant is
the third persona, or excluded audience constituted by silence, negation, and
exclusion.
77
As an in-group member, the clairvoyant bears witness to a
different identification which requires his/her involvement in the drama. This
audience defines the pass because it knows the secret. It is always lurking and
can out the passer at any time. Finally, Morris introduces a mixed fourth
persona that often takes the form of the reader/critic or the passer himself or
herself. This is an audience for whom the pass is legible because it is
recognized as identification rather than as identity. This audience generally
remains silent as “a welcome beacon of safety, solidarity, and success.”
78

Johnson gives voice to the thoughts of this fourth persona in the
conclusion of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. The anonymous
protagonist confesses:
It is difficult for me to analyse my feelings concerning my
present position in the world [an ordinarily successful white
man who has made a little money]. Sometimes it seems to me
that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a
privileged spectator of their inner life; at other times I feel that I
have been a coward, a deserter, and I am possessed by a strange
longing for my mother’s people…I cannot repress the thought
32
that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my
birthright for a mess of pottage.
79

The existence of this fourth persona shows that (bi)racial passing is a type of
action that invokes identification and claims status through the constitution of
audiences, personae, and responses. In so doing it reveals the suffering
inherent in having to choose to identify as either white or black—that any part
chosen will feel like “the lesser part” because partial representation passes for
identity when identity as mixed race is denied. It also reveals the ways in
which second and third persona audiences believe they can see acts of passing
without being seen themselves. The fourth persona, however, is a more
appropriate intellectual approach because it is more of what Boltanski and
Burchell might call a “pure spectator.” The fourth persona/pure spectator can
be the mixed race passer as an ethereal being or the rhetorical critic. In either
case, the pure spectator
presupposes someone vague, without definite substance,
someone with no precise place or definite opinion, someone
who has no commitment in the sense that no particular situation
detains him or prevents him from moving on elsewhere and
whose raison d’être is like that of a spy—to observe, listen and
report.
80

In observing, listening, and reporting, the fourth persona acts as a sleuth who:
introduces the act of passing as a tropological one; confronts the pains inherent
in the act; looks for moments of peace as they are found; reveals hidden
motives; and seeks a solution to the problems presented by the color line which
manifest as passing.
33
The “fourth persona” is the critical intellectual approach taken up in
this project because it considers race along with other axes of identity and
acknowledges how passers see themselves over time as well as how audiences
read their acts and are also seen. Robinson’s and Morris’s sketches of these
personae are limited because they focus predominantly on the optics of passing
at the expense of more rigorous audience analysis. I will take their model a
step further by tying the personae to other important rhetorical concepts in the
section that follows. Passing will be shown to be a type of interpreted
identification that responds to strict biracial definition and differentiation of the
color line by going in either the white or black direction, what I call (bi)racial
passing.
(Bi)racial passing distinguishes between opposing and unequal racial
realities of either white or black and provides the dramatic possibility of
understanding mixed race identification practices in the absence of legal,
social, and civil recognition. The dupe/second persona has no knowledge of a
mixed race whole and takes the partial identity put forth by the passer, which is
projected to the dupe as the new whole, as the whole. The third persona/in-
group clairvoyant takes the other part of a passer’s mixed race whole, sees the
passer in terms of this projected whole, and uses it as the truer attribute for
identification.
When framed as a problem of competing identifications and rhetorical
encounters, passing becomes more than an optical illusion. It becomes a
34
rhetorical issue that can be approached from a variety of perspectives,
including classical, modern, and postmodern rhetoric, cultural studies, and
critical race theory. The section that follows will outline such approaches and
explain why a new perspective of passing based on the fourth persona is
required in order to address the larger problem of mixed race identification. In
addition, it will be argued that a focus on passing from the fourth persona and
as (bi)racial broadens and deepens a critical understanding of rhetoric as an
important means of invention and intervention in social life.
IV
The study of passing reinvigorates many debates within the field of rhetoric.
For instance, it can be argued that contemporary U.S. rhetoric occupies a
neoclassical space harkening back to the classical debate between Plato and the
Sophists.
81
Central issues in this debate concern the importance of appearance,
speech, and identity as powerful elements of rhetoric.
82
In Donald J. Zeyl’s
1997 translation of Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates addresses the dangers of rhetoric
itself as a false art that imitates and passes for a true art. According to Socrates,
the Sophists’ claims are so shallow that they seek only to flatter audiences by
appealing to taken-for-granted opinion (doxa) and therefore cannot be taken
seriously as knowledge (episteme). Moreover, like conventional definitions of
racial passing, Sophistic rhetoric is characterized as rhetorical passing, both
self-deceptive and coercive because it constitutes imitation. One of Socrates’s
primary antagonists, the Sophist Callicles, embodies this perversion as a
35
rhetorical passer. Callicles is a rhetorical passer so far-gone that he is a victim
of rhetorical passing because he dupes himself and his audiences by laying
claim to knowledge that, according to Socrates, cannot be authenticated and is
therefore unjust.
Rhetoric is the theoretical genus and counterpart of (bi)racial passing
because it is described by Plato as a matter of deception rather than as an act of
assertion. In Phaedrus Socrates claims, “for the fact is…that one who intends
to be an able rhetorician has no need to know the truth…they only care about
what is convincing.”
83
And in Gorgias Plato writes that “there is no need for
rhetoric to know the facts at all, for it has hit upon a means of persuasion that
enables it to appear in the eyes of the ignorant to know more than those who
really know.”
84
Plato’s evaluation is consistent with Robinson’s depiction of
the passer-dupe (or Morris’s persona-second persona) relationship because the
relationship between rhetoric and audience is the same as that between passer
and dupe. Moreover, Plato characterizes Socrates as a third persona who
knows the truth and decides whether to reveal it. According to Kennedy,
“Plato’s view of rhetoric here is that it cannot be divided from its substance: a
speech must be about something and it is that something that matters most.”
85

In short, Plato’s terms enable us to conceptualize rhetoric as passing and
passing as rhetorical.
In the chapters that follow I will place acts of (bi)racial passing in
conversation with this Platonic view, suggesting that they can express its
36
limited account of the first and second persona as well as partially express the
contingency and situations of the third and fourth personae.
86
By accounting
for all four perspectives, rhetoric and passing can be considered deliberative in
nature because a rhetor chooses to lead one kind of life over another and to
communicate in a style that expresses her/his choice. Rhetoric “summons up a
significantly more complex relationship between passer and audience” and
creates a context for moral behavior as that which earns acceptance from
particular communities rather than that which follows universal laws.
87
It
makes effective persuasion a matter of location and occasion, and creates an
ethics based on experience rather than on laws imposed by government,
philosophy, or religion. Rhetoric is
a virtuoso tightrope performance, a flirtation with risk by
flaunting your disguise in a context in which you know that it
will fool only some people—an act, in other words, that has
built into it the exhilarating possibility of exposure and
destruction.
88

Thus, Callicles’s ontological choices as a passer in the realm of doxa, although
a “potent force behind all symbolic operations,” can have only negative
consequences for a society that links knowledge with apparent identity and
absolute truth.
89
These consequences include absence of universal Truth and
virtue, corruption, blindness, and injustice.
90
In Plato’s judgment Callicles’s
rhetorical passing merits a punishment greater than mere outing. The
punishment for Callicles’s offense is the marginalization of rhetoric and the
37
centering of dialectic and philosophy. This marginality remains “a
conventional condition of rhetorical studies.”
91

As a form of deliberative communication rhetoric (as passing) adheres
to fixed truths only so that such truths can be probed using “logical rigor,
evidentiary support, appeal to precedent, [and] shared paradigms.”
92
Or as
Fish asserts, rhetoric treats “truth itself [a]s a contingent affair and
[understands that it] assumes a different shape in the light of differing local
urgencies and the convictions associated with [it]”
93
and with those who speak
it. Rhetoric
does not strive for cognitive certitude, the affirmation of logic,
or the articulation of universals. Conditioned by the people who
create it, rhetoric moves beyond the domain of logic and,
satisfied with probability, lends itself to the flexibility of the
contingent.
94

Consequently, rhetoric refuses to assign fixed meanings to symbols, like black
or white. Instead, the search for truth involves usefulness, versatility, and
elegance emerging from competing viewpoints, as well as an openness to
alternative communities.
95
This is confirmed by the Sophist Gorgias who, in
the Encomium of Helen, shows that human beings are capable of shifting
paradigms as a result of the rhetor’s effective use of language and visual
imagery.
96
In other words, Gorgias explains that rhetoric is an active force
even though it is not a mirror image of some absolute “extralinguistic
content.”
97
“This…refusal of closure, highly annoying to conservative Greeks
38
of the time, was characteristic of the Sophists”
98
and is what gives rhetoric its
self-sustaining and transformative power.
Rhetoric (of the Sophists) demonstrates how challenging a model of
identification based on speech authorized by Ideal form threatens those
authorized identities that are accompanied by social status and distinction,
regardless of where those identities fall in social hierarchy. Take Plato’s
Sophist, which is concerned with distinguishing one kind of person from
another, specifically distinguishing the Sophist from the Statesman and
Philosopher. In defining the Sophist as a passer, and by consequence rhetoric
as passing, Plato’s Visitor highlights the trope of “appropriation, taking
position.”
99
The rhetorical passer appropriates the position of a Statesman or
Philosopher knowing that (s)he knows nothing and using language to create
and disseminate “copies” of truth that seem to be what they are not (much like
the (bi)racial passer, a point to which I will return in Chapter Three). At this
point it is adequate to state that, for Plato, identity entails the “possession and
presence of” a quality, be it whiteness/blackness, knowledge or truth.
100
In
passing, rhetors make claims to property and ownership of such qualities that,
upon further questioning, cannot be verified. On the other hand, Fredal writes
that examples and imitation work to “demythologize the apparently objective
realm of value, revealing its purely conventional and subjective source in
collective agreement and cultural perception.”
101
Accordingly, Plato may be a
passer himself because he claims to have access to absolute knowledge but
39
fails to acknowledge the possibility of varied ways of knowing based on
changing cultural and rhetorical traditions.
102

This debate over exactly who is passing is addressed further in Greater
Hippias, where Socrates and Hippias attempt to distinguish “the fine” from
“the appropriate.” Socrates says:
Because [appropriateness] makes things be seen to be finer than
they are—so you said—and it won’t let things be seen to be as
they are. We must try to say what it is that makes things fine,
whether they are seen to be fine or not, just as I said a moment
ago. That’s what we’re looking for, if we’re really looking for
the fine.
103

Though Socrates/Plato seeks the essential nature of “the fine,” he is forced to
confront appropriateness (to prepon), which means that “situations have formal
characteristics, and demands that speaking as a response to a situation be
suitable to those very characteristics.”
104
What is said must be appropriate to
the concreteness of each rhetorical situation encountered, including its
audience, exigencies, and constraints. Appropriateness is revealed by an
understanding of doxa and is communicated when the rhetor has mastered “a
set of complicated—and morally neutral—rules” of a situation.
105
Therefore, it
can be argued that Hippias posits doxa as a type of metaknowledge that
incorporates episteme because it presents opportunities for rhetors to create
something newer and more universal by combining and exploiting episteme
that already exists.
Plato’s attack on the doxa of rhetoric continues in Protagoras, when he
questions the nature and existence of sophistic wisdom and defines rhetoric as
40
an offensive ancient art of masking “sometimes as poetry…or as mystery
religions and prophecy” or music.
106
Though Protagoras defends himself by
redefining rhetoric as the persuasive artistry of “sound deliberation…[of] how
to realize one’s maximum potential for success,” Socrates defines it as
passing—“virtuoso performance” that leaves audiences spellbound and duped
rather than educated and informed as to the identity of the speaker and the truth
of his topic.
107
This interpretation is rephrased in The Allegory of the Cave in
Republic Book VII, wherein Socrates asks Glaucon to recall his fellow
prisoners and what was called wisdom in the cave. Those notorious “shadows
passing” are understood to have somehow impersonated a truth in the cave.
These shadows and copies take center stage within Plato’s larger pedagogical
lesson about the universality and precedence of Truth and Ideal forms, the
virtuous pursuit of justice, and the danger of rhetoric that misleads and
masquerades by referring consistently to unreal and imperfect natural
phenomena.
Rhetoric presents the possibility that Plato’s shadows passing are false
copies of the world above because the sun controls and sheds light upon
everything in the visible world. The presupposition is that if an origin story for
the shadows exists, then an origin story for the sun must also exist. The
implications are threefold. First, a person’s vision is limited to that which
(s)he perceives as real. Second, what is visible is always subject to change.
And third, episteme can be considered a form of passing much more
41
debilitating than doxa because it forces stability on categories that are
fundamentally unstable and hides the operations through which the appearance
of stability is created.
108
So, in order for absolute categorical meanings like
black and white to remain stable, society must undergo a process of anamnesis
regarding the philosopher and his episteme and then a process of amnesia
concerning the accusers and their doxa. This historical amnesia is an
underlying function of the Socratic dialogues. Accordingly, Plato’s
Sophists/passing rhetors become villains—“cheat[s] who imitate real things”—
instead of communicators who can see, hear, and communicate across cultural
and temporal contexts.
109
Nakayama and Krizek suggest that Plato’s move
mirrors the way in which the present-day racial identity of whiteness operates
strategically in the United States by making itself an invisible center. Although
the geographical location has moved from “the place of ancient Greece to
contemporary North America,” the concept of an assumed fixed center as the
source of all meaning and identification “remains intact and unquestioned.”
110

By insisting on the Truth of a fixed center, Plato also negates
Protagoras’s notion of “man as the measure of all things of those that are in so
far as they are, and those that are not in so far as they are not.”
111
In other
words Plato argues against the idea that human beings are capable intrinsically
of making valid decisions based on everyday experience. This does not mean,
as Plato suggests, that people are incapable of holding firm opinions without
the aid of the philosopher. Rather, it means that people can be moved by
42
rhetoric because it occupies gray areas that “recognize only accidental as
opposed to essential being…the conditional and relative as opposed to the self-
existent.”
112

Passers have the power to support and subvert the realm of Platonic
episteme as they decide how they will sustain their acts of passing. Episteme
banishes knowledge that is not authorized by truth. As applied to (bi)racial
passing, episteme refuses to grant mixed race identity to (bi)racial passers and
assigns to them either a black or white identity. Zack writes: “there has never
been a recognized category of mixed black and white race. Individuals with
both black and white forebears have always been considered black, both
legally and socially [regardless of appearance], in the contexts of both white
and black society.”
113
A prominent figure in U.S. history that passed as black
and subscribed to this episteme was Booker T. Washington. Washington, a
mixed race proponent of racial accommodation, acknowledged but did not
identify himself based on the white part of his ancestry. He identified simply as
a Negro.
114
Though Washington might say that he understood what the color of
[his] skin meant during his lifetime, it can be argued that Washington
subverted the realm of episteme by disclosing his mixed race identity, even if it
was oversimplified by the identification he induced.
Passers operate in and can transform the territory of opinion, doxa—the
visible realm of appearances, reputations, and expectations. This is precisely
because they see that no ideal form exists for the rhetor to claim or for the
43
mixed race person to embody. Anyone can be of mixed race. Therefore, mixed
race individuals must enact a “dramaturgy of whiteness”
115
or blackness to
gain recognition in the social world by emphasizing the aspects of their
identities that will produce the identifications they seek. In this sense, learning
how to pass is similar to Plato’s portrait of the classical art of rhapsody in Ion.
Passers, like rhapsodes, are considered inauthentic because they do not seem to
have racial identities of their own as mixed.
116
In order to represent
themselves as either white or black, passers have to know the material of
whiteness and blackness, understand the intention and outcomes of each
category, and fit in by performing persuasively. As Conley puts it, “first we
try mouthing all sounds. Then we learn which are not words and which have
meaning to the people around us.”
117
In more traditional rhetorical terms,
arguments made when passing may be true but are presented in terms which do
not require that a rhetor’s claims stand as objective fact. These arguments can
be interpreted and judged effective only by the audience’s own situation rather
than by objective knowledge. For this reason rhetoric and (bi)racial passing
generally are considered to be merely subjective opinion rather than
knowledge, and of limited efficacy.
In order to recover the statuses of rhetoric and (bi)racial passing, as
well as the intellectualism and power of rhetors and passers, Hariman extends
the definition of doxa to include “concealment, an act of metamorphosis”
which allows for a break from the episteme/doxa binary via aletheia—“truth
44
(literally unhiddenness)” or sincerity.
118
Passing is an expression of aletheia
that allows for a break from the binary by allowing the passer to choose one
identity or another depending on situation and/or sociopolitical commitment.
As such, passing affirms Dworkin’s claims about symbolic demarcations based
on skin color that shows and hides various attributes, making it unstable
evidence for distinguishing among individuals. Passing also dovetails with
Jackson’s anthropological concept of “racial sincerity,” which explains that in
order to recognize racial identities the critic must be willing to look beyond
skin color and understand a person’s social and political interests. In other
words, understanding identity is linked to sincerity and aletheia, “how people
think and feel their identities into palpable everyday existence, especially as
such identities operate within a social context that includes so many causal
forces beyond their immediate control.”
119

Aletheia is not objective knowledge, but a form of culturally specific
knowledge that privileges important aspects of the fourth persona perspective.
Aletheia calls for subject-subject relationships wherein audiences do not judge
or authenticate passers’ claims, but participate actively in understanding why
the claims are made. Aletheia also promotes the passer’s motive over his/her
phenotype or audiences’ racial visions allowing for new possibilities. Aletheia
calls for identification based on multiple and competing interpretations rather
than on exact calculation via the one-drop rule. From a theoretical perspective,
aletheia allows the critic to see that rhetoric and (bi)racial passing are “status
45
claims” that “assert regard…through the concealment of rank,” either higher or
lower, created in discourse.
120
This line of reasoning is a form of passing itself
because it reveals some things while it hides others, makes the weaker
argument appear the stronger, and subverts a visual model of identification.
Passing then is as dangerous to the life of Plato’s polis as it can be to DuBois’s
color line. The optimistic interpretation taken up in this dissertation envisions a
rhetoric that is sincere and compatible with reasoned deliberative discourse, a
rhetoric that allows rhetors to speak from a place of unity rather than from
partial representation.
121

To summarize, the preceding analysis of rhetoric as passing and
passing as rhetorical is important for several reasons. First, the analysis shows
that the rhetorical tradition entails generative principles for a study of passing.
Second, it explains that it was important for Plato to define and disgrace
rhetoric as passing because it causes the spectator to see things as impure, “not
as separate, but as mixed up together,” as continuous and consubstantial, and
perhaps even as equivalent.
122
Third, it suggests that the greatest subjects for
establishing and maintaining status, order, and hierarchy are the matters of
identification and differentiation.
123
Fourth, it presents implications for rhetoric
as a viable form of human communication that can attribute status to and
transform the status of racially mixed individuals.
124
Finally, it sets the stage
for considering rhetoric and passing as enabling forces that express personal
and/or political agency in the face of structural constraint and suffering.
125

46
Proposing passing as a rhetorical response to suffering inflicted by the
problem of mixed race identity constrained by the color line distinguishes it
from the classical framework of sheer impersonation. This is because passing
does not just reflect or express doxa as a false copy of episteme, but because
passing is a way to move beyond episteme to create an acceptable identity out
of one that is, for the most part, either alienated or unrecognized. Passing
provides an opportunity to explore “in theoretical and practical terms the
implications of a theory that is divorced from the constraints of a Platonic
conception”
126
of rhetoric. It shows passers’ ability to work in the realm of
what is possible and, through concealment and revelation (aletheia), to
articulate an otherwise voiceless identity given their rhetorical situations. The
next section will discuss the rhetorical implications of passing considered this
way in light of contemporary approaches to the problem of identity. These
approaches range from powerful social construct that reflects ideology, to
personally experienced manifestation of a social institution, to performative
utterance, to either ultimately essential or nonexistent.
127
With such varied
theoretical interventions it is no surprise that passing emphasizes disparities,
prompts further investigation, and calls for a new approach to fill gaps in the
existing literature.
V
So far I have considered potential ways to address passing—as a function of
the mixed race subject’s alienation and suffering, as a series of encounters with
47
audiences/personae in which there is a crisis of interpretation, and as a way to
address the gap between episteme and doxa. Given these, passing is not best
understood as an isolated act with a beginning and an end. Passing, by
definition, is a type of interpreted identification that responds to strict biracial
definition and differentiation of the color line by going in either the white or
black direction, what I have called (bi)racial passing. To this extent, passing is
best investigated by building a new theoretical account of its identification
practices based on the neoclassical rhetorical space referenced above and the
limits revealed by the fourth persona in later historical and rhetorical moments.
This account considers contingencies, critical interruptions, and destabilization
of norms, and tracks symbolic movement of identities that lead to
(re)classification and (re)distribution of resources. It also investigates tensions
between discourse practices in everyday life and macro-level institutional
structures, such as the color line, emphasizing the material effects of discourse
that constitute the biracial hierarchy to which acts of passing respond.
128

The need to address both symbolic and material effects of identity is
why this project posits that (bi)racial passing is rhetorical and, more
specifically, tropological. Passing is performed by the passer as synecdoche
and interpreted by audiences as metonymy.
129
According to Nerlich and
Clarke, synecdoche is an appropriate way to explain passing from the mixed
race passer’s standpoint because it “reflects and exploits order in our
categories,… it exploits semantic relations, and… it brings order into texts and
48
into social relations.”
130
Passers engage synecdoche when they project a racial
identity as either white or black instead of as white and black. This
synecdochic move “takes the part for the whole,” and objectifies the passer’s
persona as a “thing” to be “perceived” by second, third, and fourth personae
who engage in subjective “act(s) of perception.”
131
These acts of perception (as
either white or black) by second and third fourth personae are recognized as
social status and traded upon by the passer as a rhetorical commodity,
circulated in exchange for the realization of his or her goals in interpersonal
and institutional settings. However, the story of passing cannot be recounted in
terms of synecdoche or compensation/loss alone. The story of passing is one of
complex and fragile identifications based on audience perspective. To quote
Kenneth Burke, it is a story founded on “the stealing back and forth of
symbols.”
132

Although passers communicate via synecdoche, representing
themselves as either black or white personae, second and third persona
audiences interpret them metonymically. That is, audiences take the passer’s
persona as a whole even though audiences are really interacting with a part.
For example, if a passer is black and white, the second persona may identify
the passer as white and the third persona may identify the passer as black. In
either case this is metonymy. According to Burke, metonymy is a “special”
reductive “application of synecdoche” because it only identifies a passer in one
way that is mutually exclusive (i.e., either black or white).
133
If the audience
49
reads a passer as white, then (s)he cannot be black or vice versa. However,
mixed race passers, whose existence stresses a connection between both black
and white, can represent themselves in either direction as black or white.
For instance, when Homer Plessy presents himself as white
(synecdoche, or his white part for the whole of his racial identity) in order to
board a segregated passenger train, he is duping the white audience
(metonymy, because this audience believes he is nothing but white). At the
same time, the excluded black audience is aware of the other part of his racial
identity as black (metonymy, because even if this audience sees the white part
of his identity it takes the black part as the “real” part).
134
Either of these
identifications remains incomplete regardless of intent. Therefore, it is only
from the perspective of the “fourth persona” that the critic is able to see the
ways in which synecdoche and metonymy create competing identifications as
either black or white and how these identifications play out in the passer’s
experiences as they are combined with other rhetorical concepts. As we will
see in Chapter Three, Homer Plessy understood himself as mixed race and
maintained this understanding over time. In doing so it can be argued that
Plessy utilized an “intersectional” approach to communicating his identity.
Crenshaw’s Theory of Intersectionality conceives identity in terms of
motion. Crenshaw analogizes identity with a traffic intersection, in which
race, ethnicity, gender, and class are avenues of power that comprise social,
economic, and political roadmaps. These avenues are the routes through which
50
“disempowering dynamics” travel. These avenues, or axes of power, at times
are considered distinct but generally overlap, creating complex intersections.
Carbado elaborates. For him, in addition to explaining identity in terms
of motion intersectionality theory encompasses multiple rubrics: identity
intersectionality, experiential intersectionality, discrimination intersectionality,
political intersectionality, and multiracial intersectionality.
135
Identity
intersectionality involves the ways in which the multiple social spaces that
people occupy operate reflexively on their life experiences. Experiential
intersectionality explains how people’s multi-dimensional identities relate to
their experiences of discrimination. Experiential intersectionality also implies
historical and cultural contexts because an identity intersection that is
disadvantaged in one context might be advantaged in another. Discrimination
intersectionality explains that avenues of discrimination are themselves
interrelated and manifested in identity, experience, politics, and
communication. Political intersectionality is the idea that political agendas of
oppressed groups focus on the privileged within that group.
Multiracial intersectionality proposes that the experience of one group
intersects with and affects the experiences of other groups.
136
This is
exemplified by the mutually exclusive relationships between men and women
or white and black people. However, it encompasses a wide array of
intersections, including not only race and gender but also class, sexuality,
disability, religion, and historical context. This multiracial aspect of
51
intersectionality is important to any study of passing because it treats identity
rhetorically, as a decision to make oneself identifiable as a member of one
group or another because membership in both is mutually exclusive. As such,
this aspect of intersectionality will be applied as an element of my method of
analysis. First, multiracial intersectionality will show how synecdoche and
metonymy interact with other rhetorical concepts to express mixed race
identity in slavery and segregationist settings. Second, because multiracial
intersectionality is itself a synecdochic expression of the passer’s entire
identity, it will be used as the starting point for discussing how race affects
other aspects of identity (gender, class, ability, religion, etc.) and allows
passing to address other aspects of intersectionality (identity, experiential,
discrimination, political).
An intersectional description of identity in terms of motion,
complicated by competing identifications created among racialized audiences
when passing, implies that some object, persona, or body is in motion.
Butler’s theory of performativity presents those bodies as matter that is
animated through the process of multiple identifications. Such identifications
foreground the ontological status of rhetoric as learned behaviors and
interpretive acts.
137
Performative identifications reveal that the hegemonic
“regulatory ideals” that govern the production of race and racialized bodies
cannot reproduce and sustain themselves. They must be “reiterated.”
Reiteration necessarily opens up the space for rhetorical practices and
52
performances—such as passing—that can subvert the very norms they could
reinforce. As Butler puts it, “a citation will be at once an interpretation of the
norm and an occasion to expose the norm itself as a privileged
interpretation.”
138
It is crucial to note the irony in this statement: that citation is
only an “occasion” to subvert a norm and is not a guarantee that the norm will
be subverted. Once the idea of citationality is centralized, it becomes clear that
performativity is ultimately “a theory of agency…without an agent.”
139
It
describes a rhetoric of bodies and identifications that questions the nature of
personal agency and structural constraint, for “the subject as self-identical
identity is no more.”
140

Although insightful and attractive, a performative approach focuses too
sharply on the symbolic aspects of identification at the expense of agents,
material concerns, and collective identities required by a fourth persona
perspective. One consequence of Butler’s radical critique of identity and
identity politics is that it becomes difficult to conceptualize any form of
institutionalism or collectivity (e.g., collective identities, power, or action). In
order to apply her argument to study passing, I would be forced to neglect
material aspects of the color line that precipitate and follow (re)iterations of
rhetoric and identity when passing. As Benn Michaels warns, such a focus
would “transform the actions that represent racial identity into the actions that
determine racial identity,”
141
thereby eschewing historical realities and
structural constraints. The performative approach correctly shows how
53
authorized racial truths and differentiated identities are deployed, enacted, and
often subverted to grapple with the substantive evaluation of people according
to racial categories despite their motivations (the paradox of purity). But it
does not provide a convincing account of passing as rhetorical practice
opposed to a concept of racial essence based on purity. This is because
performativity only addresses metonymy, which makes a mixed race person
identifiable to second and third persona audiences as either white or black, and
ignores synecdoche. Because (bi)racial passing is initiated by the passer as
synecdoche, there is not only an agent behind the act, but an agent behind the
act who is tied to and able to cross and recross the color line.
142

Butler’s performativity retains value when paired with Omi’s and
Winant’s cultural argument that (bi)racial passing illustrates the nature of race
as hermeneutic and teleological, material and symbolic, instead of essential or
“a costume [that can] just be switched at some point.”
143
Omi and Winant
recognize that passing reveals the arbitrariness of racial classifications.
However, they render it as an individualized action always complicit with the
“racial state,” not as an action that can provide a platform from which to
expose injustices in the racial state.
144
For them, passing is a “racial project”
that is “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of
racial dynamics… [It] connect[s] what race means in a particular discursive
practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences
are racially organized based upon that meaning.”
145
Passing then represents a
54
form of mediation that momentarily illuminates the role of race as a deep-
seated element of social structure and a sculptor of everyday experience. These
crises are never resolved but, rather, erupt unpredictably over time. While
informative about the nature of race and history of racial development, this
approach fails to account for those whose identities are rendered nonexistent
by the “State”: (bi)racial mixed race passers. Perhaps this is because their
racial identities are what Miller calls “ideological null zones.”
146

Omi and Winant’s framework partially addresses these “null zones,”
showing how passing hides and exposes the many invisible and tenacious
aspects of racial identification based on metonymy and the reductive one-drop
rule. A focus on passing from a fourth persona rhetorical perspective, however,
goes a step further by noticing and attributing status to mixed race individuals
synecdochically, i.e., as both mixed race and however they wish to identify
themselves. While it certainly is the case that much (bi)racial passing is
effective because it is complicit with the hegemonic logic of the racial state,
subsequent chapters will demonstrate that passing also can be a form of
protest. Insurgent passes aim to reconfigure or even dismantle the racial state
by challenging the color line and showing that the problem of mixed race
identity is one of its effects, not one of its causes. Insurgent passing can do this
because it is both a literal act of moving through racialized spaces and a
figurative moving through a series of racialized personae. To this extent,
passing implies an “intersectional” movement through and across discursive
55
space which exists in sharp contrast to the rigid socio-legal boundaries of the
State. Like performativity theory, the racial formation formula is not entirely
compatible with a “fourth persona” perspective because it sees passing as a
reaction and not as an active form of communication with the potential for
catalyzing social and institutional change. Moreover, the racial formation
formula treats acts of passing as socio-historical events rather than as socio-
historical encounters among competing rhetorical personae.
The following exchange at a Harvard Law School cafeteria, which
places appearance and substance in dialogue, shows why performative and
racial formation perspectives are inadequate.
‘Excuse me, my name is Sara Lewis. By any chance are you
black?’ ‘No, I’m not.’ Sara took a good look at the thick lips of
the white-looking twenty-two-year-old as a few of us stood
there with her in the Harvard student center. There was
something about the shape of his head that made her wonder.
‘Really?’ She asked. ‘Not at all?’ The student shrugged
uncomfortably and hurried past her to the dining hall.
147

This encounter is uncomfortable because it constitutes a racial-epistemological
crisis. Sarah, taking on the third persona of in-group clairvoyant, asks Bob, the
assumed passer, to confess to his blackness (thereby negating his whiteness
and mixedness) and, thereby, to reify his submission to racial episteme and
authority. Both Sarah’s and Bob’s conceptions of blackness as apparent and
totalizing are intricately related to the one-drop rule, the color line, and to
Plato’s teleological belief in authentic identity based on an ability to
distinguish and not see things as commingled.
56
As the story unfolds, we discover that Bob’s white girlfriend is the
second persona/dupe who does not know he is mixed or black. We are told
that “all white people see is skin and hair.”
148
Sarah (our third
persona/clairvoyant) learns the “truth” of his racial identity years later from a
prominent magazine profile that calls Bob a “high-achieving, self-identified
black man who looked very much like a darker version of someone we all
knew.”
149

A cursory rhetorical critique of this anecdote emphasizes doxa rather
than episteme, revealing that it is not the passer’s body that speaks a racial
truth, but the ability of the passer’s body and personality to demonstrate a
racial truth in the eye of the observer. Because of its ability to identify as either
black or white, the passer’s body symbolizes disorganization and disorder as
well as a social and biological threat. The power of disorganization and
disorder is in the ambiguities they create and in the hierarchical reorganizations
they can catalyze.
150
Bob’s story also shows the synecdochic and metonymic
characteristics of (bi)racial passing because he passed as white at Harvard and
then as black when profiled in the magazine.
Passing here involves both fixation and the impossibility of fixation,
determined through encounters among audiences in the context of doxa. In
passing, the act of identifying as either white or black is not merely a
transformation of terms but is an expression of the intersectional relationship
between social conflict and suffering.
151
This is accomplished when passing
57
addresses the coexistence and coevolution of the material and symbolic aspects
of racial identification. In moving across identities perceived as mutually
exclusive (such as black or white) and/or inviolably distinct (such as male and
female), passers can transform the material conditions of their existence.
VI
This study fills gaps in the current literature by utilizing a fourth persona
perspective (that accounts for passers, dupes, in-group clairvoyants, and
critics) to examine passing as a rhetorical encounter driven by synecdoche and
metonymy. It also positions passing as an important test case for
constructionist (symbolic), essentialist and institutionalist (materialist) identity
theories alike. In so doing it follows Benn Michaels’s critique that “the very
idea of passing–whether it takes the form of looking like you belong to a
different race or of acting like you belong to a different race–requires an
understanding of race as something separate from the way you look and the
way you act.”
152
For, “if…to see race as a social construction is inevitably
(even if unwillingly and unknowingly) to essentialize it, then race really is
either an essence or an illusion.”
153
The choice seems clear enough: either hold
fast to racial identity and be committed to some sort of pernicious biracial
essentialism, or abandon it and adopt a post-race perspective, risking the
danger of neoconservative colorblindness. However, a middle ground that
redefines racial identity as a “sincere” emotional or spiritual relation to and
symbolic interpretation of race and the social issues pertaining to particular
58
racial groups could also exist.
154
While this debate is compelling, my purpose
here is not merely to establish the relative truth of sincerity over other
theoretical accounts. My point is simply that whether race is a viable category
for identity, it is a matter of rhetorical distinction manifested in the United
States as the color line. This line is passed and bypassed by many who
continue to find themselves, by accidents of birth and rhetorical determination,
in the gray gaps of the in-between.
This study also will explain how (bi)racial passing binds discourse and
identification and, ironically, further alienates mixed race individuals from a
biracial hierarchy. This is in line with Burke’s dramatistic conception of
rhetoric, which sees “identification” as “compensatory to division” and as a
means to grapple with alienation.
If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need
for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly
and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be
of man’s very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is,
partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by
these same conditions.
155

For Burke, rhetoric comprises the study of the ways in which “individuals are
at odds with one another” and themselves, and how they “become identified
with groups more or less at odds with one another.”
156
These odds result from
the simultaneity of identification and division, of concealment and revelation,
as they interface with hierarchy and order in the material realm.
It is important to remember that for Burke, identity is not just material
but also a highly symbolic process of identification.
157
As such, rhetoric
59
promises a vocabulary of “we,” a possibility of resistance, and a possibility of
representation unavailable and inaccessible to mixed race individuals in a
biracial episteme. Passing, then, is generated by the sense of being between
communities as mixed race people grapple with the decision to answer to any
group or interest. On the other hand, Burke’s view of rhetoric as a “body of
identifications” provides a different vocabulary of “we,” as the alienated
expression of a particular community running along the color line—a
community with its own styles of identification and of finding security. Hence,
Burke’s view of rhetoric is amenable to this study of (bi)racial passing because
it emphasizes the agent and animates the tensions between a racial logic that
takes appearance metonymically as evidence of a tangible identity and a mixed
racial logic that operates symbolically in terms of synecdochic
representation.
158

Burkean identification also engages the co-evolution of the material
and symbolic aspects of racial identification by invoking the key terms of
substance and property. A Grammar of Motives describes substance as the
term “used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, [although]
the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to
it.”
159
Substance consists of unique qualities assigned to people extrinsically by
way of encounters and interpretations based on position. Substance becomes
intrinsic when it influences belief systems about the constitution of reality and
our interactions with it. In passing, substances are assigned to passers by
60
audiences. These substances then become the passer’s property, or
characteristic attribute of identification. Racial properties are complicated
further by conceiving of passing as a problem of identification as well as a
problem of representation that necessitates a mastery of rhetorical tropes and
techniques such as synecdoche, metonymy, appropriation, eloquence, irony
and tragedy. Burke explains the connection between metonymy and
synecdoche as issues of perspective, position, reduction, and representation.
The basic strategy of metonymy, as it pertains to passing, is to convey racial
identity in terms of biology. Specifically, metonymy makes mixed race people
black by fractions of black blood that overpower and pollute white blood.
Metonymy comes to full force when it meets synecdoche in passing, as passers
use part of their racial identities to represent the whole. “Synecdoches are
representations that rhetorically qualify one another as they question and
modify one another.”
160
So, just like the mixed race passer who passes as
either white or black, synecdoche is and is not what it represents.
According to Burke, irony is somewhat more sophisticated because it
presumes a critical understanding of the perspectival natures of metonymic
reduction and synecdochic representation. In passing, irony can be used to
highlight the arbitrary nature of racial classification as well as the absurdity of
beliefs and values upon which they are based. As we will see in Chapter Two,
irony is a form of reasoning that can attain a “perspective of perspectives”
through the dialectical exchange of opposing identifications.
161
Irony is not,
61
however, the only dialectic at work in passing. Tragedy also plays a part as
mixed race passers act in accordance with their desires to escape imposed
racial identifications and delimit their suffering and alienation. In the tragic
context of the color line, the outcomes of passing are linked clearly to the
decision to pass and the decision to pass is a reflection of the passer. As I will
argue in Chapter Five, such contexts make it entirely plausible that tragic
mulattoes only bring their fates upon themselves because of the type of people
they are. This distracts us from exploring the possibility that the color line and
one-drop rule created an environment of suffering that rewarded those who
refused to do anything about it.
Passing also addresses the historical and legal invisibility of mixed race
people imposed through the color line and one-drop rule, and also their
inaudibility and silence, enforced through social stigmatization. Some passers
have utilized appropriation to address these exigencies by projecting either
black or white personae that are encountered, identified, and constructed by
various audiences. Appropriation occurs when the passer embodies some
specific element(s) of blackness or whiteness associated with each as property
via assigned substance. Racial property is privileged with rights, such as the
right to sit in a first-class railway coach, the right to travel with a black person
without suspicion, the right to a private education, and/or the right to fight
racial discrimination. As I will argue in Chapter Three, passers utilize
appropriation to challenge imposed metonymic identifications that exclude
62
them from exercising such rights while promoting multiple forms of identity
theft that leave them stranded at the color line.
When appropriation fails, some passers employ eloquence which,
according to Freeman, Littlejohn, and Pearce, allows them to develop inclusive
frameworks for understanding and comparing black and white racial
identities.
162
This kind of eloquence is rhetorical, applying standards of good
persuasion from moral discourse, and transcendent because it affords passers
the rights to choose and define their own identities, whether it be to identify as
either white or black or as mixed/multiracial, through different experiences and
situations across their lifetimes.
A rhetorical theory of (bi)racial passing based on the fourth persona
promises to illustrate how mixed race identity is constrained by the limits of
language but ultimately empowered by the symbolism of rhetorical
performance. In order to accomplish this, I apply an intersectional approach to
identify the roles played by synecdoche, metonymy and the Sophistic
principles of rhetoric-as-passing (irony, appropriation, eloquence, tragedy).
Intersectionality also demonstrates the coevolution of the material and
symbolic aspects of mixed race identification in slavery and segregationist
settings. My approach encourages an acceptance of the both/and rather than
either/or process of mixed race identification.
I examine a series of case studies that deal with the biosocial legacy of
racial identification and passers’ uses of language to reflect, position, and
63
deliver rhetorical messages. Ellen and William Craft escaped from slavery
aboard a train from Georgia to Pennsylvania by passing as a disabled white
slave owner and enslaved attendant. Homer Plessy protested racial segregation
by passing as white to board a white-only car of a Louisiana passenger train.
He then passed as black in order to get arrested and bring his case for
abolishing segregation to the U.S. Supreme Court. Frances Harper’s fictional
siblings, Iola and Harry Leroy, enhance the legal by enacting a mixed race
subjectivity as one who passes unintentionally as white and then intentionally
and “sincerely” as black. Philip Roth and Robert Benton present the multiple
tragedies of passing: the passer’s social and discursive situations contain
elements of tragedy, the passer is tragic, and traditional interpretations/reviews
of passing are tragic. Each case highlights the ways in which passers identify
and are identified racially through synecdoche and metonymy. Separately,
each case features one or more of the Sophistic principles of passing-as-
rhetoric (irony, appropriation, eloquence, tragedy) to uncover how rhetoric
guides passers and audiences in some ways and not others. Together, the cases
provide a powerful example of the ways in which passers’ representations and
motivations challenge traditional epistemological dichotomies, including
black/white, episteme/doxa, authentic/counterfeit, real/imagined, free/confined,
definer/defined, passer/audience, and part/whole.
I chose these case studies for several reasons. First, each case entails
an act of passing that is multidirectional and synecdochic from the passer’s
64
perspective (involves passing as white and/or as black in distinct episodes) and
is sustained at one or more intersections (race, gender, class, ability). Second,
in each case the passer shows how passing can be an act of conformity, protest,
or social transformation depending on the use of appropriation, eloquence,
irony, or tragedy. Third, each case acknowledges the life chances for the passer
on either side of the color line, thereby clearly demarcating what happened
before and after the passing. In this way, each case puts passers’ and
audiences’ personae and interpretations in dialogue. Fourth, each case is
socially significant. The Crafts went on tour and sold their story to raise funds
for the abolitionist movement. Plessy v. Ferguson set the precedent for
legalized segregation and future court action. Iola Leroy was the first novel
written by an African American woman that dealt with the theme of passing in
the reconstruction era. The Human Stain is the first mainstream representation
of passing in the 21
st
century (in literature and film) and presents several
defining moments in the life of a passer who chooses a white ethnic identity as
a way to change life chances.
My analysis of these cases first ties synecdoche to at least one other
rhetorical principle. Synecdoche is the master tropological and symbolic
move, in which passers represent themselves as black or white instead of as
black and white. This move is interpreted metonymically by second and third
persona audiences as responses to having their identities constructed
extrinsically and then imposed. Passers sustain their identifications via
65
intersections of synecdoche with metonymy, appropriation, eloquence, irony,
and tragedy. Such analysis promotes an understanding of passing from the
passer’s perspective over time as well as from the perspective of diverse
audiences.
My analysis further employs synecdoche to ascertain the intersections
between the biosocial, material, and symbolic aspects of racial identification in
each case. The historical and legal cases (Crafts; Plessy) reveal that symbolic
disclosure of passing (crossing over to one side of the color line and telling
people about it) is followed by either material denial of rights or tentative
acquisition of rights that can be snatched in slavery and segregationist settings.
The literary cases (Iola Leroy; The Human Stain) demonstrate the ways in
which mixed race passers deploy rhetorical principles to reproduce and change
the symbolic relationships that influenced their interpersonal interactions,
ethics, and morality. These cases also comprise a timeline from the earliest to
the latest benchmark representations of passing. Analysis will reveal that
passing is a matter of “continually developing social performance” that further
bridges the gaps between Plato’s episteme and the Sophists’ doxa and between
white and black.
163

The analysis unfolds in five chapters. Chapter Two, “The ‘Craft’ of
(Bi)Racial Passing: Rhetorical Irony and Intersectionality in the Case of Ellen
Craft,” treats (bi)racial passing as a means of uncovering and understanding
other unseen aspects of identity. Using Crenshaw’s and Carbado’s theory of
66
intersectionality, I argue that Craft’s narrative has been understood
incompletely because it has been examined primarily in either monoracial
and/or gendered terms. My extended analysis accounts for the equally
prominent presences of class status and disability and shows how they are
consistent with the rhetorical tropes of irony and synecdoche. Specifically, I
will discuss the consequences of a disembodied politic of universality coupled
with the use of intersectionality as the paradoxical and compulsive desire for
racial identification and representation. I will conclude by discussing the
intersectional relationships among race, gender, class, and disability made
visible in her passing as they pertain to the Crafts’ material and symbolic.
Chapter Three is entitled “Membership Has Its Privileges: Plessy’s
Passing and the Threat of Identity Theft.” The Supreme Court’s decision in
Plessy v. Ferguson provides an opportunity to examine passing as a declaration
of who matters racially and how much a racial identity is worth. At issue in
this case are social mobility, interpretive appropriation, and political equality,
based on the appearance of racial value as white. Flying in the face of what
Plessy intended, this case formally instantiated the formula for determining the
who matters via the “one drop rule.” It also institutionalized the color line and
naturalized the legal definition that made passing as white an illegal act of
creative appropriation and made passing as black the de facto way of life for
many mixed race individuals in the United States. In this way, Plessy
constitutes the legal origin of the modern crime of identity theft.
67
Chapter Four, “‘She Was, Above All, Sincere:’ Passing and Rhetorical
Eloquence” maps the logic of Plessy v. Ferguson onto Frances E. W. Harper’s
passing narrative, Iola Leroy/Shadows Uplifted. The protagonists’ experiences,
presented as heroic examples of black racial loyalty, allow them to appropriate
the ethos of the oppressed and enact it in two modes. First, playing on the
tension of the threat of passing contained by the Plessy ruling, passers confront
the social and biological purity of whiteness and transpose its valence from
positive to negative. Then, embodying the dynamics of synecdoche and
transcendent eloquence, passers demonstrate the moral purity and sincerity of
blackness by embodying aletheia. Examining the relationships among racial
purity, moral purity, and aletheia, I propose an intersectional interpretation of
passing that resets the problem of mixed racial identification as one of gender
and ethical difference. I also show how the characters’ sincere approaches of
self-identification present a rationale for (bi)racial passing as black in a
slavery-segregationist context.
Chapter Five, “A Crow that Doesn’t Know How to Be a Crow:
Reading The Human Stain and (Bi)racial Passing from Text to Film,” is
presented as a contemporary complement to the case treated in Chapter Four.
Here I focus on the passing of Coleman Silk, whose fictive experiences are
committed to narrative by Philip Roth (in the novel) and by Robert Benton (in
the film). Both texts embody the clash between individual and collective
identifications in the context of post-Plessy v. Ferguson legalized segregation.
68
These clashes, their cultural performances, and rhetorical intersections
comprise the central theme. This case is treated as an updated version of
Aesop’s moral in “The Crow and The Raven,” that paints passing as both
ridiculous and tragic. I will show how The Human Stain deploys passing to
mark passing as an act induced by and inducing suffering. In this way passing
becomes s breach of fundamental taboos that makes the passer responsible for
his own demise.
The concluding chapter, “Things Said in Passing,” will situate passing
as a circulation of meanings and as a model for rhetorical theory. The
theoretical model will be four-pronged. First, it will address the rhetorical
challenges (such as suffering induced and comfort found) that passers and
audiences experience across the cases. Second, it will detail the rules that
passers invent and follow to sustain their personae and survive in emerging
situations. It also will show how the rules-in-use prohibit and promote sense-
making, behavior, and persuasiveness. Third, it will read (bi)racial passing in
relation to “passing” nature of rhetoric itself, particularly in the context of
President-Elect Obama and the current historical moment. Fourth, it will detail
areas for further research in the domain of passing as a transformative and
rhetorical practice that is not limited to issues of mixed racial identification.
My theory focuses on the ways in which (bi)racial passers represent
racial identity through the rhetorical process of identification in a racist biracial
system of categorization of slavery and/or segregation. However, like any
69
theory, its scope is unavoidably bounded. Cases are restricted to United States
(bi)racial passing during the slavery and Jim and Jane Crow eras for several
reasons: because U.S. racial existence is unique when compared to that of
other nations (such as Brazil, Britain, and South Africa);
164
because issues of
race in the United States are exaggerated by the paradox of purity; and because
racial identification in the U.S. affects the life chances and self-conceptions of
millions of individuals.
165

The topic is further narrowed to passing as it pertains to white or black
racial identification in the United States. This is not because the identification
processes and experiences of Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic
Americans, and Semitic Americans are irrelevant but, rather, because the area
of academic specialization must be restricted for the sake of economy. Finally,
historical/social constraints on passers’ initial self-concepts as black, white, or
mixed race must be acknowledged. Therefore, the level of analysis is
constrained to the theoretical realm acknowledging that (bi)racial passing
represents a particular rhetorical choice based on historical facts and ingrained
social values and practices.
Above all, this project emphasizes that (bi)racial passing is both
symbolic and material. Therefore, it will speak to the ways in which verbal
and visual images shape what we consider comfortable, reasonable, and
desirable in other aspects of life. It will challenge the ways in which passers
should be represented and regarded rather than ask whether they should be
70
praised or blamed. If this perspective affords anything, it affords an
opportunity for sensitivity and reconciliation: “that we, with love,” can be
persuaded to allow passers “to see themselves as they are, to cease [passing]
from reality and begin to change it.”
166
In so doing, we will provide a more
thorough understanding of the ways in which rhetoric intersects with the color
line to define who we have been, who we now are and, most importantly, to
discover and mobilize who we might become for the purpose of positive
change.

71

CHAPTER ONE REFERENCES
1
Jennifer Carr, comment on “Racial Passing: A Concept Whose Time Has
Passed,” The Wo Nsa Da Ma A Blog, comment posted 18 May 2008,
http://wonsadamaa.blogspot.com/2008/05/racial-passing-concept-thats-time-
has.html (accessed 25 September 2008).
2
Nathan Irvin Huggins. Revelations: American History, American Myths
(Oxford: Oxford U P, 1995): 245. See also Paul R. Spickard. Mixed Blood.
(Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1989): 312. Spickard uses the heading
“Passing is Passé.”
3
Ulli K. Ryder. "As Shelters Against the Cold": Women Writers of the Black
Arts and Chicano Movements, 1965-1978.” (Ph.D.. Diss, University of
Southern California, 2008). Ryder also points out the irony that the 1960s and
1970s did see a rise in mixed race births that coincided with Civil Rights
legislation outlawing discrimination based on race, color, and national origin.
4
Woods’s name became so synonymous with multiracialism after his
appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in which he coined the term
“Cablinasian,” that Representative Tom Petri’s bill (H.R. 830) mandating that
a freestanding multiracial category be added to the 2000 Census became
known the “Tiger Woods Bill.” The bill was never passed.

5
Nella Larsen. Passing (New York: Penguin Classics, 1997): 185-186.
6
Leon E. Winter. American Skin: Popular Culture, Big Business, and the End
of White America (New York: Crown, 2002).

7
U.S. Census Bureau. “Questions and Answers for Census 200 Data on Race”
U.S. Census. http://www.census.gov/Press-
Release/www/2001/raceqandas.html (accessed 20 October 2008). It should be
noted that the 2.4% of the U.S. population identifying as mixed race translates
to approximately 6.8 million. In addition, given that many mixed race persons
still pass as either one race or another, we can assume that the mixed race
population is actually higher.
8
Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas. Mixed Race Hollywood (New York: New
York University Press, 2008).

72

9
Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (Speech, Philadephia, PA, 18 March
2008). http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords (accessed 19
March 2008). This excerpt is reminiscent of the rhetoric of Rev. Dr. Martin L.
King, Jr., who campaigned for U.S. civil rights and integration by consistently
playing playing one U.S. identity against another. King often remarked that a
white southerner is both a segregationist who believes that blacks are inferior
to whites, and a U.S. citizen who believes that “all men are created equal.”
10
T. L. Dumm. “Barack Obama and the Souls of White Folk,” Communication
and Critical Cultural Studies (2008): 318.
11
Ibid.
12
Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (Speech, Philadephia, PA, 18
March 2008). http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords
(accessed 19 March 2008).

13
Ralina Joseph. “Celebrating Check All that Apply: Neoconservatives and
Mixed Race Self Identification on the 2000 U.S. Census” (paper presented at
the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association Albuquerque, NM,
October 16-19, 2008).
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/1/3/6/2/p11
3627_index.html (accessed 1 October 2008).
14
W.E.B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk. (New York: Vintage Books:
1903): 3.
15
Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (Speech, Philadephia, PA, 18
March 2008). http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords
(accessed 19 March 2008).
16
Ursula M. Brown. The Interracial Experience: Growing Up Black/White
Racially Mixed in the United States (Westport: Prager, 2001): 37.

17
Robyn Wiegman. American Anatomies Theorizing Race and Gender
(Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1995).

73

18
The issue of suffering as it connects to spectatorship and audience has been
analyzed sensitively and thoroughly by Luc Boltanski and Graham Burschell,
leading figures in the new “pragmatics” school of French sociology.
According to Boltanski and Burschell, suffering begs the question of what can
be considered the morally acceptable response when the viewer cannot act
directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place.
Boltanski argues that spectators can involve themselves and others actively
actively by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by
it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith's moral theory, they examine three
rhetorical topics available for the expression of the spectator's response to
suffering: the topics of denunciation, sentiment, and aesthetics. They conclude
with a discussion of a 'crisis of pity' in relation to modern forms of
humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves
an emphasis and focus on present suffering. For further discussion and detail
please see: Luc Boltanski and Graham Burschell. Distant Suffering: Morality,
Media and Politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

19
Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (Speech, Philadephia, PA, 18
March 2008). http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords
(accessed 19 March 2008).
20
Ibid.
21
Though not addressed by Obama in “A More Perfect Union,” it is important
to note that gender is also a part of this hierarchy, which intersects with race
and class to present another disempowering dynamic that affects life chances
for all women regardless of race.
22
Charles E. Morris III. “Pink Herring & The Fourth Persona: J. Edgar
Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, Third Edition
ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing, 2005): 667. Morris
has reconstructed prior literature on the persona for his own purposes, and in
ways that other scholars, and I, do not necessarily agree with. Further,
revisiting this territory is not necessary given my own purposes in applying
Morris. For further discussions of persona please see any of the following:
Max Müller. “Persona,” in The Open Court. 1.20, np Typescript. Peter Munz,
1987. Edwin Black. “The Second Persona,” in Contemporary Rhetorical
Theory: A Reader eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, Sally
Caudill (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999): 331-340. Philip Wander. “The
Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” in Contemporary
Rhetorical Theory: A Reader eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle
Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999): 357-380.
74

23
John Ayto. Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins (New York: Arcade
Publishing, 1990): 385.
24
William Craft and Ellen Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1806): 15.
25
Anderson Bowles. The Richmond (VA) Whig, 6 Jan. 1836.
26
A. W. Johnson. The Republican Banner and The Nashville (Tenn.) Whig, 14
July 1840.
27
It is important to note a recent development pertaining to the study of
rhetoric and race the in U.S. context. According to CNN.com in an article
entitled “House Apologizes for Slavery/Jim Crow Injustices,” on Tuesday 29
July 2008, “the House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing to
African Americans for slavery and the era of Jim [and Jane] Crow. The
nonbinding resolution, which passed on a voice vote, was introduced by Rep.
Steve Cohen, a white lawmaker who represents a majority black district in
Memphis, Tennessee. While many states have apologized for slavery, it is the
first time a branch of the federal government has done so... The resolution
states that ‘the vestiges of Jim Crow continue to this day.’ ‘African-Americans
continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow – long after
both systems were formally abolished – through enormous damage and loss,
both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty,
the frustration of careers and professional lives, and the long-term loss of
income and opportunity,’ the resolution states... The resolution does not
address the controversial issue of reparations. Some members of the African-
American community have called on lawmakers to give cash payments or
other financial benefits to descendents of slaves as compensation for the
suffering caused by slavery.” Diedre Walsh and Scott Anderson. “House
Apologizes for Slavery/Jim Crow Injustices,”
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/29/house.slavery/index.html
(accessed 29 July 2008).
28
Andrea Dworkin. Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987): 22.

75

29
A body of literature discusses the various reasons for (bi)racial passing.
These include: James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
(New York: Vintage Books, 1912); Phillip Roth, The Human Stain (New
York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000); Walter White, A Man Called White:
The Autobiography of Walter White (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1.948); A. Cheree Carlson, “‘You Know It When You See It:’ The Rhetorical
Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 85.2 (1999): 111-128; Rachel F. Moran, Interracial
Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001); Jessie Redmon Fauset, There is Confusion (New York:
Beacon Press, 1924); Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1933); James M. O’Toole, Passing: Race Religion and the
Healy Family, 1820-1920. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
30
Langston Hughes. “Passing,” The Ways of White Folks (New York: Vintage
Books, 1933): 51, 54.
31
Randall Kennedy. “Racial Passing,” Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001).
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/lawjournal/ issues/volume62/number3/kennedy.pdf
(accessed 5 June 2006).
32
Catherine R. Squires and Daniel C. Brouwer. “In/Discernible Bodies: The
Politics of Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 19 (2002): 283-311.
33
Harryette Mullen. “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of
Whiteness,” Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 71-89; A. D. Powell. “Passing” for Who
You Really Are (Palm Coast, FL: Backintyme, 2005).
34
David B. Buller and Judee K. Burgoon. “Interpersonal Deception Theory,”
Communication Theory 6 (1996): 203-242. According to Buller and Burgoon
human beings have a persistent expectation that people will tell the truth,
known as “truth bias.” The “truth bias” is 2-pronged: (1) there is an implied
social contract that all of us will be honest with each other. (2) The
expectation of honesty is a cognitive heuristic. Buller and Burgoon go on to
explain that people often find themselves in situations where they make
statements that are less than completely honest. Three deception strategies:
falsification—creating a fiction; concealment—hiding a secret; and
equivocation—dodging the issue, are utilized in such situations. Ironically,
most people believe they can spot deception but interpersonal deception theory
(IDT) shows most cannot. Deception research shows that various nonverbal
cues are not reliable indicators of deception in contrast to common
assumptions. I argue elsewhere for the existence of a “visibility bias” that
relies on the assumption that people are exactly as they appear to be.
76

35
Brooke Kroger. Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are (New York:
Public Affairs, 2003): 13.
36
Please note that I use the terms hypodescent and one-drop rule
interchangeably. Both refer to the legal and social tradition of defining race by
the amount of non-white blood a person is said to possess.

37
Lawrence Wright. “One Drop of Blood” The New Yorker, 24 July 1994.
http://www.afn.org/~dks/race/wright.html (accessed 6 July 2006).
Additionally, on page 19 of Race and Mixed Race, Zack makes the following
observation about the pernicious nature of the rule of hypodescent: “This one-
drop rule, which has been in effect since about 1915, is in theory more
stringent than the Third Reich’s designation of Jews. The Nazis designated a
person as a Jew if that person had one grandparent who observed the Jewish
religion.” According to Omi & Winant, Louisiana state law as recently as
1970 deemed any person with at least 1/32 black blood to be black. For further
discussion please see Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in
the US (New York: Routledge, 1994): 53
38
Dalton Conley. Honky (New York: Vintage Books): 52. Conversely, “black
or graduated shades thereof” bore the mark of slavery. This hierarchy was
fixed in law by Virginia’s state statutes as early as 1667.
39
Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek. “Whiteness: A Strategic
Rhetoric,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism Ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State
College: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2005): 630-631. The authors explain the
rhetorical logic by which white comes to mean that a person is not black. They
continue by explaining that to be black does not mean that a person is also not
white. By either definition, a specific definition of an individual as mixed race
is denied.
40
Naomi Zack. “Race and Philosophic Meaning,” in Race and Racism Ed.
Bernard Boxill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 48.
41
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962): 35.
42
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 100.
43
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," in Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997): 180-214.
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/english/NEH/GATES1.HTM. (accessed online 7
July 2006)
77

44
The “tragic mulatto” myth was introduced by Lydia Maria Child in two short
stories: “The Quadroons” (1842) and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” (1843).
Child’s caricature of a mixed race/black women as the child of a white
slaveholder and his black female slave was classically tragic. Child’s mulatta
was ignorant of both her mother's race and her own and believed she was white
and free. She was innocent, well-mannered, well spoken and beautiful. When
her father died the stain of her "negro blood" was revealed and she was
remanded to slavery. Unable to unite with her white lover she died a victim of
slavery and white male violence. A similar portrayal of the almost-white
mulatto appeared in Clotel (1853), the novel written by Black abolitionist
William Wells Brown. The majority of passing narratives initially employed
this stereotype/myth. This dissertation avoids the trap of the tragic mulatto by
focusing on the agency exhibited in passing as synecdochic responses to a
cultural logic of racial reduction. For additional information please see: Mary
Ann Doane. Femmes Fatales. (New York: Routledge, 1991).
45
Mary Bucholtz. “From Mulatta to Mestiza: Passing and the Linguistic
Reshaping of Ethnic Identity,” in Gender Articulated, eds. Kira Hall and Mary
Bucholtz (New York: Routledge, 1995): 355, 367.
46
Aristotle. “Rhetoric,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Modern Library, 2001): 1354a.
47
Danzy Senna. Caucasia (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998): 116.
48
Teresa Zackodnik. “Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts,
and Racial Identity,” American Quarterly 53.3 (2001): 420-451.
49
Mary Bucholtz. “From Mulatta to Mestiza: Passing and the Linguistic
Reshaping of Ethnic Identity,” in Gender Articulated eds. Kira Hall and Mary
Bucholtz (New York: Routledge, 1995): 352. This “passing = passing as
white” definition is a legacy of the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that will be
treated in detail in Chapter Two.
50
Ibid. Italics in original.
51
A. D. Powell: “Passing” for Who You Really Are (Palm Coast, FL:
Backintyme, 2005): 8.
52
Charles W. Chesnutt. Spingarn Medal Acceptance Speech at Fisk University
quoted in Arlene A. Elder. “The Future American Race: Charles W. Chesnutt’s
Utopian Illusion,” MELUS 15/3 (1988): 126.

78

53
Walter White. A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948). According to simple
mathematical calculation, this makes White about 1/8 black, thus securing his
status as black in the U. S.
54
A. D. Powell. “Passing” for Who You Really Are (Palm Coast, FL:
Backintyme, 2005): 8-9.
55
White, Walter. A Man Called White (New York: Viking Press, 1948): 4.
56
Kenji Yoshino. Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New
York: Random House Books, Inc., 2006).
57
W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage Books,
1990): 56.
58
Gayle Wald. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S.
Literature and Culture (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2000): 6.
59
Brooke Kroger. Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are (New York:
Public Affairs, 2003): 7-8.
60
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 123.
61
Phillip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
132.
62
Maria P. Root. “Within, Between and Beyond Race,” in Mixed Race Studies
ed. Jane O. Ifekwunigwe. (London: Routledge, 2004): 144.

63
Devon W. Carbado. “Racial Naturalization,” American Quarterly 57.3
(2005): 635.
64
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993): 44.

79

65
Plato. The Republic: Book VII Trans. Donald J. Zeyl, ed. John M Cooper
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): 1132-1155. Plato. Gorgias trans.
Donald J. Zeyl, ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997):
791-870. In his introduction Race and Racism (Oxford: Oxford U P, 2001): 17,
Bernard Boxill outlines four tenets for racial theory based on biology that stem
from the classical tradition: “(1) Human beings can be divided into classes
called races. (2) Each race has distinctive and readily observable physical
properties that make it easy to tell what race a human being belongs to. (3) The
members of each race share a certain practically unalterable biological
structure or essence that they do not share with the members of the other races.
(4) These essences are unobservable to the naked eye, but they are potent and
important, for they are invariably passed on biologically from parents to
children, and cause the races to have their distinctive physical properties.”
These ideas are interrogated by the critical and rhetorical theories of Amy
Robinson, Ekaterina V. Haskins and Robyn Wiegman. For further explication
please see: Ekaterina V. Haskins: Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle
(Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 2004); Amy Robinson. “It Takes One
to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest,” Critical
Inquiry 20 (1980): 715-736; and Robyn Wiegman. American Anatomies
Theorizing Race and Gender, (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1995):
1-113.
66
Thomas Jefferson. “Thoughts on the Negro,” in Notes on the State of
Virginia. (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1853).
67
Linda Alcoff. “Mestizo Identity,” in The Idea of Race eds. Robert
Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
Inc., 2000): 141.
68
This is Kenneth Burke’s definition of identity as explicated in A Grammar of
Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969): 21. Naomi Zack
applies this view of identity to race. For more detailed discussion please see:
Naomi Zack. Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993): 9-18.
69
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
103.
70
Danzy Senna. Caucasia (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998): 349.

80

71
Gloria Anzaldúa coined the term“racial borderlands.” Anzaldúa advocates
subversively for a political mobilization around the “mestiza consciousness,”
for only multiplicity—internal as well as external—can break down the
“subject-object duality that keeps her [one] a prisoner.” Gloria Anzaldúa in
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute
Books, 1999): 80.
72
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 17-18.
73
Ibid.

74
Charles E. Morris III. “Pink Herring & The Fourth Persona: J. Edgar
Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, Third Edition
ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing, 2005): 667.
75
A. D. Powell. “Passing” for Who You Really Are (Palm Coast, FL:
Backintyme, 2005): 5.
76
Edwin Black. “The Second Persona,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A
Reader eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New
York: The Guilford Press, 1999): 331-340.
77
Philip Wander. “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical
Theory,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader eds. John Louis
Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guilford
Press, 1999): 357-380.
78
Charles E. Morris III. “Pink Herring & The Fourth Persona: J. Edgar
Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, Third Edition
ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing, 2005): 667.

81

79
James Weldon Johnson. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New
York: Vintage Books, 1927): 210-211. Johnson’s description of selling one’s
“birthright for a mess of pottage” is reminiscent of the Biblical story of twin
brothers Jacob and Esau. Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for “bread and lentil
stew; and he ate and drank…Thus Esau despised his birthright.” Genesis 25:34
New Standard Revised Version. The point of Johnson’s allusion to this story
concerns the issues of choice as well as conflicting dimensions of power and
authority. The “bottom line” is that by his actions, Johnson demonstrates that
the anonymous “Ex-Coloured Man” does not deserve to be the one who enjoys
the responsibilities and rewards he has obtained, since he does not have the
steady, thoughtful qualities which are required. In this way he is like the
Biblical Esau. Rather than getting his own food – after all, Esau was not really
starving to death and Jacob was not the only kitchen in the encampment – he is
led astray by his senses. Esau and the “Ex-Coloured Man” respond impulsively
to a good smell and, in the words of Genesis 25:34, come to despise their
birthrights.
80
Luc Boltanski and Graham Burschell. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media
and Politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 30.
81
I am concerned only with the conventional interpretation of Plato’s attitude
toward rhetoric (taking Socrates at his word) for heuristic purposes, and can
safely bracket interpretive controversies engaged by other scholars such as
Charles Kauffman. For more information please see: Charles Kauffman. “The
Axiological Foundations of Plato’s Theory of Rhetoric.” Central States Speech
Journal 33 (1982): 353-366.

82
By “Sophists,” I mean those generally perceived as the main players in this
group of classical rhetorical teachers who were independent of Plato—
specifically Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Antiphone, Hippias, Critias and
Thrasymachus. When I use the term Sophistic rhetoric, I do not mean to
ignore the fact that the Sophists often differed in their rhetorical perspectives.
Rather, my intent is to emphasize the common features that permitted Plato
and other scholars to regard them as a group.
83
Plato. “Phaedrus, 272 d,” in The Complete Works of Plato trans. Nicholas P.
White, ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): 549.
84
Plato. “Gorgias,” in The Complete Works of Plato trans. Nicholas P. White,
ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): 238-275.
85
George A. Kennedy. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994): 39.
82

86
George A. Kennedy defines empeiria as “something acquired by experience”
in A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Kennedy also explains that
phronesis—φρόνησις—is the virtue of moral thought, usually translated
"practical wisdom," sometimes as prudence. Phronesis is concerned with
particulars because it is concerned with how to act in particular situations.
George A. Kennedy. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994): 36.
87
Scott Consigny. “Edward Schiappa’s Reading of the Sophists.” Rhetoric
Review 14.2 (1996): 253-269.
88
Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Betraying the Sender: The Rhetoric and Ethics of
Fragile Texts.” Narrative 29.3 (1994): 202.
89
Robert Hariman. “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader Eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guillford Press, 1999): 36.
90
John Poulakos. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1995): 80.
91
Robert Hariman. “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guillford Press, 1999): 36.
92
Steven Mailloux. Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American
Cultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998): 40.
93
Stanley Fish. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the
Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1989): 478-481.
94
John Poulakos. “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and
Rhetoric 16.1 (1983): 35-48. For a more detailed discussion of sophistic
rhetoric as a use of discourse to encode and decode specific cultural practices
please see John Poulakos. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). In this text Poulakos
links sophistry to ontological perspectives of “Nomadism” by Deleuze and of
the “Bricoleur” by de Certeau. Additional discussion of a Sophistic worldview
are: G. R. Stanton. “Sophists and Philosophers: Problems of Classification.”
American Journal of Philology 94.4 (1973): 350-364; James Fredal. “Why
Shouldn’t the Sophists Charge Fees?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38.2 (2008):
148-170.
83

95
John Poulakos. “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guillford Press, 1999): 26.
96
In this apagogy, Gorgias identifies four possible causes for Helen’s acts: (1)
it was a divine plan; (2) Paris took her by force; (3) Paris seduced her; (4)
Helen fell in love with Paris. In any case he asserts that the “truth” of a
person’s actions is a function of the kinds of language and visual imagery to
which they are exposed.
97
Ekaterina V. Haskins. Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle.
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004): 15.
98
George A. Kennedy. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994): 20.
99
Plato. Sophist trans. Nicholas P. White, ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1997): 243.
100
Ibid., 257.
101
James Fredal. “Why Shouldn’t the Sophists Charge Fees?” Rhetoric
Society Quarterly 38.2 (2008): 167.
102
This idea is based on Robert L. Scott’s discussion of rhetoric as an epistemic
phenomenon. For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon please see the
following by Robert L. Scott: "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic." Central
States Speech Journal 18.1 (1967): 9-17; “Non-Discipline as a Remedy for
Rhetoric? A Reply to Victor Vitanza.” Rhetoric Review 6.2 (1988): 233-237;
"On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic: Ten Years Later." Central States Speech
Journal 27 (1976): 258-266; "Epistemic Rhetoric and Criticism: Where Barry
Brummett Goes Wrong" Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990); "The
Necessary Pluralism of Any Future History of Rhetoric." A Journal of
Rhetorical Theory 12 (1991): 195-209; "Rhetoric is Epistemic: What
Difference Does That Make" in Defining the New Rhetorics eds. Theresa Enos
and Stuart C. Brown. (Newbury Park: Sage Publications Inc., 1993): 120-136.
103
Plato. Greater Hippias trans. Paul Woodruff, ed. John M Cooper
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): 911.
104
John Poulakos. “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guillford Press, 1999): 29.
84

105
Stanley Fish. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoeric and the
Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durhan: Duke University
Press, 1989): 473.
106
Plato. Protagoras trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, ed. John M
Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): 753.
107
Plato. Protagoras trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, ed. John M
Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997):755; 328 d-e. p. 762.
108
Christopher Norris. Derrida. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987):
163. Episteme’s appearance of stability is the ultimate irony and very useful for
highlighting social negotiations occurring along the color line, a claim which I
will revisit in Chapter Two.
109
Plato. “Sophist, 234c-235” in The Complete Works of Plato trans. Nicholas
P. White, ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): 255.
For further discussion of how Plato explains rhetoric as passing please see
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993).
110
Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek. “Whiteness: A Strategic
Rhetoric,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State
College: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2005): 628-646. It is also important to note
that Jacques Derrida cautions against a simple restaging of the battle between
the Sophists and Plato because our culture is significantly different from the
Greek situations depicted in the Platonic dialogues. For more on Derrida’s
concern about the cultural relevance of this debate please see the following
texts: “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991): 61-171.; Gary A. Olson. “Jacques Derrida
on Rhetoric and Composition: A Conversation” Journal of Advanced
Composition 10.1 (1990): 1-21.
111
Plato. “Theaetetus,” in The Complete Works of Plato trans. M. J. Levett and
Rev. Myles Burnyeat, ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1997): 169.
112
William K. Guthrie. The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1971): 193.
113
Naomi Zack. Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993): 74-75.
85

114
Booker T. Washington. Up From Slavery in Three Negro Classics (New
York: Avon Books, 1965): 30, 95. Washington admitted matter-of-factly that
his father was white and had no interaction with him. A reading of
Washington’s autobiography reveals that his identifications with blackness,
although incomplete because of synecdoche, were “sincere.” They were
intertwined with a belief in and commitment to the betterment of black people.
The theoretical question remains: Why did Washington and others who passed
for black accept the parameters for racial categorization that were drawn by
whites only to imprison and oppress them? See Chapter Four for a more
detailed analysis of this text and fuller answer to this question.
115
John Tehranian. “Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the
Construction of Racial Identity in America,” Yale Law Journal 109.4 (2000):
817-848.
116
Plato. “Ion,” in The Complete Works of Plato trans. Paul Woodruff, ed.
John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): 937-949. Socrates
charges that Ion fails to prove that he is “wonderfully wise about Homer”
because he cannot speak to the totality of poetry or to the correctness of what
Homer says about any specific craft in his poetry (542a).
Socrates: But then what sort of thing will a rhapsode know?
Ion: My opinion, anyhow, is that he’ll know what it’s fitting for a man
or a woman to say—or a slave or a freeman, or for a follower or a
leader (540b).
The rhapsode knows artistic language, not technical language. This allows him
to say something meaningful about the social roles of and relationships to
others. Socrates disagrees. The rhapsode has no knowledge to call his own
(540c-541b). According to Socrates’s argument then, authentic knowledge is
normative, measurable, universal and teachable so that it can make the human
soul good and fit for submission to the rule of the polis. Poetry and poetic
expression do not serve this function for they do not seem to have subject
matter of their own. This highlights an important point in Plato’s theory: that
the foremost purpose of discourse is to disseminate doctrine, not to entertain.
For more discussion of this topic please see: Charles Kauffman. “The
Axiological Foundations of Plato’s Theory of Rhetoric” Central States Speech
Journal 33 (1982): 127-140.

117
Dalton Conley. Honky (New York: Vintage Books): 37.

86

118
Robert Hariman. “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader Eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guillford Press, 1999): 46.
119
John L. Jackson, Jr. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005): 11.
120
Robert Hariman. “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader Eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guillford Press, 1999): 47.
121
John O’Neill. “Rhetoric, Science and Philosophy.” Philosophy of the
Social Sciences 28.2 (1998): 205-225.
122
Plato. “The Republic: Book VII,” in The Complete Works of Plato trans.
Donald J. Zeyl, ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997):
1141.
123
Ibid, 1139.
124
Robert Hariman. “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader Eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill (New York: The Guillford Press, 1999): 37.
125
Ekaterina V. Haskins: Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle
(Columbia: University of South Carolina P, 2004): 4.
126
Raymie E. McKerrow. “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” in
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste
Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York and London: The Guillford
Press): 441.
127
Please see the following texts for full articulation of these theoretical
perspectives. Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. Communication and Race: A Structural
Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Michael Omi and
Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the
1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994); Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Walter Benn
Michaels “Autobiographies of Ex-White Men: Why Race is not a Social
Construction,” in The Futures of American Studies eds. Donald E. Pease and
Robyn Wiegman (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2002): 231-248.

87

128
According to Dana L. Cloud, Marx would call this rhetoric’s “mode of
production.” Cloud asserts that critical rhetorical projects need to stretch
themselves beyond texts and bodily experience to include a sharper focus on
economic motives and contexts of discursive production. For a review of the
strengths and limits of critical rhetoric please see: Dana L. Cloud. “The
materiality of discourse as oxymoron: A challenge to critical rhetoric,”
Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141-163; Dana L. Cloud. “The
Affirmative Masquerade,” American Communication Journal 4.3 (2001)
http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss3/special/cloud.pdf (accessed June
19, 2006).; Michael Calvin McGee. “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,”
in Explorations in Rhetoric Ed. Raymie E. McKerrow (Glenview: Scott,
Foremann, and Co, 1982): 23-48; Kent Ono and John M. Sloop “Commitment
to Telos: A Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 59
(1992): 48-60; Maurice Charland. “Finding Horizon and a Telos: The
Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 71-74.
129
Oxford English Dictionary. “Passing.” According to this entry, those who
succeed in ‘passing’ live their lives in mortal terror of being found out.
Passing, in its conventional sense, implies a denial of one's authentic ancestry
to be accepted as a member of another race. http://www.oed.com/ (accessed 25
July 2008).
130
Bridgette Nerlich and David D. Clarke. “Synecdoche as Cognitive and
Communication Strategy” in Historical Semantics and Cognition eds. Andreas
Blank and Peter Koch (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999): 210.
131
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962): 507-508. As a matter of synecdoche passing privileges a critical
perspective based on taking “the particular for the general, species for genus,
product for producer, trade name for general product, general for particular,
genus for species, and place for one-time event.” S. Davis. “Synecdoche.”
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. (New York: Garland Press, 1996):
712-713. For more on the worldviews that synecdoche helps the critic to
understand theoretically please see Ernest G. Borman. “Rhetorical Vision.”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 58.4 (1972): 396-409.
132
Ernest G. Borman. “Rhetorical Vision.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58.4
(1972): 396-409.
133
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962): 508-509.

88

134
Rita Keresztesi. Strangers at Home (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2005): 35. For Keresztesi, this kind of passing plays on the subversive
character of racial mimicry as Bhabha describes it in The Location of Culture
(Oxford: Routledge, 1994): 88-89, which is as a “metonymy of presence.” This
play is not harmless. It causes much suffering for the passer and audiences
alike that deal with the stress of ambiguous identities whose “recurring
experiences are those of exile, relocation and displacement; that is being
permanent strangers at home and in the world.”
135
Devin Carbado. “The Fifth Black Woman,” Journal of
Contemporary Legal Issues 11 (2001): 3.
136
Ibid.
137
Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993). On page 19 Butler writes: “because texts do not
reflect the entirety of their authors or their worlds, they enter a field of reading
as partial provocations, not only requiring a set of prior texts in order to gain
legibility, but—at best—initiating a set of appropriations and criticisms that
call into question their fundamental premises.” Butler highlights the
importance of genealogy, citation and re-iterability in order to repeat and
reinforce the validity of her arguments—she understands that even Plato’s
Truth must have an origin story.
138
Ibid., 108.
139
Angela McRobbie. “Judith Butler and the Politics of Post-feminist Cultural
Studies,” in The Uses of Cultural Studies ed. Angela McRobbie (New York:
Sage, 2005): 86.
140
Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993): 229-230.
141
Walter Benn Michaels. “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man,” Transition
73.7 (1991): 133.

89

142
Racial passing is a model of identification based on appearance,
performance and discursive editing. For instance, in reference to Nella
Larsen’s, Passing, Butler writes: “Clare passes not only because she is light-
skinned, but because she refuses to introduce her blackness into conversations,
and so withholds the conversational marker which would counter the
hegemonic presumption that she is white…Conversations in Passing appear to
constitute the painful, if not repressive, surface of social relations.” Judith
Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993): 171, 176. Larsen’s protagonist Clare had only two choices if
her motive was to become identifiable: (a) to deny her non-white ancestry and
pass as white, or (b) to deny her white ancestry and pass as black. The second
is a choice even Butler does not acknowledge.
143
Danzy Senna. Caucasia (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998): 334.
144
The racial “State” is composed of categories of identification,
organizations, governmental structures, public policies, material conditions,
social rules, relationships and interpersonal interactions in which they are
grounded. This “racial state,” much like Plato’s Republic, is extremely
powerful, oppressive and ambivalent—simultaneously rigid and flexible
because the practices of identification cannot be completely accounted for or
contained. As illustrated by my discussion of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave,
Omi and Winant explain that this kind of racial epistemology is difficult to
dislodge because its logic is continuous and normalized over time. In other
words, our races, like the sun, appear to precede us and are completely
determined.
145
Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States
from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994): 56.
146
Wentworth Earl Miller III, interview by Walter Chaw, “Miller’s Crossing:
Filmfreak Central Interviews Actor Wentworth Miller about The Human
Stain.” http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/notes/wmillerinterview.htm.
147
Lawrence Otis Graham. Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper
Class (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000): 376.
148
Ibid., 377.
149
Ibid.
150
Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1996).
90

151
A. Cheree Carlson. “‘You Know it When You See It:’ The Rhetorical
Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 111-128. The discussion of gender as a
“bridging device” and a means for transforming terms and preserving biracial
hierarchy is found on pages 121-125.
152
Walter Benn Michaels. “The No-Drop Rule,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994):
768.
153
Ibid., 769.
154
John L. Jackson Jr. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005).
155
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 22.
156
Ibid., 22.
157
Ibid., 26; 28.
158
Identification is itself a way of seeing, knowing and a way of being—a way
of situating a person in the world that affects his/her deliberation, modes of
argumentation, access to the public sphere, kinship relations, lifestyle, and
social status. The significance of identification to the rhetorical study of
passing concerns the identities of passers, audiences as spectators, and critics
alike. It forces us to ask whether there is any fixed point from which to analyze
or read an act of passing. Is one’s identity changed as the result of reading an
act of passing in either narrative or dramatic form? Does a spectator’s identity
change the meaning of a pass? In Rhetoric, Burke writes that identification is
the goal of rhetorical communication and that identification produces
persuasion. Further, he explains that identity operates based on perceived
similarity or difference, and that these perceptions cast a net of identification
which enacts itself as social drama.
159
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962): 23.
160
Robert Wess. Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism.
(Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1996): 118.

161
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962): 512.

91

162
Sally A. Freeman, Stephen W. Littlejohn, and W. Barnett Pearce.
“Communication and Moral Conflict,” Western Journal of Communication 56
(1992): 311-329. This paradigm for eloquence is based on the writings of
Quintilian, Cicero, Augustine, and Maury, and can be related to the
contemporary writings of Donoghue on the subject.

163
Ekaterina V. Haskins: Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).
164
Several texts examine the parameters of identification connected more
directly to issues of class, accent, tribe, religion and ethnicity than to skin color
and race. These include: Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart (New York:
Doubleday Books, 1959); Partha Chatterjee. The Politics of the Governed:
Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004); Pearl Fuyo Gaskins. What Are You?: Voices of Mixed
Race Young People (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); Randall A. Lake.
“Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest
Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 123-151; Lisa Lowe.
Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996); Eugene Robinson. Coal to Cream: A Black Man's
Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (New York: The Free Press,
1999); George J. Sánchez. Becoming Mexican American (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993); James C. Scott. Domination and the Arts of
Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990);
Corrie ten Boom The Hiding Place (Old Tappan: Spire Books, 1971).
165
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. Communication and Race: A Structural Perspective
(New York: Oxford U P, 1998); Michael A. Hogg and Scott A Reid. “Social
Identity, Self-Categorization, and the Communication of Group Norms,”
Communication Theory 16 (2006): 7-30.
166
James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International): 10.
92
CHAPTER TWO
THE “CRAFT” OF PASSING:
RHETORICAL IRONY AND THE CASE OF ELLEN CRAFT

I
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or The Escape of William and Ellen
Craft from Slavery is the autobiographical account of Ellen and William
Craft’s escape from slavery in Georgia in 1848. Ellen disguised herself as Mr.
Johnson, a wealthy white and disabled male property owner on his way to
Philadelphia for medical treatment.
1
William posed as Ellen’s slave, who,
because of his master’s ill health, needed to be in close attendance. After a
series of train, boat, and carriage rides over the course of four days, the Crafts
arrived in Philadelphia. During the first four months of 1849 they told their
story publicly in front of more than 60 antislavery groups in Massachusetts.
Prior to their first speaking engagement, William Wells Brown published
excerpts from their story in William Lloyd Garrison’s famous abolitionist
newsletter, The Liberator.
2
Wells Brown wrote the following report on 12
January 1849 from Pineville, Pennsylvania.
DEAR FRIEND GARRISON:
One of the most interesting cases of the escape of fugitives from
American slavery that have ever come before the American
people, has just occurred, under the following circumstances:—
William and Ellen Crapt [sic], man and wife, lived with
different masters in the State of Georgia. Ellen is so near white
that she can pass without suspicion for a white woman. Her
husband is much darker. He is a mechanic, and by working
nights and Sundays, he laid up money enough to bring himself
and his wife out of slavery. Their plan was without precedent;
and though novel, was the means of getting them their freedom.
93
Ellen dressed in man's clothing, and passed as the master, while
her husband passed as the servant. In this way they travelled
from Georgia to Philadelphia. They are now out of the reach of
the blood-hounds of the South. On their journey, they put up at
the best hotels where they stopped. Neither of them can read or
write. And Ellen, knowing that she would be called upon to
write her name at the hotels, &c., tied her right hand up as
though it was lame, which proved of some service to her, as she
was called upon several times at hotels to 'register' her name. In
Charleston, S. C., they put up at the hotel which Gov. M'Duffie
and John C. Calhoun generally make their home, yet these
distinguished advocates of the 'peculiar institution' say that the
slaves cannot take care of themselves. They arrived in
Philadelphia, in four days from the time they started. Their
history, especially that of their escape, is replete with interest.
They will be at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery
Society, in Boston, in the latter part of this month, where I
know the history of their escape will be listened to with great
interest. They are very intelligent. They are young, Ellen 22,
and Wm. 24 years of age. Ellen is truly a heroine.
Yours, truly,
WM. W. BROWN.
P.S. They are now hid away within 25 miles of Philadelphia,
where they will remain until the 6th when they will leave me for
New England. Will you please say in the Liberator that I will
lecture, in connexion with them, as follows:—
At Norwich, Ct., Thursday evening, Jan. 18.
At Worcester, Mass., Friday evening, 19.
At Pawtucket, Mass., Saturday evening, 20.
At New Bedford, Mass., Sunday afternoon and evening, 28.
3

Brown later adapted the Crafts’ story for his 1853 novel, Clotel, or The
President’s Daughter. Brown was largely involved in arranging the Crafts’
speaking engagements throughout the northeastern United States until they
were forced to flee to the United Kingdom because of the Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850.
4
The Crafts spent nearly 10 years abroad as expatriates where they
spoke before thousands and returned to the United States in 1869.
94
The Crafts’ story also inspired abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria
Child to dramatize and retell the tale in her 1858 play, The Stars and Stripes: A
Melodrama. In 1860, the Crafts released their own official version of the
story, Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom. Their narrative was published
by London’s William Tweedie and revenues from the text went to further the
abolitionist cause. The book was extremely popular and already in its second
publication by 1862.
5

The oral and written presentations of the Crafts’ escape from slavery
encouraged the exploration of mixed race identity and passing in the setting of
enslavement. Thus, the Crafts’ escape will be the starting point for an analysis,
which, on some level, seeks to explore passing as an ironic combination of
race, gender, class, and (dis)ability. In section II I begin with the major
historical facts of the case and its retelling. I also introduce irony as a key term
required for understanding these facts. In sections III and IV I continue with
an analysis of how Craft sustained the pass rhetorically (synecdoche and irony)
and performatively (ambiguity, dissimulation, cross-dressing, and feigned
disability). In Section V, I conclude by demonstrating that, despite appearances
and traditional scholarly analyses of the case that focus primarily on race,
passing rarely involves only one aspect of identity.
II
In their writing and speaking, Ellen and William Craft provide complex
representations of passing. According to Hegler, the Crafts’ public lectures
95
followed a simple informative-persuasive presentational pattern. First, Brown
introduced the Crafts. Second, William informed the audience about their
journey to freedom. Third, Brown sought to persuade the audience to support
the abolitionist cause. Fourth, Ellen took the stage for the audience’s “visual
consumption” and to add a few words to what William said.
6
On many
occasions, both Ellen and William “appeared at abolitionist meetings in the
disguises they had assumed for their escape. In fact, the Crafts were hardly
recognizable to their fans without their disguises.”
7
The Crafts became
celebrities as antislavery and eventually mainstream newspapers reported their
story in the U.S. and Europe. The New York Herald, The Boston Globe, The
Georgia Journal, and The Macon Telegraph covered the story.
8
This media
attention did away with the need for embedded authentication of their ethos
and tests of narrative probability, processes most other narratives of the
enslaved were forced to undergo. The publicity had the simultaneous effect of
catapulting the Crafts into an international public space.
In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom the Crafts recount their
story very differently. They liken their passing to a series of ironic movements
that develop on key terms, ultimately moving their audiences to consider
slavery and freedom differently. Generally, their uses of irony ask audiences
to recognize the difference between reality and appearance, contrast intention
and expectation with what actually occurs, distinguish between literal and
figurative meanings, and to identify with their dramatic action. Specifically,
96
the Crafts employed irony to dissociate themselves from unjust social
conventions and expectations of their time by appearing to ascribe to them.
The recognition of irony depends on encounters among audiences that perceive
their messages and intentions, inhabit distinct cognitive and social
environments, and are able to attribute relevance and consistency to
interpretations.
Ellen planned to travel 1,000 miles north from Georgia in the open with
William. The covert intentions were escaping from slavery and exposing the
absurdity of its disabling powers. Acting on these intentions the Crafts began a
process of ironic development and created a product, which transformed Ellen
in Mr. Johnson. William explains:
Knowing that slaveholders have the privilege of taking their
slaves to any part of the country they think proper, it occurred to
me that, as my wife was nearly white, I might get her to
disguise herself as an invalid gentleman, and assume to be my
master, while I could attend as his slave, and in that manner we
might effect our escape.
9

Despite the obvious crossing of physical and geographic boundaries (South-
North), there are other types of boundary crossing performed rather than stated
(gender, race, class, ability).
10
In short, this space between material and
symbolic boundaries is a clue to irony. Irony allows us to discover and
describe the truth of the Crafts’ passing as a process of development. They
first develop a plan to break free and then develop a tangible product in Mr.
Johnson’s persona. This mode of irony sees the Crafts playing with identity in
order to suggest what lies beyond it: rhetorical encounters in which audiences
97
take passers at face value and provide the proof needed to support their own
and passers’ images. As a result, the duped second persona audience aboard
the train took Ellen to stand for exactly what she was not—male, wealthy, free,
and disabled.
11

But how did the Crafts ensure this result? The answer is found by
reconstructing the Crafts’ act of creating the male, wealthy, free, and disabled
persona they named Mr. Johnson. It all begins on Ellen’s father’s plantation in
Georgia with a description of Ellen as mixed race with a both “striking” and
“near-white” persona.
12
Josephine Brown later described Ellen as
white as most persons of the clear Anglo-Saxon origin. Her
features were prominent, hair straight, eyes of a light hazel
color, and no one on first seeing the white slave would suppose
that a drop of African blood coursed through her veins.
13

The Crafts attribute this phenotype to Ellen’s genealogy. Ellen’s mother was
an enslaved woman named Maria. Ellen’s father was her mother’s white
owner, Colonel James P. Smith. Ellen often was mistaken for a legitimate
member of her father-slave master’s white family. Ellen’s phenotype gave her
a distinct identity that did not reflect her social status as enslaved and created
uncertainty and anxiety among spectators. The Crafts managed this
uncertainty and anxiety by taking great pains to explain that despite her white
appearance, Ellen was “legally the property of the man, who stands in the
anomalous relation…of father as well as master” and could have been taken or
sold at any time to settle any of his debts, as could any of her children.
14
She
and William understood her persona and unique identity as “a white slave;” a
98
Figure 4: Ellen Craft
union of opposed binary elements (daughter-slave, property-
human, abled breeder-future mother, slave-wife, black-white).
This identity became a motive for and resource of their pass.
Ellen and William exploited this resource to their
advantage in formulating a plan of escape. In order to make
their escape the Crafts made symbolic choices concerning how Ellen would
represent herself in an elaborate disguise (see pictures, left and below). As
stated above, their first move is based on Ellen’s mixed race identity. Using
synecdoche, Ellen chose to take the white part of herself to represent the
whole. In so doing she demonstrated knowledge of advantages attached to
whiteness, especially freedom and mobility. However, synecdochic racial
identification presented cultural challenges on the basis of additional identity
elements, such as gender, that extend power and meaning to Ellen’s passing.
Gender is the key term for the second movement because even as a
white woman, Ellen was forbidden to travel with William on a public
conveyance. This is why they created a costume whereby Ellen would be
transformed into Mr. Johnson, “a most respectable looking gentleman.”
15

Ellen made a poultice, “and put it in a white handkerchief to be worn under the
chin, up the cheeks, and to tie over the head. This nearly hid the expression of
the countenance, as well as the beardless chin”.
16
The poultice created a
muffling effect so that, as much as possible, Ellen could avoid conversation
with her fellow white travelers.
99
Mr. Johnson’s persona made it possible for William to travel as servant.
William explains:
[I] got into the negro car in which I knew I should have to ride,
but my master (as I will now call my wife) took a longer way
around…He obtained a ticket for himself and one for his slave
to Savannah.
17

Racially and economically segregated traveling
conditions suggest that class is the key term for the third
movement of this pass. Mr. Johnson’s class status as
master required learned abilities that Ellen and William
did not have. Since neither Ellen nor William was
literate (it was illegal for the enslaved to be taught to read
or write) she made a poultice to bind her right hand in a sling so that she could,
“with propriety ask the officers” they met at checkpoints “to register [her]
name” on her behalf.
18
This fourth movement, based on the key term of
disability, enabled the Crafts to displace their actual learning disability of
illiteracy onto Ellen’s feigned physical disability. The physical disability
facilitated the escape and provided additional reason for a white man and his
slave to be traveling together.
19

Further cementing the pass as Mr. Johnson, Ellen wore a top hat to add
height, wore green glasses to avoid making direct eye contact with whites, cut
her hair square at the back of the head, and pretended to be partially deaf as
“the only means of self-defense” against having to speak to white people while
traveling.
20
Speaking to whites entailed the possibilities of outing and return
Figure 5: Ellen Craft as
Mr. Johnson
100
to slavery, as well as general discomfort. This is illustrated when Mr. Johnson
encountered Mr. Cray, an old friend of Ellen’s owner-father, on the train.
After a little while, Mr. Cray said to my master, ‘It is a very fine
morning, sir.’ The latter took no notice, but kept looking out of
the window. Mr. Cray soon repeated this remark, in a little
louder tone, but my master remained as before. This
indifference attracted the attention of the passengers near, one
of whom laughed out. This, I supposed, annoyed the old
gentleman; so he said, ‘I will make him hear;’ and in a loud
tone of voice repeated, ‘It is a very fine morning, sir.’ My
master turned his head, and with a polite bow said, ‘Yes,’ and
commenced looking out of the window again. One of the
gentlemen remarked that it was a very great deprivation to be
deaf. ‘Yes,’ replied Mr. Cray, ‘and I shall not trouble that fellow
any more.’ This enabled my master to breathe a little easier…
21

Ellen’s disabled persona allows her to deflect white attention. In addition to
protecting Ellen from potentially hostile whites, her feigned disabilities
allowed for physical contact between herself and William in a context in which
white women did not have physical contact with black men. It also reinforced
Mr. Johnson’s white male persona as one that is slightly feminized because of
illness and therefore deserves and requires service from his attendant. It is in
this context that William’s collusion in the pass as third persona/in-group
clairvoyant becomes as important as Ellen’s. William explains one aspect of
his performance:
as the captain and some of the passengers seem to think this
strange and also questioned me respecting him, my master
thought I had better get out the flannels and opodeldoc which
we had prepared for the rheumatism, warm them quickly by the
stove in the gentleman’s saloon, and bring them to his berth.
22

101
The caretaking continues when the couple reaches Charleston, and William
makes another public display of warming the bandages.
23
This ensures that Mr.
Johnson will receive the best service available and also the most sympathy,
even as William himself is treated horribly.
William’s presence as third persona/in-group clairvoyant was integral
to Ellen’s pass because he became evidence of her status as upper class and
disabled. In fact, their performance was so believable that Mr. Johnson
received an offer from a slave dealer to buy Willliam. Mr. Johnson’s reply
was simple, “I don’t wish to sell, sir; I cannot get on well without him.”
24
This
could not have been a truer statement.
William’s presence, participation, and silence authorized Mr. Johnson’s
social status as master. As property, William gave Mr. Johnson the appearance
of ownership, wealth, and the social privilege of mobility in spite of apparent
disability. Moreover, in retelling the story William’s narrative voice maintains
this tone by emphasizing the reversal of roles between husband-wife, master-
slave, woman-man, black-white, and abled-disabled. He refers to Ellen as his
master rather than as his wife. This voice is critical to the effectiveness of the
pass and suggests that race can be a medium through which gender, class, and
ability are interpreted.
William makes clear that hiding in plain sight was difficult, uncertain,
and anxious. During the four-day adventure Ellen developed new disabilities
whenever there was a possibility for outing. As aforementioned, she feigned
102
deafness to avoid an acquaintance of her father-master, she also cited
rheumatism when whites became too friendly, and she fainted when two white
ladies began to flirt with her as Mr. Johnson.
25
William recounts how, in the
midst of a potentially hostile white audience, their effort was threatened with
exposure and returning to slavery, and the cruel retribution of Ellen’s master-
father.
Fully believing that we were caught, I shrank into a corner,
turned my face from the door, and expected in a moment to be
dragged out. The cabinet-maker looked into my master’s
carriage, but did not know him in his new attire, and, as God
would have it, before he reached mine the bell rang, and the
train moved off.
26

The dangers of passing as Mr. Johnson and servant recounted in this story
demonstrate the Crafts’ understanding of the risks of ironic communication,
exceptional dedication to freedom, and their exceptional understanding of the
meanings and significances of these concepts in the face of suffering.
Once in free territory, the Crafts made contact with William Lloyd
Garrison’s abolitionist group. Ellen stayed with a Quaker family in
Philadelphia, who nursed her through a serious illness. Ellen would be plagued
by bouts of illness and infirmity for many years after enslavement. Sterling
relates:
The next days were a blur to Ellen. She had moments of
exhilaration, when, once more in women’s clothing, she tossed
the bits and pieces of her disguise around the room. Then
reaction set in, and the sleepless nights and anxious days took
their toll. Exhausted physically and emotionally, she rested in
her room at the boarding house, while news of the Crafts’
escape spread to antislavery circles in the city.
27

103

Why would Ellen toss “the bits and pieces of her disguise around the room” in
a moment of “exhilaration?” Did she feel that she was no longer passing?
Having introduced the major facts of the case and tied them to a generic
description of irony, it is now appropriate to answer these questions by
conducting a more detailed analysis in the following section. Like all
narratives and presentations of the enslaved, the Crafts’ was intended to
present an irrefutable argument against enslavement. However, the Crafts’
argument used passing and public presentation to expose multiple ironies and
interpretations based on rhetorical encounters. Thus, Ellen’s and William’s
case poses the additional key questions: How is the pass sustained by
synecdoche and irony? How does this act of passing embody the dynamics of
intersectionality? And, how can acts of passing move beyond a race-only
fixation and open a space for examining other ambiguous aspects of identity
that also affect life chances (e.g., gender, class, ability)? In the next section I
will answer these questions, showing how the Crafts engaged Socratic,
“effective,” and “true” conceptions of irony, challenged and conformed to
social conventions in “moments of exhilaration,” questioned the validity of the
Declaration of Independence and the law’s authority based on praxis,
transformed audiences’ expectations, and undermined slavery’s dominant
narratives of white supremacy and patriarchy.
104
III
Ellen and William emphasize their interdependence, and thus the
interdependence of rhetorical personae, throughout the textual and
presentational incarnations of their pass. The Crafts were hidden in plain sight
because Ellen’s appearance as male, wealthy, and disabled masked her
personal rank and (dis)abilities in the context of enslavement and in dupes’
eyes. This juxtaposition returns us to the study of passing as a discourse of
social designation, performance, and persuasion. Since Plato this discourse
remains a serious interpretive effort, accessible primarily in terms of the
visible, audible, and able-bodied subject.
28

Even Plato, who argued that rhetoric is passing, acknowledges the role
of irony in projecting a persona. For instance, in Symposium Alcibiades
exhorts Socrates by comparing him to the figure of the Silenus. Alcibiades
states:
His powers are really extraordinary. I assure you, not one of you
knows him; well, I shall reveal him, now that I have begun…Is
not this like a Silenus? Exactly. It is an outward casing he
wears, similarly to the sculptured Silenus. But if you opened his
inside, you cannot imagine how full he is, good cup-
companions, of sobriety… In public, I tell you, his whole life is
one big game—a game of irony. Whether anyone else has
caught him in a serious moment and opened him, and seen the
images inside, I know not; but I saw them one day, and thought
them so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous, that
I simply had to do as Socrates bade me.
29

This speech is an attempt to endow Socrates with a depth that can explain the
ambiguities of his life. It also links irony to persuasion. Socrates, like the
105
Crafts in their passing, is hidden in plain sight because his prosthesis or outer
casing masks his personal rank, intellect, and moral abilities. In both cases a
disabled countenance covers other, sometimes even more stigmatized,
identities.
To appreciate the irony operating within the Crafts’ passing it is
necessary to approach it from multiple perspectives. First, as Plato’s
description of Socrates reveals, passing is ironic because it provides a mask
and does not necessarily show what is masked. Passing is also ironic because it
suggests depth, but does not certify depth. When detected and/or explained,
irony lets audiences know that they are seeing only part of the whole. Whether
that part is of the passer’s identity or the setting of the pass, it does not
necessarily imply a truer whole to see. In this way the pass recognizes,
describes, challenges, and perpetuates dramatic action. Plato’s description also
suggests an (authorial) irony of the in-group clairvoyant, which is not engaged
as much in the pass as it is in the telling. While audiences and readers pass
judgment on the Crafts’ and their dupes, William uses them to make an
example of an even deeper type of ignorance. The idea is that if the audience
or reader is able to see the places where dupes fail to grasp the deeper message,
this ought to make them take a step back and question the breadth and depth of
their own understanding. Upon reflection, they might find that they are no
more enlightened than the dupes. And so for the Crafts, irony prompts
reflection on the part of the reader and audience, and does not focus solely on
106
Ellen, William, Mr. Johnson, or the rhetorical situation. This framework
defines passing as a series of encounters that express multiple meanings,
including meanings that the passer did not intend.
Ellen’s and William’s pass is also ironic in the dramatic sense that
Barbe refers to as “effective irony.” Effective irony generally requires three
participants—“(1) the speaker or ironist, (2) the hearer or victim and (3) an
audience or evaluator.”
30
According to Barbe, each participant brings to the
event “linguistic, contextual, situational, and personal background knowledge”
to identify and distinguish between words uttered and their meanings.
31
Like
the “in-group clairvoyant” or third persona who bears witness to an act of
passing, the evaluator in an ironic moment must be capable of differentiating
between actual and apparent meanings whether (s)he publicizes the difference
or not. As aforementioned, William Craft is the third persona/in-group
clairvoyant and primary evaluator in this act of passing.
Barbe’s ironic model bears a striking resemblance to Robinson’s and
Morris’s rhetorical model of passing discussed in Chapter One. In this model a
passer’s persona is made meaningful only in so far as it is known by the in-
group clairvoyant/third persona and/or fourth persona. In each case, the
evaluator-clairvoyant-third persona or fourth persona must note the apparent
meaning and its mask along with the contradictory meaning(s) that lie beneath
the surface. For the third persona, Ellen’s truer racial identity is black. For the
fourth persona, Ellen’s racial identity presents constraints associated with
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gender, class, and ability. Written and aural presentations of the story were
persuasive because they transformed dupes into in-group clairvoyants. The
discrepancies noted among these personae/audiences (in the story and during
its retellings) show that Ellen’s persuasive capacity is a function of the identity
she carries beneath her outward appearance as Mr. Johnson.
That is, the connection between Ellen and Mr. Johnson is based on
substitution, concealment, and revelation. Using synecdoche, Ellen substitutes
the white part of her racial identity for the whole. In so doing she substitutes
an enslaved identity for a free identity. She then conceals a female identity and
reveals a male identity. This required concealing an impoverished identity by
revealing a wealthy appearance. Finally, she conceals the learning disability of
illiteracy by revealing the physical disability of illness. These substitutions,
concealments, and revelations question the mutually exclusive natures of
binary categorization as well as audiences’ expectations and conventions.
Indeed, the pass is more than the sum total of these simple substitutions,
concealments, and revelations. It is more than synecdochic because of Ellen’s
representation as white. It is ironic because it required dissembling, and can be
considered its own cause and effect. In order to sustain a white racial identity,
it was necessary to pass along the lines of gender, class, and ability
concurrently. Understood in this manner, Ellen and William unveil
hypocrisies and ironies that lie behind white, wealthy, and male identities.
They show that Mr. Johnson is indeed disabled because his privilege cannot
108
stand on its own. Rather, it rests on excluding non-white, poor, and female
bodies from his social world.
Irony is found in the pass, in its retelling, and also in the situation that
motivates the pass. To support this point, the Crafts discuss the irony inherent
in the Declaration of Independence as a motive for their passing. In the
preface of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom William first cites the
phrase “God made of one blood all nations of men” from Acts 17:26 and then
writes:
Having heard while in slavery that…the American Declaration
of Independence says that “We hold these truths to be self-
evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;” we could not
understand by what right we were held as “chattels.” Therefore
we felt perfectly justified in undertaking the dangerous and
exciting task of “running a thousand miles for freedom” in order
to obtain those rights which are so vividly set forth in the
Declaration.
32

The Crafts’ illustrate effectively that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness” are terms formed ironically because they were never meant to
include the enslaved. Mr. Johnson’s character was needed to make them real.
The obvious implication here is that their statuses as mixed race/black and,
therefore, enslaved disqualified them from enjoying “inalienable rights.”
The Crafts continue by highlighting the ironies inherent in
contradictory laws devoted to defining and maintaining the color line. They
discuss the ways in which it was possible, for instance, to be legally black in
one state but not another, or to be white in one decade and not white the next,
109
or to become differently raced by moving from one region or even one
situation to another. The Crafts’ passing, then, is an expression of identity that
runs physically and symbolically along the color line—a communication
system that is replete with feedback and able to rearrange itself regularly as
various incidents change the rules or redirect the cultural current.
These situational ironies become more complex as we understand the
deeper rhetorical principles upon which they are based. “True irony,”
according to Burke, is:
based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with the enemy as
one needs him, is indebted to him, is not merely outside him as
an observer but contains him within, being consubstantial with
him.
33

Freedom for the enslaved, enabled by U.S. citizenship, is one true irony here.
The physical, economic, and cultural labor of the enslaved was a primary
contribution to the early success of the nation yet this co-cultural group was
excluded from partaking from its benefits. Another true irony is Mr. Johnson,
a white persona enabled by Ellen’s identity as mixed race. Because of Ellen’s
historical relationships with her family as black and white as well as daughter
and slave, thematic tensions and oppositional character groups within this
dramatic plot resemble a predictable ironic reversal, wherein mixed race/black
and impoverished becomes white and wealthy, and vice versa. Though
challenged greatly by Ellen’s passing, white supremacy and patriarchy emerge
relatively unscathed. This is, ironically, one of the reasons behind Ellen’s
110
exhilaration at being back in her own skin. She was able to assume a proper
woman’s role even though she could not assume an identity as mixed race.
Appreciation of the pass despite this result is facilitated further by
comparing the intersectional layers that lead to its ironic composition. As
presented in the previous chapter, an intersectional perspective theorizes the
interconnections among, race, gender, class, and ability in the U.S. context as
heavily trafficked intersections. Given the strong manifestations of patriarchy
in the slavery context, Ellen’s experiences of mixed race alienation are
confounded by gender-based oppression. Accordingly, any critical analysis of
her social and rhetorical situations must revolve around these intersections.
Intersectionality provides knowledge about Craft’s pass as a developmental
process, a product, and a means of personal and institutional transformation. It
also suggests that passing can be a means of self-empowerment for many
mixed race individuals who “as multiply-burdened…pull themselves into the
groups that are permitted” representation and autonomy.
34
Finally,
intersectionality emphasizes Ellen’s identity as enslaved and (part) white. The
persuasive enthymeme in the minds of dupes’, of course, is that there is a more
likely vision of a slave, one whose race, ability, or class background contrasts
with Ellen’s to produce the irony. Emphasizing the contrast between myths
about and realities of mixed race identity, interracial relations, and patriarchy
functioned effectively to challenge beliefs about the nature of mixed race
identity and enslavement.
111
Before going any further it is appropriate to reintroduce the five
dynamic principles of Intersectionality theory: identity intersectionality,
experiential intersectionality, discrimination intersectionality, political
intersectionality, and multiracial intersectionality.
35
Ellen’s identity
intersectionality is ironic at its core because it revolves around her status as
mixed race-female-slave-wife (and white-looking) whereby she and any of her
children would be enslaved as property and family of her owner-father. So
identified she “incorporates a collision of mutually exclusive subject-
positions—she is a virtually impossible subjectivity, a subjectivity for which
the law does not account.”
36
Foreshadowing what Homer Plessy would do
decades later, Ellen assumed all rights of property, procedure, and consent that
she was denied as a slave-wife by assuming the role of master in passing. Her
pass became ironic as it muddied the distinctions between slave-master,
woman-man, abled-disabled, black-white and disrupted “single lines of
analysis …which treat identity as one-dimensional, unicategorical.”
37

The ironies of Ellen’s identity and situation are matched by the ironies
of her experience as mixed race and enslaved. For example, virtually all mixed
race persons born to enslaved mothers were alienated through the laws and
customs of enslavement:
It is a common practice for gentlemen (if I may call them such),
moving in the highest circles of society, to be the fathers of
children by their slaves, whom they can and do sell with the
greatest impunity; and the more pious, beautiful, and virtuous
the girls are, the greater the price they bring, and that too for the
most infamous purposes…and as the law says a slave shall have
112
no higher appeal than the mere will of the master, she cannot
escape, unless it be by flight or death.
38

Obviously, Ellen chose flight. This choice expressed Ellen’s understanding of
her identity intersectionality as an ironic union of elements that left her
“stigmatized.”
39
As was the case with most enslaved Africans and their
descendants, Ellen experienced the full range of discrimination and oppression.
She was part of at least four million enslaved Americans in the mid to late
1800s.
40
As an enslaved woman she lived under constant horror as an object of
cruelty and sexual abuse, especially along interracial lines. Many white
masters and overseers made a common practice out of raping female slaves.
This type of sexual contact was fundamental to the political economy of
slavery and produced a large racially mixed population of which Ellen was a
part. Hence, the rules of this peculiar institution left Ellen without available
narrative.
Mixed race-woman-slave is both valued and devalued. Under the
institution of slavery a mixed race-woman-slave is extremely profitable for
both her manual and reproductive labor. At the same time she is completely
dehumanized. In part because she is mixed race (read black via the one-drop
rule) and a slave, considered chattel, and in part because she is not considered
a human woman and therefore naturally not a wife, mother, or being capable of
consent. As a slave she had no freedom allowed to her as wife (e.g., choice in
partner, motherhood). As a wife, she had no available narrative to articulate her
experiences or effect escape. Therefore, she could escape only by becoming
113
human as best she could manage it in the time period: a white, wealthy,
disabled (and therefore slightly feminized) male. Her passing can be read as “a
challenge to the law’s insistence on her singularity, its efforts to confine [her]
in a sole, unarticulated category.”
41
An important aspect of this pass is the way
in which it challenges metonymic interpretations of race and gender and
underscores the intersectional perspective in which:
race and gender…are in fact inextricable. There are no unraced
gendered persons, no ungendered raced persons…the structures
have the effect of radically simplifying identities, of making
them comprehensible by selectively identifying certain physical
or historical facts and about those bodies and making them
significant.
42

Ellen’s and William’s pass takes on a further intersectional and ironic
dimension once they are free. At this point Ellen is valued precisely because
she is a mixed race-woman-(former) slave. At the same time she is denied the
opportunity to recount the story publicly on her own terms because of the
constraints of polite womanhood. Therefore, her story is always told by
another or others.
43
Even in its retelling Ellen’s identity was commodity when
her disguised likeness was sold to raise money for the abolitionist cause.
44

Although rarely told in her own words the tale was virtually meaningless
without her physical presence during presentations. Audiences reacted more
strongly and favorably to the messages when she was present.
45
The Crafts’
passing relies on the situations in which the exchange of information can be
used to violate the expectations of audiences, which will be received either
114
positively or negatively depending on the audiences’ abilities to identify with
Ellen in plain clothes and as Mr. Johnson.
The discrimination Ellen faced is correlated to the ironies inherent in
her identity and reflected in her experience. We encounter irony in Ellen’s
identity as mixed race, white-looking, and enslaved. This identity afforded her
means of escape in passing. Then, the freedom and renown she achieved as a
result of passing successfully left her unable to speak for herself. Ellen’s story
is credited to her husband William in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.
This retelling is, according to Booth, a “clue to irony” because:
we discover th[e]...clashes between what is said and what we
think we know about the subject, but we find that what we
know consists mainly of value judgments. None of these could
be easily proved by established methods; most are at least
questionable. Yet from them we build a conclusion that is
unshakable.
46

The conclusion to be drawn from Ellen’s experience is that mixed race women
faced tremendous limitations in finding public voice in their own bodies. For
in passing “what goes forth as A returns as non-A,” and in so doing becomes a
symbol for freedom (from slavery, even if not from the tyranny of
categorization).
47
She was no longer either white or black, but white and black.
And, unfortunately, there was no available expression found for this (bi)racial
designation outside of passing. On one hand Ellen’s passing destabilizes
common sense categories of race, gender, class and ability by revealing their
bases in unstable dichotomies that ground their definitions. On the other hand
her passing binds this revelation to a rhetorical situation whose constraints
115
erase her voice. An analysis of Ellen’s pass has provided opportunities to look
at the ways in which various forms of domination interact and impact the lives
of mixed race individuals.
The space created by Ellen’s pass and its retelling is not just one of
domination. It is also a political one, “since it concerns the possibility of an
agreement between unequally affected or unequally concerned persons which
does not rely on force.”
48
This means that although Ellen and William were
both enslaved, much of the focus went to William as a male. The overlapping
natures of Ellen’s identity, experiential, and discrimination intersectionalities
left her without political redress. She had no rights, was unprotected by law
and, at best, was only able to access agency temporarily in passing as Mr.
Johnson. Her passing allowed her to escape slavery, a bold political statement
in and of itself. But when used to address the political agenda of abolition she
was pushed to the sidelines as cheerleader and/or model. This illustrates that
even within disadvantaged groups the intersection of certain identities are
valued (e.g., mixed race/black and male) more than the intersection of others
(e.g., mixed race/black and female). However, attempts to reinscribe Ellen
within the dominant narratives of class, race, and gender (as proper lady and
wife) ultimately fail because her body defies inscription. Of bodily
incomprehensibility Elkins writes, “when deformation is so strong that an
object becomes incomprehensible, it is necessary to describe it by renaming
it.”
49
The fact that Ellen had to morph into Mr. Johnson attests to the ironies of
116
identity, her pass, her situation, and to the power of racial ambiguity as a
medium that shapes and is shaped by communication and action.
So far I have discussed how this case contains multiple ironies based on
mixed race identity, passing, and rhetorical situation. I have explained how the
Crafts created a product, Mr. Johnson, based on a rhetorical combination of
synecdoche and irony. I have also explored the intersectional natures of the
pass along the axes of race, gender, class, and ability. Now, I will move on to
examine the ways in which Ellen’s pass was sustained mechanically through
dissimulation, cross-dressing, and feigned disability. This will provide
material justification for the multiple symbolic ironies identified thus far. It
will also allow for a return to the rhetorical, showing how the Crafts persuaded
their audiences by using passing as a medium to represent the intersectional
character of race and other stigmatized identity elements.
IV
The Craft’s passing explodes the cultural and social myths that undergird
categories of identification themselves. Through the practice of dissimulation,
concealing identity in order to dupe the second persona and then revealing
identity in order to transform second persona into third and fourth personae,
Ellen embodies the concept of “self-imitation.” Doniger elaborates:
everyone who passes is, in a very real sense, self-imitating;
since there is neither an ur-purity of race nor an unambiguous
gender identity, anyone ‘black’ passing as white is in effect
white-as-black-as-white, and a female passing as male is, to
some degree, a male-as female-as-male.
50

117
Doniger’s claim emphasizes performativity. Where this claim ends, the Crafts
begin. This is because the Crafts are the agents behind their act, which operates
on several levels simultaneously to conceal and reveal multiple and complex
ironies. Their pass offers a departure from the traditional concepts of depth
inherent in Socratic or “effective” irony: that a person means the opposite of
what he or she says. Or, that we see one persona, only to find out that another
one lies behind it, and behind it another one. “As an ethos of becoming, the
pass locates in practice that which is assumed to be impervious to dramatic
rehearsals.”
51
In other words, we are introduced to a different concept of depth
in which identities exist simultaneously, intersectionally, and contingently.
To the extent that the Crafts exercised agency and emancipated
themselves through passing, their story poses a physical challenge to the
relation of the color line through dissimulation and outing. First, by feigning
multiple disabilities she does not have, Craft disables the working notion of
authentic and counterfeit identities. Second, by feigning either blackness or
whiteness via synecdoche and irony at different moments depending on
objective (mixed race-as black-as white-as black), she reveals that the truth of
identity is most often a function of the rhetor’s and audiences’ subject
positions. Craft’s intentional self-outing for the purpose of identifying with
predominantly white abolitionist audiences implies an absence and a presence
of whiteness. Therefore, it can be argued that she feigned simulation. Craft
feigned not to have whiteness even though she had white skin (and a white
118
father). As an ironic passer Craft feigned to have whiteness until she divulged
her blackness once freed. This news was often shocking to duped audiences
because it upset the material and symbolic bases of race and racial
identification based on the color line.
To enhance cognitive dissonance, and provide dupes with an
opportunity to exchange experiences, William often told the story of Salomé
Muller, a white woman who spent 25 years as a Southern slave due to a case of
mistaken identity. He also reminded audiences that Ellen was not unique. She
was one of many mixed race and/or white-looking slaves. William told of
white people kidnapped and enslaved, of other light-
complexioned slaves making their escape through the guise of
whiteness, and of white people who befriended, supported, and
even courted the young white slaveholder on “his” journey
north. The world of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
cannot be described in simple racial terms, for its predictable
patterns of social engagement overlie surprising disruptions of
the assumed social order.
52

The Crafts used this narrative tactic because they understood the powers of
irony and dissimulation in enhancing their abolitionist cause. When duped
audiences found Craft persuasive in transforming her identity from Ellen to
Mr. Johnson and back, she caused them to question the notion that appearance
marks of verifiable identity. This catalyzed the development of a more
nebulous conception of race and racial character that is not necessarily self-
fulfilling. For if Craft could be enslaved, and if “white can be taken for black,
and black, for white, [man for woman and woman for man], then the notion of
119
discrete and meaningful… categories [of identification] becomes increasingly
hollow.”
53

Once William made this argument and Ellen performed it, it became
virtually impossible for their audiences to justify any person’s enslavement.
Persuading audiences that abolition was a necessary good often rested on
feelings of racial discomfort they experienced while observing Ellen in plain
clothes. This discomfort was the result of Ellen’s ability to transform dupes
(second personae) into in-group clairvoyants (third personae), granting them
the ability to see distinctions between actual and apparent meanings and
identities. However, it should be noted that the Crafts’ argument for abolition
rested on outrage that other whites could be enslaved rather than on the outrage
and injustice of the institution.
In addition, Craft’s passing sustains the rhetorical intersection of irony-
synecdoche and the cultural dynamics of intersectionality by exhibiting the
three advantages of dissimulation outlined by Bacon in Of Simulation and
Dissimulation: surprise, safety, and a better understanding of those who
promoted slavery.
54
Craft’s passing allowed for her public escape from slavery
because “Mr. Johnson” protected her by laying aside suspicion of Ellen’s
presence in all-white environments. Mr. Johnson also bestowed the social
privilege of mobility, in case the situation became dangerous aboard the train.
Her staged infirmity allowed for William’s mobility as well, since Johnson
required constant care. In any case Ellen and William could exit the train at
120
any time and board another if they became too fearful. Further, Ellen generated
racial comfort among her fellow white travelers. That is to say that no
dissonance was sensed between genotype and phenotype, anatomical sex and
gendered appearance, and therefore between status and privileged (mobile)
identity or physical disability.
Because of Ellen’s dissimulation, she and William were able to
overhear and better understand the minds of their opponents who would object
to abolition: wealthy, white, male slave owners. This information was critical
in forming the abolitionist plea. For instance, while eating breakfast next to a
young military officer, the following insight was offered to Mr. Johnson:
‘You will excuse me, Sir, for saying I think you are very likely
to spoil your boy by saying ‘thank you’ to him. I assure you, sir,
nothing spoils a slave so soon as saying, ‘thank you’…to him.
The only way to make a nigger toe the mark, and to keep him in
his pace, is to storm at him like thunder, and keep him
trembling like a leaf…If every nigger was drilled in this manner
they would…never dare to run away.’
55

This transaction afforded the Crafts the opportunity to recognize and rebut
their opponents’ arguments by exposing enthymemes and fallacies.
Second, feigned disability was critical to Craft’s act of passing because
it provided the element of surprise and a cloak of invisibility. Many disabled
individuals acknowledge “what it is to be overlooked by a sea of passersby.”
56

Her arm in a poultice veiled her illiteracy and her glasses veiled her ability to
see her situation. Her second poultice disguised her femininity (e.g., beardless
chin, voice, etc.). These prostheses were denotative “indexical
121
signs…point[ing] to other meanings, thereby summoning the array of
representations signifying any given social practice or object of knowledge.”
57

These prostheses supported Mr. Johnson’s condition and persona and directed
attention away from Ellen’s pre-passing race, class, ability, and gender
identities.
So, when Mr. Johnson’s disabled body moved into the social space
aboard the train, it made a way for Ellen’s (and William’s) physically abled,
yet enslaved and stigmatized, bodies to be inserted into that space and travel to
freedom, thereby transforming their class status. The irony here is that while
disabled bodies are generally considered poor fits in relation to society’s
definition of what is standard or normal, Ellen’s feigned disability was a form
of accommodation and protection. It thereby “contravened existing systems of
oppression” she experienced on the bases of race and gender discrimination.
58

Exhibiting true irony, Craft’s passing is pregnant with meanings, for in passing
as a disabled white male she carried herself and William from slavery to
freedom.
Craft’s disability was sustained in large part by her cross-dressing,
which was not an unusual practice among fugitive slaves. William Still, a
preeminent conductor along the Underground Railroad, recalled many “men
disguised in female attire and women dressed in the garb of men [who] have
under very trying circumstances triumphed in thus making their way to
122
freedom.”
59
Cross-dressing was an unpleasant experience for many men while
women passed into a higher class and were shielded against sexual assault.
60

Cross-dressing cast doubt upon racial categorization by crossing black-
white with an additional set of binary identification categories (male-female).
Craft cross-dressing allowed her to pass through a male persona and reveal her
full feminine nature in moments of “exhilaration” at abolitionist rallies.
However, cross-dressing is distinct from passing because it is much rarer for a
cross-dresser to be considered genetically both female and male (i.e., a
hermaphrodite, transsexual, or third gender) than it is for a passer to claim
black and white identification through family and heredity.
It must also be noted that, in contrast to passing, cross-dressing does
not depend generally on deceiving a dupe/second persona, someone who is
fooled into thinking that a woman is a man. Rather, it depends on the in-
group/third persona knowledge of a viewer who knows that the anatomical sex
and gendered exterior of the cross-dresser are at odds.
61
In this case William is
the in-group member and ironic evaluator who keeps the secret and protects
the pass. In a fetishistic sense, as in drag or transvestitism, cross-dressing
involves mimetic performance of “identity as difference.”
62
A cross-dresser is
a cross-dresser precisely because he or she dresses differently than the
gendered regulatory norm prescribes.
63
This is not what the Crafts were doing
in their pass. Passing, on the contrary, “more often involves the careful
masking of ambiguity: difference as identity.”
64
Therefore, a passer should not
123
be outed even though her difference is the essence of her identity. When Craft
outed herself she experienced “moments of exhilaration” because she
embodied the fourth persona. In so doing she was able to enact the discrete
cultural objectives of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
In the next section I will link this discussion of the physical mechanics
of the case to the rhetorical perspective of the fourth persona. The fourth
persona perspective will show how passing is a process through which
identities and institutions are constructed symbolically and socially. In so
doing I will also emphasize the disabilities inherent in traditional treatments
that ignore the intersectional thickets of passing, in favor of a one-dimensional
approach that does not account for Craft’s “exhilarating” moments.
V
Here I extend the definition of (bi)racial passing from the fourth persona
perspective (as synecdochic act in which the part is taken for the whole and
interpreted by audiences metonymically as that whole) to include issues of race
gender, and class as well as (dis)ability. Disability emphasized the distance
between Ellen and William and the duped whites on the train. It also provided
protection from whites as they took pity on Mr. Johnson and left Ellen and
William alone. In telling audiences about their pass, disability emphasized the
radical distinction between someone who suffers and someone
who does not, between an unfortunate and someone else who is
sometimes referred to as a beholder, someone who sees,
sometimes as a bystander, sometimes as a spectator, which
emphasises [sic] the distance and even theatrical character of
the relationship.
65

124

By focusing on a synecdochic representation and metonymic interpretation of
Ellen as white, male, wealthy, and abled, the Crafts were able to tap into their
audiences’ imaginations to create identifications. White audiences were
transformed from dupes (second persona) to in-group clairvoyants (third
persona) because they could now see added dimensions to the pass. Further,
audiences’ images of who could be and actually was enslaved were altered by
Ellen's display of her original and passing personae. Together Ellen, William,
and their readers and auditors become a unified fourth persona that saw the
abolitionist cause as an urgent one.
As an expression of a fourth persona, the Crafts’ passing and outing
(via retelling) can be read as a means of physical survival and a psychological
need to relieve suffering along any identity intersection in which it is endured.
The Crafts and their audiences remind us that treating passing as a problem
only of racial identification is an attempt to ignore its ironies, contradictions,
and complex identity intersections. When studied intersectionally, racial
passing has been “correlated with class passing.”
66
As argued in Chapter One,
this is because passing attacks the historically and culturally determined
divisions of labor and liberty in U. S. commercial and capitalist cultures. From
the perspective of the fourth persona, this correlation simultaneously engages
and ignores intersectionality. On the one hand, intersectionality is engaged
when one aspect of identity is performed and discussed in terms of only one
another, as in Smith’s study. Smith writes:
125
Although it is generally motivated by class considerations (people pass
primarily in order to partake of the wider opportunities available to
those in power), and constructed in racial terms (people describe the
passing person as wanting to be white, not wanting to be rich), its
consequences are distributed differentially on the basis of gender
(women in narrative are more likely to be punished for passing than are
men).
67

In Smith’s study passing is strategy of representation to move from only one
subject position to another as a means of temporarily and immediately
avoiding suffering produced by heavy traffic at the intersections of identity,
discrimination, and experience. However, the fourth persona reveals that
Ellen’s passing operates on at least four identity levels and is fundamentally
ironic. It is a means of finding agency and rejuvenated self-determination
while submitting to dominant structures of categorization that invented the
problem in the first place.
On the other hand, intersectionality is ignored when either Ellen’s or
William’s contributions to the pass and its retelling are given primacy.
68
The
unified fourth persona exposes the need for Ellen’s and William’s roles to be
examined together and equally. It also calls for passing to be considered as an
ironic-synecdochic problem because it rests on the very structures of
categorization and domination it seeks to transgress and often transform. Part
of the irony is that any type of passing requires the recurrence of boundaries in
spite of all the suffering and misery they impose, so that passers can shed the
weight of their alienation. This makes passers ironists who challenge the
126
meaningfulness of identification categories by placing synecdoche and
metonymy in conversation (via irony).
Finally, the fourth persona allows the critic to draw four valuable and
progressive conclusions. First, passing is affected by institutions that
naturalize hierarchies based on raced, gendered, classed, able-bodied and other
characteristics. Second, these characteristics are indexed both symbolically and
materially. Third, the agency in passing results from taking on and openly
resisting the dominant structure simultaneously. Fourth, that passing can be
read as a project of control guided by the perspectives and dilemmas of mixed
race individuals as intersectional personae. These conclusions emphasize the
ironies of self-identity based on normalized conceptions of race, gender, class,
and ability that eliminate the possibility and expression of “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness” for intersectional subjects who are not white, male, and
wealthy.
In summary, passing confirms that “irony is…a powerful weapon
enjoyed by authors and readers alike. Perhaps no other form of human
communication does so much with speed and economy.”
69
At the heart of
such irony lies a choice to identify as either black or white, a contradiction
which the passer cannot resolve or sustain but only pass through. On one hand,
passing can be a practice through which subjects exploit irony, metonymy, and
synecdoche in order to redraw the boundaries to include their stories. On the
other hand, passing is not merely ironic because irony fails when it is
127
unnoticed, while passing succeeds. When passing succeeds it calls the
ideological and epistemological foundations of identity into question, by
transforming contingency into rhetorical action predicated on renewal and
reinvention. Most poignantly, passing attests to the existence of race, gender,
ability, and class as powerful markers of difference and formidable obstacles to
those who find themselves, by accidents of rhetorical determination, somehow
disabled.
Building on my definition of (bi)racial passing as passing based on
synecdoche, intersecting with irony, and interpreted via metonymy, I will now
examine another case in which mixed race individuals take traditional racial
symbols and turn them on their heads. The Crafts employed irony to create a
persona that embodied the differing racial heritages for those who could
identify as either black or white. In so doing they made an ironic appeal for the
abolition of slavery based on white fear rather than on outrage at the injustices
perpetrated against black and mixed race people. Their appeal was very
successful. This strategy of appealing to whiteness, its privileges, and its fears
was also utilized in the next case I examine, the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson.
I focus on the intersection of synecdoche and appropriation to question the
expectations and advantages of whiteness and to uncover whether passing can
be considered either a form of protest and/or an antecedent form of identity
theft. I will show how Plessy’s passing takes whiteness and blackness into new
contexts, forcing rhetoric to represent white and black symbolically and as a
128
range of economic and reputational gains and losses. The institutionalization of
segregation as a result of Plessy v. Ferguson is the grounds for the fictionalized
cases of passing examined in Chapters Four and Five.
129

CHAPTER TWO REFERENCES
1
In 1996, Ellen Smith Craft was recognized officially as one of the State of
Georgia’s Women of Achievement.
2
Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in 1831 in order to advocate for the
cause of abolition. In the newsletter he published letters from famous
abolitionists and former slaves. Though limited in publication, circulation
consisted of fewer than 400 subscriptions during the paper's second year, the
publication gained subscribers and influence over the next three decades, until,
after the end of the Civil War Garrison published the last issue on 29
December 1865. For more information please see: Henry Mayer. All on Fire:
William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1998).

3
UNC University Library. “Documenting the American South: William Wells
Brown describes the Crafts' escape,” The Liberator, January 12, 1849,”
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/craft/support1.html (accessed 15 February 2007)
4
Mary Gleason McDougall. Fugitive Slaves: 1619 – 1865 (Boston: Ginn &
Company, 1891): 43. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a Federal law
written with the intention of enforcing a section of the United States
Constitution that required the return of runaway slave. It sought to force the
authorities in free states to return fugitive slaves to their masters. The Fugitive
Slave Law brought the issue home to anti-slavery citizens in the North, since it
made them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery. Even
moderate abolitionists were now faced with the immediate choice of defying
what they believed an unjust law or breaking with their own consciences and
beliefs.
5
Charles J. Heglar. Rethinking the Slave Narrative (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2001).

6
Ibid., 85.
7
Samira Kawash. Dislocating the Color Line (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997): 64-65.

8
Charles J. Heglar. Rethinking the Slave Narrative (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2001).
9
Ibid., 20-21.
130

10
E. M. Weinauer. “‘A most respectable looking gentleman:’ Passing,
Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom.” in
Passing and The Fictions of Identity ed. E. K.Ginsberg (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1996): 38.
11
Joseph Mali. The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s “New Science”
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
12
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860): ix.
13
Josephine Brown. “Biography of an American Bondsman, 1856” in Two
Biographies by African American Women. ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991): 76.

14
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860): 8.
15
Ibid., 25.
16
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860): 18.
17
Ibid., 45.
18
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860): 24.
19
Ellen Samuels. “‘A Complication of Complaints’: Untangling Disability,
Race and Gender in William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for
Freedom.” MELUS (2006): 6. http://lion.cahdwyck.com (accessed 26 October
2008).

20
Ibid., 29.
21
Ibid., 29-30.
22
Ibid. 30.

23
Ibid., 34.

24
Ibid., 32.
131

25
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom. (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860): 29-39.

26
Ibid., 29.
27
Dorothy Sterling. Black Foremothers: Three Lives. (Old Westbury:
Feminist Press, 1979): 19.

28
Plato. “Symposium,” in The Complete Works of Plato trans. Donald J.
Zeyl, ed. John M Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997).

29
Ibid.
30
Katharina Barbe. Irony in Context (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995): 16.
31
Ibid.
32
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860):. iii.

33
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962): 514.
34
Kimberlé Crenshaw. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A
Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and
Anti-racist Politics” in Feminist Legal Theory ed. D. K. Weisberg
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989): 65.
35
Devin Carbado. “The Fifth Black Woman” Journal of
Contemporary Legal Issues 11 (2001): 703.
36
E. M. Weinauer. “‘A most respectable looking gentleman:’ Passing,
Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom” in
Passing and the Fictions of Identity ed. E. K.Ginsberg, (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1996): 40.
37
Ibid., 43.
38
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860): 16.

39
Erving Goffman. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
132

40
Anthony H. Tibbles. Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity
(London: Stationery Office Books, 1994).
41
Ellen M. Weinauer. “‘A most respectable looking gentleman:’ Passing,
Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom” in
Passing and the Fictions of Identity ed. Elizabeth K. Ginsberg (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1996): 44.
42
Judith Branford and Chrispin Sartwell. “Voiced Bodies/Embodied Voices.”
in Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference and Interplay (New York:
Routledge, 1997): 192-193.

43
Charles J. Heglar. Rethinking the Slave Narrative (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2001): 89.

44
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860).
45
Ibid.
46
Wayne C. Booth. The Rhetoric of Irony. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1972): 52.
47
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962): 517.
48
Luc Boltanski. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999): 36.

49
James Elkins. The Object Stares Back (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1996): 147.

50
Mary Doniger. The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of
Self-Imitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 102.
51
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 136.
52
John Ernest. “Representing Chaos: William Craft’s Running a
Thousand Miles for Freedom” PMLA 121.2 (2006): 474-475.

133

53
E. M. Weinauer. “‘A most respectable looking gentleman:’ Passing,
Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom.” in
Passing and the Fictions of Identity ed. Elizabeth K. Ginsberg (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1996): 47.
54
Francis Bacon. (1561–1626). “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” in Essays,
Civil and Moral. http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/6.html (accessed 20 September
2007)
55
Ellen and William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (Athens
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1860): 33.
56
Tobin Anthony Siebers. “Disability as Masquerade” Literature and
Medicine 23 (2004): 3.
57
Ibid., 8.
58
Ibid., 7.
59
William Still. The Underground Rail Road (New York: Amo, 1872): 1.
60
Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(New York &
London: Routledge, 1992): 284.

61
Amy Robinson. "It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of
Common Interest." Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 715-36.
62
Anne McClintock. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995): 65.
63
Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New
York: Routledge, 1993).
64
Anne McClintock. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995): 65.
65
Luc Boltanski. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999): 36.

66
Catherine R. Squires and Daniel C. Brouwer. “In/Discernible Bodies: The
Politics of Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 19 (2002): 283.
134

67
Valerie Smith. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender (London: Routledge, 1998):
36.
68
For more commentary please see: Cheree A. Carlson. “‘You Know it When
You See It:’ The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander v.
Rhinelander,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 111-128.; Catherine R.
Squires and Daniel C. Brouwer. “In/Discernible Bodies: The Politics of
Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media,” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 19 (2002): 283-311. ; Richard Dyer. White (London:
Routledge, 1997).
69
Wayne C. Booth. A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1975):13.
135
CHAPTER THREE
“MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES:”
PLESSY’S PASSING AND THE THREAT OF IDENTITY THEFT

A history of the past is also a history of the present.
--Anurima Banerji
1

I

Roughly 50 years after Ellen and William Craft boarded a train to escape from
slavery, Homer A. Plessy boarded a train in Louisiana to protest Section Two
of Act 111 of the 1890 Louisiana legislature entitled, An Act to Promote the
Comfort of Passengers or the Separate Car Act. This Act endorsed segregation
aboard interstate and intrastate conveyances by demanding that all Louisiana
railway companies transporting passengers make available “equal but separate
accommodations for the white and colored races.”
2
The law stated that
the officers of passenger trains shall have power and are hereby
required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment
used for the race to which such passenger belongs; any person
insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race
he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of Twenty Five
Dollars or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not
more [than] twenty days in the Parish Prison.
3

Plessy, a member of the Comité des Citoyens, protested against the law citing
the authority of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the
American creed of equality. Not only did Plessy and the Comité question the
constitutionality of act itself they also reminded the country that a particular
racial, gender, and class identity intersection was its underlying premise. As a
consequence, they realized that in order to test the law they had to test the
136
identity intersection through a rhetorical maneuver involving synecdoche,
appropriation, and metonymy. That maneuver was (bi)racial passing.
The plan was simple. On 7 June 1892 Plessy was instructed to “get the
ticket. Get on the train. Get arrested. Get booked.”
4
Plessy passed as white in
order to get the ticket and get on the train. He then passed as black in order to
get booked. Plessy, with the help of the Comité and its lead attorney Albion
Tourgée, fought the arrest all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1896 where
they lost the case. A local newspaper entitled The Crusader provided the
following account:
Homer A. Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railroad, at the
foot of Press Street, for Covington. He held a first-class ticket
and naturally took his seat in a first-class coach. As the train
was moving out of the station, the conductor came up and asked
if he was a white man. Plessy, who is as white as the average
white Southerner, replied that he was a colored man. Then, said
the conductor, ‘you must go in the coach reserved for colored
people.’ Plessy replied that he had a first-class ticket and would
remain in the first-class coach. The conductor insisted that he
retire to the Jim Crow coach. Plessy determinedly told him that
he was an American citizen and proposed to enjoy his rights as
such and to ride for the value of his money. The conductor,
seeing his own powers of persuasion unavailing, invoked the
aid of the police. Captain C. C. Cain…told Plessy that if he was
a colored man, he would have to go to the colored coach. Plessy
again refused…Plessy said he would go to jail first before
relinquishing his right as a citizen.
5

Though well known today Plessy’s story was not headline news at the time of
its occurrence. While black newspapers like The Crusader and The Parsons
Weekly Blade did cover and critique it extensively, the mainstream press barely
mentioned it. “For example, The New York Times carried the decision in its
137
regular railway column.”
6
This case is significant not just because it eschewed
the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and ushered in the
“separate but equal” policy that cemented the color line for decades to come,
but also because this Supreme Court was the same one which “protected
corporations as ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
7
These
economic and racial rulings are not independent. Moreover, they relate to the
study of (bi)racial passing because they share a conception of personhood that
is tantamount to a particular identity intersection of white, male, and
propertied. According to the Court this identity intersection was used by
Plessy without authorization and, hence, stolen.
To study Plessy v. Ferguson is to study the rhetorical footprint of this
identity intersection. Although scholarly critiques of the case abound and
rightly focus on the cultural, factual, and ethical aspects of passing involved,
Plessy’s passing is generally characterized “as an attempt by mulattos to retain
the privileges that their light skin had previously afforded.”
8
Plessy’s passing
has not yet been examined from a fourth persona perspective as the
simultaneous expression and denial of mixed race identity. Nor has his passing
or the Court’s ruling about it been linked to the contemporary concept of
identity theft.
9
Re-examining this landmark case from such a perspective is
warranted because it suggests new and valuable insights regarding the
constitutive legal powers of race, identity, and identity theft. In the pages that
follow I will pose critical questions particular to Plessy’s act focusing on two
138
levels. The first level will focus on “the dynamics of the social relations in
which (h)e act(ed) and to which (h)e [was] accountable.”
10
The second level
will examine an incongruous grammar, rhetoric, and symbolic of race from the
fourth persona perspective. The questions that guide this discussion are: How
is the synecdoche-appropriation intersection dramatized by Plessy’s
pass? What symbolic and material claims about mixed race identity are made
as a result? How did the Court respond to Plessy’s claims? And, what are some
implications of considering Plessy’s pass as an antecedent form of identity
theft?
Beginning with an historical introduction to the case in section II, I
explore the structure and events of Plessy’s pass. I maintain that it is an
example of (bi)racial passing that argues against the biological and
epistemological assumptions of race as explained in Chapter One and
transgressed by Ellen Craft in Chapter Two. Specifically, I propose that
Plessy’s pass argued against the security and imposition of black-or-white-only
representation. I continue in Section III by arguing that Plessy’s dexterity with
(bi)racial passing in terms of synecdoche-appropriation afforded a fourth
persona “perspective by incongruity” that enabled his insurgency against
segregationist practices based on privileges afforded the propertied white and
male self. In Section IV I utilize textual analysis to demonstrate the ways in
which Plessy’s passing is interpreted and assessed by the Court
metonymically—as a theft or unlawful use of white racial identity in order to
139
access exclusive benefits and privileges. I conclude in section V by suggesting
that the privilege Plessy allegedly stole in passing can be interpreted through
the neoteric lens of identity theft. I also suggest that (bi)racial passing can be
insurgent action to critique segregationist practices.
II
The late nineteenth century is a fascinating context for examining mixed race
identity through lenses of property and self ownership. Legally, people of
African descent enjoyed freedom and rights as U.S. citizens. Socially, they
were denied full and equal participation. As abovementioned the Louisiana
State legislature passed the Separate Car Act in 1890, mandating that all
Louisiana railway companies transporting passengers in their coaches provide
“equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.”
11

Prominent Creole and African American citizens of Louisiana joined forces in
protest of the Separate Car Act. They created the Comité des Citoyens (a.k.a.,
Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law) on
1 September1891. The Comité sought to test the constitutionality of the
Separate Car Act by staging violations of the law. They formulated two plans
in order to test the interstate and intrastate features of the Act. On 24 February
1892 the Comité put its first plan in motion. Their passer was Daniel F.
Desdunes (pictured right, below), a man described as an “octoroon,” seven-
eighths European and one-eight African heritage. Desdunes held a first-class
ticket and boarded a train heading from Louisiana to Alabama. Desdunes did
140
not get very far because a detective, hired by the
Comité, promptly arrested him for violating the Act.
Desdunes was tried shortly thereafter and acquitted.
This acquittal was not considered a victory because
Desdunes’s case did not broach the issue of racist
biracial classification as the root of legalized
segregation. As it turns out Desdunes was acquitted because the provisions in
the Louisiana law regarding interstate travel were not compatible with federal
legislation.
12

Enter Plessy (pictured below, left) and the Comité’s second plan to test
the law. Plessy, another mixed race individual self-identified as seven-eighths
European and one-eighth African, became known as “the exception that defied
the rule” because “the admixture of colored blood [was] not discernable.”
13
His
(bi)racial passing—his ability to pass as either white or colored/black—was
used as a representative legal action whose outcome
became precedent.
14

On 7 June 1892, Plessy committed crimes of
identity and circumvention by utilizing the trope of
synecdoche in passing first as white and then as
black/colored. Plessy bought a one-way ticket
aboard the East Louisiana Railway, boarding in
New Orleans and headed toward Covington. Plessy
Figure 6: D. F. Desdunes

Figure 7: Homer A. Plessy
141
paid the higher fare and dressed appropriately in a suit and hat like Ellen Craft,
donning “the proper attire of gentlemen traveling first class.”
15
Supported by
New Orleans’s Comité he “entered a passenger train and took possession of a
vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were
accommodated.”
16

The Comité hired Christopher C. Cain to make the arrest and forcibly
remove Plessy from the train after the conductor, J. J. Dowling, discovered
Plessy was “colored.”
17
Plessy was released the following day on a $500 bond
and was shortly thereafter represented legally by “carpetbagger” attorney
Albion W. Tourgée, James C. Walker and Samuel F. Phillips at trial. Stressing
that Plessy should have been able “to ride for the value of his money” and not
for the value assigned to his racial status as colored, Tourgée argued: that the
objective of the Separate Car Act was to show prejudice toward colored
citizens thus depriving them of rights to citizenship protected under the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments; that the Thirteenth Amendment
abolished slavery, and with it, the nation’s racial caste system that “held the
African in bondage to the whole white race as well as to his owner;”
18
and that
the Separate Car Act unjustly made white racial identity and its prerogatives
properties worthy of protection and imbued with rights to privacy.
19

Plessy appealed the decision. As plaintiff in error he continued to allege
that the ruling violated his equal protection rights under the Fourteenth
Amendment. In April 1896 the case reached the U. S. Supreme Court where
142
Tourgée presented Plessy’s passing as argument for and evidence of the
insecurity and implausibility of racial separation based on the color line
(episteme and verbal and/or visual distinction). His brief before the Court
explains:
The act in question…proceeds upon the hypothesis that the
State has the right to authorize and require the officers of a
railway to assort the citizens who engage in passage on its lines.
…The gist of our case is the unconstitutionality of the
assortment. …We insist that the State has no right to compel us
to ride in a car ‘set apart’ for a particular race, whether it is as
good as another or not…The question is not as to the equality of
the privileges enjoyed, but the right of the State to label one
citizen as white and another as colored in the common
enjoyment of a common highway.
20

This argument hinged on the dramatic possibility of circumventing the
“common highway” afforded Plessy by a mixed race identity as both black and
white. The notion of the “common highway” emphasizes the intersections,
lanes, divisions and borders inherent in drawing the color line along with
crossings and evasions. Tourgée’s arguments proved as much when he
appraised the Court that:
racial intermixture and intermarriage were already
accomplished facts. Homer Plessy himself was a living
testimony to this fact. The ‘races’ had mixed for centuries,
despite enormous legal and social barriers, and civilization had
not crumbled as a result… Tourgée’s brief repeatedly
hammered home the reality that was racial intermixture—the
bugaboo of integration—was benign, commonplace, and could
not be stopped by unconstitutional segregation laws.
21

Even with a sensibility and affinity for mixed race identity, Tourgée’s
argument failed to address the metonymic logic of the one-drop rule, which
143
disqualified Plessy from membership in and privileges of whiteness.
22
The
Supreme Court did not make the same oversight.
On 18 May 1896 the Court responded with its majority decision. “In
the nature of things,” wrote Justice Brown, the object of the Fourteenth
amendment “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon
color or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or
commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”
23
This
decision protected whiteness from the assaults of mixed race (bi)racial passers
like Plessy by identifying them as imposters. Mixed race identity was nullified
and erased by the Court because it proved that coloreds and whites were of the
same substance. In the end the majority decision became the legal justification
for the institutionalization of Jim and Jane Crow segregation and a means of
maintaining racial distinction. The decision influenced future verdicts, granting
“no one…an inherent or constitutional right to pass himself [or herself] off for
what [s]he is not.”
24
Most scholars agree that it also became a prime example
of “a compound of bad logic, bad history, bad sociology, and bad
constitutional law.”
25

A glimmer of hope was provided by Justice John Harlan’s dissent
wherein he explained that that the Constitution is color-blind. “In view of the
Constitution,” he wrote:
In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior,
dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our
constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates
classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are
144
equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most
powerful…The thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations for
passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor
atone for the wrong this day is done.
26

While many contemporary critical race theorists would rightly disagree with
the utility of a colorblind perspective, they might agree with Harlan’s dissent
on the grounds that it did not espouse the right to privacy grounded in the
concept of the propertied white and male self. Commenting on Harlan’s
argument Williams explains that “the over-expanded mental state we call
‘privacy’” is among the most pernicious and subtle contemporary enemies of
substantive democracy, as well as a powerful mode of justifying class and race
inequalities. “The tyranny of what we call the private,” she argues, risks
reducing us to “the life crushing disenfranchisement of an entirely owned
world where permission must be sought to walk on the face of the earth.”
27

Like Harlan, Williams warns of other rhetorics of distinction and other
“disempowering dynamics” sure to emerge in the wake of the majority
regarding religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality (and marriage rights), disability
and immigration.
28

But the story does not end there. In late1896 the Comité de Citoyens
disbanded affirming that they “as freedmen, still believe[d] that” they “were
right and in” their “cause as sacred.”
29
On 11 January 1897 Plessy put an end
to the matter once and for all. He withdrew his plea of not-guilty, paid the 25
dollar fine and passed once again, through the color line, into a segregated
society that would define him for the rest of his life. As will be argued in
145
Chapter Five, Plessy’s unhappy ending conforms to the figure of the tragic
mulatto, whose every step is supported and thwarted by the color line. The
ruling that defied Plessy’s intention adds touches of irony and tragedy to the
narrative. In this way it conforms with the tropological definition of (bi)racial
passing presented in Chapter One, as the interaction of synecdoche and
metonymy with irony, appropriation, eloquence and/or tragedy. With the facts
of the case firmly set in place I now turn to a symbolic exploration of these
details to demonstrate how (bi)racial passing was absorbed into the legal
structures of the U.S. as precedent for institutionalizing the color line as Jim
and Jane Crow segregation
III
The details of Plessy’s passing both reflect and challenge the artificial
manufacturing of racial identity as an act of human communication—its legal
expression being one such act. On the one hand the synecdochic and
appropriative dynamics of his pass (passing as white) and then the metonymic
dynamic (intentional self-outing as colored based on the one-drop rule) reflect
the ambiguity of racial identity itself making “its meaning deferred to its
representation alone.”
30
On the other hand, Plessy’s pass challenges the law’s
authority to consolidate such representations, especially by calling on concepts
of appropriation, property, and ownership.
Building on the ideal of verifiable identification reflected in the Plessy
v. Ferguson case, Harris argues that an individual’s racial identity, and
146
specifically his or her white racial identity, can be considered a legal property
interest.
31
Her argument is syllogistic: a person’s ability to be identified as
white bequeathed slave or free status. A person’s slave or free status
determined that person’s legal personhood (as slave 3/5ths of a person and as
free 5/5ths of a person) and ability to enjoy rights, privileges, and material
benefits of personhood. Therefore, a person’s ability to be identified as white
is a form of property that has exclusive rights of use and enjoyment. Based on
court transcripts Harris asserts that Plessy’s rights were violated because he
was able to pass as white.
Because phenotypically Plessy appeared to be white, barring
him from the railway car reserved for whites severely impaired
or deprived him of the reputation of being regarded as
white…[and] the public and private benefits of white status.
32

Though the Supreme Court did support the presupposition that a person’s
reputation as white could afford that person a property right, it denied that right
to Plessy because he could not verify that he was purely or fully white. As a
result it was ruled that Plessy held no right to hold or be denied any property
right associated with whiteness. Moreover, the Supreme Court would later rule
in its majority decision that
if he [Plessy] be a white man and assigned to a colored coach he
may have his action for damages against the company for being
deprived of his so called property [or whiteness]…Upon the
other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned he has
been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to
the reputation of being a white man.
33

147
The Court’s decision reveals that Plessy’s passing is both the condition and the
resolution of the case. By taking one part of his identity for the whole, in two
distinct and related instances as white and then as black, Plessy was able to
appropriate a space in which he did not belong. This appropriation questions
both the stability of racial classifications as well as the ability of any audience
to determine the racial character of any individual. Moreover, it questions “the
legitimacy of racial segregation itself.”
34
Tourgée supports this view by
arguing that even if such knowledge were attainable its deployment to
segregate the populace would be and was unconstitutional. According to
Golub, Tourgée’s argument redraws “our conception of race up from the body
and onto the power exercised by the state’s assignation of racial categories on
whose behalf the law claimed to act.”
35
In short, it rebuts the biological
assumptions of race and affirms the authority of juridical rhetoric.
Tourgée’s strategy of highlighting the legal powers of racial
identification hinged equally on whiteness as a form of property and on
Plessy’s status as mixed race (bi)racial passer. As a (bi)racial passer Plessy
embodied and manipulated the distance between legalized racial categories of
white and black. White identity was fixed to juridical constructions of private
property, privilege, and personhood, “like the acquisitive individualism of the
developing property system itself in the late nineteenth century.”
36
This system
made it impossible for black identity to be owned on the same terms as white
identity because it was the yardstick from which an individual measured his
148
distance from the privilege and protection of whiteness. Fanon affirmed this
construction of black as a contested and contradictory identity when he wrote
that
the Negro is a comparison…every position of one’s own, every
effort at security, is based on relations of dependence, with the
diminution of the (white) other. It is the wreckage of what
surrounds me that provides the foundation for my virility.
37

This distance between white and black racial identities is reflected in
Tourgée’s attempt to communicate the alienation of a mixed race perspective
to the Court. He implied that a mixed race individual of “Plessy’s
complexion…may not even know himself to which race he belongs and may
believe that he belongs in” the first-class car.
38
Foreshadowing the
epistemological issue at stake in determining mixed race identity the chapters
that follow, Plessy’s status as tragic mulatto is unfortunately confirmed.
Tourgée urged the Court to relieve Plessy of his confusion when he
asked them to consider the following scenario:
How much would it be worth to a young man entering upon the
practice of law to be regarded as a white man rather than a
colored one? Six-sevenths of the population are white.
Nineteenth-twentieths of the property of the country is owned
by white people…Under these conditions, is it possible to
conclude that the reputation of being white is not property?
Indeed, is it not the most valuable sort of property, being the
master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity?
39

Tourgée argued further that “if a white were forced to travel in a colored car
the person should be able to sue for damages for having his reputation
impugned and for having been” the victim of what we now refer to as identity
149
theft “…having been deprived of the exclusive rights and privileges of his
whiteness.”
40
Clearly whiteness, like an American Express card, is something
one should never leave home without.
The Court’s rejoinder suggested that its responsibility lay solely in
creating the racial grammar of white and colored as equal politically but not
socially. Consequently it left to each State the responsibility of creating
rhetorics of whiteness and blackness at its discretion. As a result of this
decision a host of states including North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Maryland, Florida, and Oklahoma soon
adopted similar segregationist provisions. By the mid twentieth century almost
all Southern states institutionalized Jim and Jane Crow segregation.
41
Aside
from being unjust, this was highly problematic because in many instances a
mixed race person was white in one state and black in another. Since mixed
race and black persons were denied equal protection at the federal level, they
were left without legal or moral redress in fighting for citizenship at the state
level. The lack of legal uniformity protected white identity along with its
exclusivity and privileges, thereby setting a precedent that was not dismissed
until the Civil Rights Act of 1968. This decision had dire consequences for all
“colored” people as fledgling citizens, regardless of their mixedness, because
colored identity was essentially deemed anti-property and contaminant.
Hence, it is subject to metonymy while whiteness is not.
150
As for the materiality of Plessy’s (bi)racial pass, the Court determined
that in passing he contaminated a pure white-only space and that this crime
merited punishment. The material effects of Plessy’s passing are dramatized
symbolically (through the intersection of synecdoche-appropriation) by
“enacting the scenario of ‘infiltration’ which subtends the legal concept of the
‘private,’...[and] act[ing] out the very possibility of intrusion on which the law
is founded.”
42
Arguing on Plessy’s behalf, Tourgée claimed that the state of
Louisiana violated that which was Plessy’s property and therefore protected,
his assumed identity and ethos as white. This argument helped set the
trajectory of U.S. privacy law, which is directly implicated in the present-day
crime of identity theft. In defense of itself the state of Louisiana maintained
that the Separate Car Act, and therefore the act of the train conductor in
questioning Plessy’s racial identity, was constitutional. The Act was
constitutional because it authorized the police to protect the health and welfare
of its citizens by sorting and separating them according to race. Dowling’s act
of verification was constitutional because it fell within the precepts of the
Act.
43
So argued, the case made its way to the Louisiana State Supreme Court
where Judge John H. Ferguson ruled that the Separate Car Act did not violate
Plessy’s rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
44

Ferguson’s argument is grounded in American individualism and
reveals the identity intersection of the default legal persona as white,
propertied, and male.
45
The appraised value of this default legal person was
151
calculated in conjunction with a right to privacy, interpreted as the right of
those who own the property to exclusive use, distribution and enjoyment of
particular privileges.
46
Exclusivity is both symbolic and material, making
racial categories equivalent to “the buses, private clubs, neighborhoods and
schools that provide the extracorporeal battleground for their expression.”
47

Private exclusivity is the foundation for U. S. citizenship according to the
Fourteenth Amendment and the right that the Court judged did not apply to
Plessy in passing.
The constitutionality of the Separate Car Act illustrates that there is no
such thing as a mixed race person who can be called on historically, except
through legal action that identifies such a person. Key terms include “power,”
“required to assign each passenger to the coach…for the race to which such
passenger belongs,” “liability” and “imprisonment.”
48
First, officers are
authorized and mandated to evaluate and verify racial ethos and identity based
on appearance and communication by the law. Second, appearance and verbal
expression as either colored or white are equated with a real and verifiable
racial ethos and identity. Third, this racial identification becomes a zoning
issue—contextualizing and protecting the spaces and places individuals inhabit
and the nature of services provided therein. The Separate Car Act declares
white-only and colored as separate and incompatible in social space and
custom.
49

152
Fourth, violation of racial zoning practices is criminalized and worthy
of incarceration or monetary damages. Ultimately, white-only and colored are
imbued with symbolic meaning making the latter inferior to the former, white
and colored are thereby institutionalized as non-communicative, mutually
evolving, and interdependent social worlds made to appear independent. Bell
describes this institutionalization when he writes that
legal segregation was so complete that a Southern white
minister was moved to remark that it ‘made of our eating and
drinking, our buying and selling, our labor and housing, our
rents, our railroads, our orphanages and prisons, our recreations,
our very institutions of religion, a problem of race as well as a
problem of maintenance.
50

The problems of race and maintenance became part of a formula that linked an
individual’s rights to her or his racial identity, which dictated ethical actions
and material resources. Plessy and his council urged the Court to acknowledge,
articulate and redefine the white, male, and propertied identity that served as
the founding premise of its decision. The Court was unwilling to do so.
Instead, the Court defined passing as the appropriation of whiteness
(that the passer may possess but does not own) to obtain special treatment as a
colored or mixed race person. The presumed threat of such appropriation was
profound because each separate ethos a passer projected through synecdoche
was a means of unauthorized access to different social, cultural, and economic
markets—promoting theft of social, cultural, political and/or financial capital.
Passing was framed as an illegal exchange of black-for-white identity, a
153
convergence of the material realm of commerce and the symbolic realm of race
in the context of controlled access and institutionalized segregation.
Because it conjoins racial capital with economic and cultural capital the
Court’s interpretation of Plessy’s passing can be viewed as an antecedent
definition of identity theft. However, it could also be argued that the Court
took away Plessy’s property interest in his white appearance when it
determined his racial identity metonymically by way of the one-drop rule.
Before my claims can be verified it is necessary to show how a fourth persona
“perspective by incongruity” based on my proposed redefinition of (bi)racial
passing can sustain the comparison. After this is established I will undertake a
discussion of how this comparison presents important implications for
contemporary civil, social, economic, and political legislation pertaining to
identity theft today.
IV
A rhetorical perspective that accounts for the passer, dupes, in-group
clairvoyants, and critics (such as the court and/or the contemporary student of
passing) is useful for explaining how Plessy’s pass was both an antecedent
form of identity theft and an insurgent argument subverted through rhetorical
action. As a form of social protest “all his actions…[were] framed for their
effect; his life is a spellbinding and spellbound address to an audience.”
51
This
act of passing evolved within a context of racial categorization and has
therefore inherited not just its symbols, but also its grammar and rhetoric. A
154
brief retelling of Plessy’s story from a fourth persona perspective proves this
point.
The Court ruled that when Plessy boarded the train with his first-class
ticket he represented himself as having properties that he did not own. In other
words, Plessy duped the Louisiana Railway ticket agent and its white
passengers. These audiences were duped as Plessy stole white identity through
synecdoche-appropriation. When Plessy introduced himself to the train
conductor as colored his initial persona as white, the persona that granted him
access to the first-class coach, was transformed and regarded as fraudulent.
Plessy observed the train’s conductor and white passengers viewing and
determining him in terms of a white identity he claimed not to have. By
disclosing the secret of his mixed identity he violated the secrecy inherent in
sustaining traditional accounts of racial passing. Plessy’s confession
transformed dupes into in-group clairvoyants, showing “that more than self-
esteem or community pride is at stake; that identity—who is who and go gets
to decide—is directly linked to material outcomes” and to the audiences’
symbolic (re)interpretations of those material outcomes as the gain or loss of
property.
52

In-group clairvoyants such as the Comité suggested that Plessy was
white simply because he embodied whiteness and that the embodiment was the
“reflection of a basic reality.”
53
Moreover, they interpreted the act as insurgent
by making use of the one-drop rule’s metonymic logic and irony of passing as
155
defined by Ellen and William Craft’s experience. In-group clairvoyants were
asked to see that Plessy’s pass was “designed to prove that the law requiring
segregation was illegal because segregation itself was an impossible social
project” proven impossible by Plessy’s existence.
54
Plessy’s insurgency
brought internal and external substances and motives into view, contrasting
what he and the Comité felt he was doing with the conductor’s and Court’s
positions. This view is an aspect of the fourth persona Burke referred to as
“perspective by incongruity,” a lens through which the insurgent passer
ultimately bears witness to the symbolic of race.
From a fourth persona perspective (by incongruity), Plessy’s passing
and bypassing the color line allowed identification to replace persuasion. In
other words, to identify as white and utilize its privileges is to persuade
audiences that one is white. As audiences are persuaded they allow the passer
to create a material reality in line with white identity. Passing becomes “a
powerful and particular…occupation” in Plessy’s case because it emphasizes
the work of juridical rhetoric in the interests of identification and
representation.
55
The Court’s rhetoric was forced to answer important
questions posed by Plessy’s pass. Can racial identity be stolen from a party
who still has it? Whose whiteness was taken when Plessy boarded the first-
class coach? Whose non-whiteness? The fourth persona is an interesting
perspective from which to consider the Court’s answers to these questions.
Essentially, the answers rest on Plessy’s own determination of his racial
156
identity as white or colored. His answer, colored, shows the identifications and
definitions of white and colored shared by the passer and dupe/second persona
audience, through a symbolic of race, and toward the competing modes of
interpretation among first, second, third, and fourth personae/audiences. It is
also a watershed moment revealing several threats of Plessy’s mixed race
identity.
One threat is Dowling’s (the dupe’s/second persona’s) discovery of
Plessy’s transformed persona. Another more insidious threat would have been
Plessy being corrected by his dupe because of some falsity in the persona he
projected. Plessy averted these threats by answering “colored” rather than
mixed, Creole, or white and black. Much like the example of Walter White
presented in Chapter One, Plessy willingly took on his subordinate position in
the white-colored racial hierarchy, recognized the appropriative capacity his
white skin allowed as privilege, and forced the Court to articulate the ground
upon which racial meanings stand. His passing relied on the tension of his
persona as presented in speech as colored/black versus appearance as white. It
also relied on his intention versus audience perception. These tensions are
functions of persuasiveness and probability, making passing a matter of
“generation and fulfillment of expectations through the use of symbols” such
as the purchase and use of a first-class train ticket using money, white skin
color, and appropriate attire.
56
The use of these symbols served as a means of
gaining and maintaining a social position in order to resist upholding that
157
position. In addition to making use of appropriate symbols of identification
Plessy’s pass was inherently symbolic because it enhanced uncertainty,
arguing against racial categorization through his own disembodiment. It is an
act in which Plessy became virtual. He was a colored man without a colored
body. Let us return to the watershed moment for further evidence to support
this claim: “as the train inched away, the conductor…collected tickets. He
paused when he got to Plessy—then, the question: ‘Are you a colored man?’”
57

This question is climactic because the answer explains how the insurgent
passer, having mastered the grammar and rhetoric of race, catches a glimpse of
the symbolic. The insurgent passer discovers the magic of a white skin as it
“mask(s) the absence of a basic (racial) reality” in which whiteness is universal
and the norm from which all colored others deviate.
58

A second threat is the exposure of the Court as primary force of the
racialized self and its commodification. Plessy’s pass posed this threat by
displaying the grammar and rhetoric of race. His ability to pass as white, dress
as a first-class passenger, purchase a first-class ticket, and board the first-class
coach are displays of a racial grammar that govern the use and arrangement of
racialized selves (e.g., white/first-class or colored/second-class/freight). The
discrepancy between his actions as an assumed white person and his self-
proclaimed identity as colored is a rhetorical exercise in which his multiple
personae identify, identify with, and divide his audiences. This discrepancy
also evidences the ways in which juridical rhetoric must contain mixed race
158
identity in the process of racial identification. For within the confines of the
pass Plessy was both white and colored. As white and colored Plessy
articulated a subjectivity for which the law allowed no evidence. No one could
stand before the Court as both white and colored. One could only stand as
either white or colored. Since Plessy’s identity as mixed race was not
authorized by the Court, and because his identity as white was nullified, he was
unable to cash in on the privileges of authentic membership.
A third threat follows logically from the second, the threat perceived by
the Court of mixed race identity as black and white. In his brief before the
Court Tourgée argued that embodiment of whiteness by mixed race persons
justified enactment of its privileges. In the figure of Plessy, he stated, “we have
the case of a man who believed he had a right to the privilege and advantage of
being esteemed a white man.”
59
Ackerman explains how Plessy’s belief could
have been argued according to the Fifth Amendments’ Takings Clause.
Because Mr. Plessy ‘passed’ for white, he was able to ‘trespass’
on the privileged space reserved for whites… Arguably, Mr.
Plessy’s property interest in his white appearance was ‘taken’
from him by the state when it began to identify ‘whiteness’ by
blood rather than appearance. American property law defines a
‘taking’ as a government action ‘directly interfering with or
substantially disturbing the owner’s use and enjoyment of [his]
property.’ Mr. Plessy, therefore, might have argued that his
eviction from the train reflected an unlawful taking because it
directly interfered with and substantially disturbed his use and
enjoyment of the rights and benefits that accompanied his
visible whiteness.
60

This alternate interpretation provides a provocative spin on the relation
between passing and identity theft by suggesting that the Court stole Plessy’s
159
identity. However, Plessy’s case was not argued in this manner because its
objective was to destabilize racial categories of either black or white. Plessy’s
self-outing overcame the risk of potentially reifying racial categories because it
exposed the fissures in systems of identification based on appearance as taken-
for-granted reality. For that reason the Court controlled Plessy’s passing by
comparing it falsely to identity theft, thereby protecting the symbolic norms
used to invent and maintain racial division as natural and necessary.
Plessy’s mixed race identity had to be contained because it afforded
him the ability to trespass racial boundaries and gain familiarity with the
passwords of the dominant racial discourse. Understanding these passwords is
a critical element for insurgency because “only those voices from without are
effective which can speak in the language of a voice within.”
61
Plessy used
these passwords to break the code of race, demonstrating that the standards of
racial classification were not standards at all. They were instead the results of
the Court’s metonymic rhetorical logic, a form of mind control that forces
audiences to takes the passer’s (apparent) whole for the part. Tourgée put this
into words when he explained that
they are called ‘races’ it is true, but the only racial distinctions
recognized by the act are ‘white’ and ‘colored.’ The statute does
not use the ordinary scientific terms Caucasian, Mongolian,
Indian Negro &c…[T]hey reduce the whole human family into
two grand divisions white [are given] the term ‘races,’ the white
‘race,’ and the ‘colored’ race.
62

Tourgée took great pains to show how Plessy, by taking part of his identity for
the whole as either white or colored, became privy to multiple scenes and sides
160
of the color line and therefore to a fourth persona perspective. On one side of
the color line his white skin could protect him from racial violence and
discrimination. On the other side of the color line he was subject to
discrimination from duped white and colored audiences. Plessy could see the
symbolic because he occupied multiple personae and perspectives as a rhetor
of mixed and indeterminate race.
63
Consequently, part of his self-outing
served to further identify himself with colored audiences in the interests of
ethics rather than to create further distance between the racial poles of white
and black. His “ethos, like postmodern subjectivity, shifts and changes over
time…and around competing spaces,” taking the shape of any category poised
to contain it.
64
Since Plessy understood the effects of his persona on various
audiences, he utilized it as a way to call for ethical action that would make
segregation unconstitutional.
Understanding his transformed persona as disembodied (either as a
colored man in white skin or as a white man without property interest in
whiteness) enabled Plessy to challenge the binary determinist thinking that
condemned people to opposite sides of the color line. It also allowed him a
unique perspective of incongruity. He was able to view things as what they are
not yet appear to be. This foreshadows the ekphrastic quality of contemporary
mixed race performer and philosopher Adrian Piper’s “My Calling (Card) #1,”
which expresses a similar sensibility in a non-verbal and less formal context.
161
The calling card Piper distributes in social situations delivers the following
message:
Dear Friend,
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed
at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to
alert white people to my racial identity in advance.
Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as
pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my
policy is to assume that white people do not make these
remarks, even when they believe there are no black people
present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am
sure you regret the discomfort your reaction is causing me.
65

Like Piper’s “calling card,” Plessy’s pass is insurgent because it validates race
as symbolic construction with a co-evolving material component rather than as
a natural and biological fait accompli. In other words, it shows that race is
highly meaningful even though it is not necessarily real. Similar to the ways in
which Wittig explains that women are oppressed by gendered classification,
the meaning of race manifested in the racial category of colored is:
the category that sticks…for only they cannot be conceived of
outside it. Only they are [colored], the [colored], and [colored]
they have been made in their minds, bodies, acts, gestures; even
their murders and beatings…Indeed, the category of [colored]
tightly holds them.
66

As colored man in white skin Plessy poses a syntax error in so far as either the
white or colored racial categories are concerned. His insurgency, fueled by his
fourth persona perspective by incongruity, allows only for momentary release
and escape through passing. In that moment Plessy speaks with the grammar
162
and rhetoric of race and tells a story of the symbolic, how the Court ultimately
ruled that identification of race passes for the substance of race itself.
A fourth persona perspective allows the critic to take on the roles of
protagonist and witness in this act of passing as a form of metacritique.
Metacritique reveals that there existed no so-called proper model according to
which Plessy could style himself, nobody who was allowed to openly identify
as colored but look white, and certainly nobody who could openly identify in
court as both. His racial performances of blackness or whiteness were
symbolic actions that seemed legitimate in the absence of verification.
Audiences saw how he became a disembodied colored man, a colored man
without the skin and body that made him colored. As such, he demonstrated
that society’s racialized expectations are neither biologically fixed nor
determined by symbolic ideals (because he appeared white) and characters
(that said blackness was always visible and a contaminant). Plessy questioned
the conventional relationship between symbolic labels and their material
justifications by substituting racial symbols for the grammar and rhetoric of
race.
In passing Plessy engaged in multiple forms of resistance. He resisted
the authority of the State to categorize, confine, and castigate its citizens on the
basis of race. He resisted the security of racial categories and imbalanced racial
relations. He resisted the preferences and privileges attached to whiteness and
he resisted the discommodities attached to coloredness. The reaction to his
163
passing set the stage for future acts of resistance, opportunities for insurgent
passers such as Walter White and Adrian Piper, instances of collective action
to combat the notion that racial difference constitutes racial identity, and began
the continuing debate of whether the value of one race can be justly appraised
over that of another.
The moral of Plessy’s story is that any pass is an act that defies the
relations between identification and substance as well as between race and
persona. The insurgent act depends on the reproduction and then eradication of
a traditional racial persona, what Burke refers to as identification. This
insurgency uses rhetoric to expose the symbolic. Plessy’s mixed race identity
was a unique racial form or “universe of discourse” that is both distinguished
from and possesses the same properties as white and colored.
67
Displaying
verisimilitude, Plessy projected personae as white and then as colored that
move beyond mere imitation or impersonation to challenge the underlying
principle of racial identification: acceptance of phenotype, genotype, and
behavior as shorthand for character. Plessy challenges his audience’s
acceptance by performing white and colored identities with a critical difference
available to him in the symbolic form of mixed race identity: whiteness without
a soul and blackness without a body. Plessy’s disembodied persona can be
considered an antecedent avatar, bound exclusively to culturally sanctioned
categories.
164
No longer able to see phenotype and persona as correlated or essential,
Plessy concludes his narrative of insurgent passing because it is no longer his
story to tell. In this story the only claims to racial certainty are those provided
by audience perspectives which have been formally contested. There is no
longer a formal ideal or referent to which Plessy would ascribe. There are only
symbolic interpretation and imagination which structure human existence and
impose racial coherence. Thus, it is only from the perspective of an insurgent
passer, one who sees the transfiguration of racial identification into racial
substance, that it is possible to visualize the symbolic of race (a.k.a., the
identity of race itself).
My remarks thus far have focused on Plessy’s insurgency and
perspective by incongruity marking the ways a fourth persona perspective sees
the slippages between racial identification and substance. Reasserting the
Court’s connection between Plessy’s passing and the concept of identity theft I
will now comment on the breaches, appropriations, and discoveries each
requires. In the section that follows I conclude by discussing the implications
of linking (bi)racial passing with the concept of identity theft and exploring
whether the position taken on identity theft today will be seen, a hundred years
from now, as a step forward or in reverse.
V
Approximately one hundred years after the Supreme Court decision in Plessy
v. Ferguson, the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of
165
America in Congress assembled passed an act entitled, The Identity Theft and
Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998.
68
Section Three of this act defines identity
theft, making all
transfers or uses, without lawful authority, [of] a means of
identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to
aid or abet, any unlawful activity…a violation of Federal
law,…constitut[ing] a felony under any applicable State or local
law.
69

This law was extended on 10 May 2005 when President George W. Bush
approved the REAL ID Act, a comprehensive measure to establish new
identification requirements across the United States. The legislation “mandates
federal identification standards and requires state DMVs, which have become
the targets of identity thieves, to collect sensitive personal information.”
70

These laws define identity as a construct used by individuals to refer to
themselves as persons and used by others to identify them as unique and
particular persons.
71

Legal discourse takes great pains to define identity broadly as an
intangible uniqueness as well as a set of behaviors and “political product of
racial formation carried out by the state.”
72
According to Webster’s New
Twentieth Century Dictionary, identity is:
The condition or fact of being some specific person…; the
condition of being the same as…someone assumed, described,
or claimed.
73

Regardless of where they fall on the substance versus performance spectrum,
denotative definitions of identity are considered judicially as a person’s
166
intrinsic nature and sense of individuality. As such, identity not only relates to
an individual’s conscious self-concept but also to the ability of others to
distinguish and recognize that person as a unique entity. As the Plessy v.
Ferguson case makes clear, to learn or establish a person’s identity involves
reference to some set of institutional or socially agreed upon identifying factors
that authenticate a person’s uniqueness in relation to others. In other words,
there needs to be some sort of tracking device that can locate and authenticate
information about people and this device can be linked to some a central
database that can find out if there is anything suspicious about the person. In
the Plessy case race functioned as that tracking device. Plessy’s pass was
considered a simple theft because it took whiteness without authorization.
Consequently, a person’s identity and his or her ability to prove it are critical
for the initiation of a host of communicative, commercial, political, civil, and
social transactions.
The Court’s decision in the Plessy case affirms that racial identity is
symbolic and that for the sake of political expedience it is materialized through
mediation and commodification. Identities are mediated because they do not
simply reflect a relationship between what they are and the perspectives
through which they are interpreted. They also express and change those
relationships. Identities are commodified because they can be created legally,
because they are imbued with use and exchange values, and because an
authorized and legitimized identity is necessary to complete social
167
transactions. Identity accounts for Plessy’s “organic representative force
capable of articulating multiple and conflictual social relations in microcosmic
form, as they are anchored to a cited period”
74
and generates “a certain degree
of epistemological certainty.”
75
This certainty only exists to the degree that we
acknowledge the epistemological aspects of identity and identification:
that what we know depends on how we know, and how we
know depends on who we are. And this in turn cannot be known
in advance of how we express who we are, or have expressed
who we are historically.
76

Knowledge about identity is therefore both enabling and constraining. It is a
means of communicating who we are and are not, what we do and do not have,
where we can and cannot go, and what we can and cannot do.
77

As in Plessy’s moment identity is recognized as private property and as
a locus of commerce. Each person is identified in terms of (“uniqueness” and
“particularity” or) property; that “characteristic or quality of an [individual]
that is true of” him or her and evaluated based on its uses and exchanges “in
relation to other entities that are likewise forming their identities in terms of
property.”
78
Suggesting the idea of the propertied self as white and male
Plessy’s passing challenges the Platonic conception of episteme that grounds
the Court’s framework of Plessy’s passing as identity theft. In this framework
identity is an established reputation or persona verifiable by official
documentation or testimony and by empirically observable images that
correspond with documentation or testimony.
79
The manners in which identity
can be deployed ethically often rest on the use of, and in some instances the
168
willful abnegation of, socioeconomic privileges in passing as a means of
stylized rhetorical argumentation.
Although it is clear that The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence
Act of 1998, its 2004 amendment and the Real ID Act of 2005 were designed to
address exigencies of consumer and national security, they are consistent with
the pattern of American jurisprudence which informed the decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson. This pattern simultaneously creates and identifies citizens, making
particular identities the measures by which opportunity, property ownership,
and power are accessed. REALID laws cement identity as an axiological matter
of who counts and of how much each individual is worth. Yet to stop there is
to miss the impact of (bi)racial passing in our present day context.
Legally, Plessy exercised a right to which he was not entitled because
he was not white. This begs the questions: Can racial identity be stolen? If so,
from whom? Can it be reclaimed, recouped, and reestablished? My reading of
(bi)racial passing in Plessy v. Ferguson as supported by the Court suggests that
the answer is yes. Plessy’s passing undergoes a four stage process consistent
with the stages of identity theft outlined by Saunders and Zucker: an
acquisition of white identity through a breach of privacy, the appropriation and
unauthorized use of said identity for socio-economic gain or privilege, the
transformation and discovery of appropriated identity, and finally the repair of
identity (recouping losses and reestablishing financial reputation and status
quo).
80
Plessy’s pass began as a clever protest against the condition of
169
segregation. It was interpreted by the Court as a theft of white racial identity
as privileged and private property and as a circumvention of law protected by
the Constitution. As such it contributed to the suffusion of de jure nation-wide
segregation. However, this observation neither diffuses the power of Plessy’s
intent nor siphons the credibility of his rhetorical character, perspective, and
argument.
As an anterior version of identity theft Plessy’s passing is considered a
legal violation and a matter of credibility evaluated on social performance and
the ability to evade or succumb to detection. In either context identity is
property distributed on the basis of authority in the interests of meeting the
demands of particular rhetorical situations. Based on Harris’s work I have
argued that both Plessy’s passing and identity theft are linked to property, the
information which identifies a person and is used by that a person to identify
himself or herself to an audience. In communicating this information, a person
intends that the audience identifies him or her as having the property and
treating him or her accordingly. Theft occurs when a person who possesses but
does not own the property uses it to acquire goods, services, or special
treatment.
While it is clear that Plessy’s insurgency was performed in the interests
of social justice while identity theft is not, this analysis suggests certain
revelatory aspects of Plessy’s act when compared to identity theft. For
instance, Plessy’s pass implies that mixed race identity, like a consumer's
170
identity, can be considered a “hot product.” This is because both are:
“concealable” in the absence of the appropriate authorizing information,
“removable, available, valuable, enjoyable and disposable.”
81
The appeal and
allure of each are effects of these characteristics. This implies that the role of
episteme is authoritative and that the role of passing is to debunk that authority,
using aletheia and doxa to undo institutional justifications that tie personae to
racial identity and social (im)mobility. Per the Court’s majority decision it
also implies that privileged individuals and groups will go to great lengths to
protect their privacy and property. As a consequence, the complex
interrelationship between opportunities afforded in passing, identity theft, and
in their deterrence requires further investigation.
Plessy’s passing also bridges the gaps among audiences who look at
and listen to (and communicate electronically with) a passer: the passer, the
“dupe,” “in-group clairvoyant,” and the fourth persona.
82
Multiple audience
interpretations mean that “impersonation can only be seen if one acknowledges
that one is recognizing something someone else is not…the pass becomes
available to the informed spectator as a consequence” of multiple and
contradictory rhetorics of identification.
83
Similarly, an identity theft is usually
discovered in conjunction with the receipt of information indicating the
amount of damage perpetrated by the thief, the party who possessed
information about the victim that the victim did not wish him or her to obtain.
The greater the damage and loss of privacy the sooner the theft is recognized.
171
As in passing, violation of privacy and identity appropriation are functions of
the “in-group clairvoyant” or third or fourth persona. Restitution cannot be
made until evaluation by the fourth persona occurs.
A fourth persona perspective is abetted by the social mobility and
cultural capital afforded by mixed race identity. This continues to be the case
“both in the mainstream and at the high end of the marketplace, [where] what
is perceived as good, desirable, successful is often a face whose heritage is
hard to pin down.”
84
Likewise, identity thieves are abetted by the social
mobility and anonymity of the internet making it difficult to pinpoint the
jurisdiction and location of their crimes. This kind of mobility affords a
privileged perspective, allowing passers and identity thieves to see black and
white, identification and division, multiple personae, as they pass and bypass
one another to represent selves. While those whose races are determinate
remain on a racial continuum, insurgent (bi)racial passers escape imposed
physical constraints so that they can reposition themselves and others in
relation. They are, in effect, “‘floating signifier[s],’ whose enigma lies less in
[themselves] than in the discursive uses…to mark social processes where
differentiation and condensation seem to happen almost synchronically.”
85

Their constructed self-images and ethea have the capacity to modify prior
racial representations and confer credibility and authority upon new concepts
for identification.
172
There exist broad implications for this discussion of passing in terms of
online identity and identity theft particularly in a post 9/11 environment. First,
an interest in identity modification would most likely result in a desire for
heightened security and laws reforming national intelligence and
identification.
86
This scenario suggests that the threats of insurgent (bi)racial
passing are proportionate with those of identity theft, making passing an issue
of public policy and public value. This is because it challenges an episteme-
based model of identification that requires a person to be exactly and
exclusively what (s)he seems or else legally and financially worthless.
Second, Plessy’s case implies social and rhetorical choices on the part
of the passer. One choice is to mask a non-privileged identity to reflect a
privileged identity as a means of social protest. A subsequent choice is to
unmask a privileged identity and become a witness to the symbolic of race.
Another choice is to self-determine and represent identity, a choice that allows
an individual to allocate his or her own capabilities for socio-political
affiliation and solidarity. Yet another choice is the willingness to be whoever
an audience desires and proclaims one to be. A stock analysis of these choices
allows insurgent passers to acquire the grammar necessary to define and
describe a concept of identity based on racial ambiguity. This grammar
becomes rhetoric when it identifies with and challenges the cultural logic that
invents white and colored as distinct terms grounding racial norms and
appearances in the material realm. The rhetoric becomes symbolic when it can
173
emphasize the locations in which identification and division as well as white
and colored cohabitate, “so that you cannot know for certain just where one
ends and the other begins.”
87
When this is the case (bi)racial passers remain as
difficult to catch as identity thieves, entombed beneath countless images and
obscured by distortion and misdirection.
While the appeal of Plessy’s story resides in the multiple readings of
race it offers, the fourth persona perspective reminds the critic that the double-
edged sword of passing persists. Regardless of how just or sacred the cause the
passer is forced to rely on the same grammatical structures and rhetorics of
identification that interpret the self as private property and its symbolic
representations as visible and true. Furthermore, the insurgent passer’s
subversion can never alone undo the grammar and rhetoric of race, for without
them passing would be implausible. Hence, the foremost challenge to
insurgent (bi)racial passing is the a-priori existence of a racial episteme and
hierarchy. As an insurgent passer Plessy invaded precisely that which the
Supreme Court rallied to defend, the partition between the white-only space for
first-class citizen and the cramped colored quarters for those second-class
citizens pushed to the edge. However, it is in this hierarchy, in which race is
always grounded in and filled with a “will to power,” that the insurgent passer
abandons the material conditions and social positions circumscribing others
whose bodies are more firmly sutured to the Court’s interpretation of
174
propertied self.
88
In so doing he bequeaths a valuable legacy of endurance and
civil disobedience that continues to cast a shadow and a light.
In the next chapter I will graft the logic of Plessy v. Ferguson onto
Frances E. W. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy/Shadows Uplifted. I will explore the
utility of (bi)racial passing as a narrative device that plays on the multiple
threats of passing contained by the Plessy ruling and their relationships with
race and gender. Situating passing at the rhetorical intersection of synecdoche-
eloquence I will discuss the ways in which conceptions of gender are strongly
racialized in the text, illustrating that even the gray spaces between racial and
rhetorical worlds often remain the property of white men.
175

CHAPTER THREE REFERENCES
1
Anurima Banerji. “Legal Invention of an Artefact: Birth of Identity in Asian
America,” Economic and Political Weekly 37 (2002): 4152.
2
Louisiana, Preamble of Act No. 111 (1890) in Otto H. Olsen. The Thin
Disguise: Plessy v. Ferguson, A Documentary Presentation (New York:
Humanities Press, 1967): 54.
3
Louisiana, Separate Car Act, Section 2, Act 111 (1890) in Keith Weldon
Medley. We as Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna: Pelican Publishing
Company, 2003): 89.
4
Keith Weldon Medley. We as Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna: Pelican
Publishing Company, 2003): 140.
5
Crusader. June 1892. As cited in Keith Weldon Medley. We as Freedmen:
Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003): 146.
6
Wayne Anderson. Plessy v. Ferguson: Legalizing Segregation (New York:
The Rosen Publishing Group, 2004): 48.

7
Kenneth C. Davis. Don’t Know Much About History (New York: Harper
Collins, 2003): 280.

8
Mark Golub. “Plessy as Passing: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced
Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson,” Law & Society Review 39.3 (2005): 571.

176

9
In this regard I am indebted to existing research on and criticism of the case.
Derrick A. Bell Jr. Race, Racism and American Law (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1980); Lerone Bennett, Jr. Before The Mayflower: A History of
the Negro in America 1619-1964 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962); Barton J.
Bernstein. “Case Law in Plessy v. Ferguson,” The Journal of Negro History
47.3 (1962): 192-198; David W. Bishop. “Plessy v. Ferguson: A
Reinterpretation,” The Journal of Negro History 62.2 (1977): 125-133. Mark
Elliott. “Race Color Blindness and the Democratic Public: Albion W.
Tourgée’s Radical Principles in Plessy v. Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern
History 67.2 (2000): 287-330; Theodore L. Gross. Albion W. Tourgée (New
York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1963); Keith Weldon Medley. We as
Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguso. (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003);
Loren Miller. The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United
States and the Negro (New York: Random House, 1966); Paul Oberst. “The
Strange Career of Plessy v. Ferguson,”15. Ariz. L. Rev. 389 (1973): 433-441;
Otto H. Olsen. The Thin Disguise: Plessy v. Ferguson, A Documentary
Presentation (New York: Humanities Press, 1967); Otto H. Olsen. The
Carpetbagger’s Crusade: A Life of Albion Winegar Tourgée; Richard Kluger.
Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black
America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); Amy
Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.” (Ph.D.
Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993); Eric Sundquist. “Mark Twain and
Homer Plessy,” Representations 21 (1998): 102-128; Brook Thomas. “Plessy
v. Ferguson and the Literary Imagination,” Cardozo Studies in Law and
Literature 91 (1997): 45-65; C. Vann Woodward. The Strange Career of Jim
Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); C. Vann Woodward.
American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964).
10
Pamela L. Caughie. Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility.
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999): 43-44.
11
Charles A. Lofgren. The Plessy Case (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987): 3.

12
Keith Weldon Medley. We as Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson. (Gretna:
Pelican Publishing Company, 2003): 158-159.
13
C. Vann Woodward. American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the
North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964): 221;
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
177

14
Keith Weldon Medley. We as Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna:
Pelican Publishing Company, 2003): 16.
15
Harvey Fireside. Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme
Court Decision that Legalized Racism (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers,
2004): 1.

16
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
17
I use the term “colored” rather than “black” or “African American” in this
chapter because it is the historical term used in all the documents and research
pertaining to the case as well as the term commonly used at the time of the
pass and at the trials. The significance of “colored” is that it is meant as a
plural or inclusive term for all those whose racial identities were anything
other than white. The term, like “Negro,” “black” and later “African
American,” was deployed in binary opposition to the exclusive category of
“white-only.”
18
Albion W. Tourgée. As cited in Mark Elliott. “Race Color Blindness, and the
Democratic Public: Albion W. Tourgée’s Radical Principles in Plessy v.
Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern History 67.2 (2000): 316.
19
Aristotle. “Rhetorica,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Modern Library, 2001): 1318.
20
Please see Albion W. Tourgée’s “Brief of Homer Plessy.” in 13 Landmark
Briefs And Arguments Of The Supreme Court Of The United States:
Constitutional Law eds. Philip B. Kurland & Gerhard Casper. (Washington
DC: University Publications of America, 1975): 27, 55-56.
21
Ibid.

22
For a thorough discussion of the properties of whiteness please consult the
following texts: Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance
into the Visible.” (PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993); Cheryl I.
Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard L. Rev. 106.8 (1993): 1706-1791.
23
As cited in Richard Kluger. Simple Justice (New York: Knopf Inc., 1975):
74.
24
Judge Greenfield as cited in Jane Gaines. “Dead Ringer: Jacqueline Onassis
and the Look-Alike,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.2 (1989): 477.
178

25
Robert Jennings. Harris. The Quest for Equality: The Constitution, Congress
and the Supreme Court (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1960): 101.
26
Justice Harlan. “Dissent,” as cited in Keith Weldon Medley. We as
Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson. (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003):
204-5. Harlan’s dissent is one of the first articulations of colorblind
constitutionalism. Today’s post-race colorblind moment is characterized by the
idea that racial difference and inequality have been transformed into a
universal meritocracy that no longer requires intervention by race based
programs like affirmative action
27
Patricia Williams. The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Massachusetts: Harvard
U Press, 1991): 43.
28
I believe that Williams is right based on the November 2008 election results
regarding California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. The ban
promotes an equal but separate marriage policy for same-sex couples.
Regardless, the phrase “disempowering dynamics” is borrowed from critical
race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw as introduced in her article, “Demarginalizing
the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Anti-Racist Politics.” in
Feminist Legal Theory ed., D. K. Weisberg (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1989): 57-81. In this article Crenshaw specifically addresses legal
responses to claims that involve race and gender discrimination. Her “Theory
of Intersectionality” pursues the analogy of a traffic intersection and argues
that race, ethnicity, gender, and class are avenues of power that comprise
social, economic, and political roadmaps. These avenues are the routes through
which “disempowering dynamics” travel. These avenues are at times
considered individually although they generally combine and relate, hence the
intersection. She explains that given the strong manifestations of patriarchy in
American society, black women’s experiences of racism are confounded by
gender-based oppression. I will explore this concept further in Chapter Four.
29
As cited in Keith Weldon Medley. We as Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson
(Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003): 206.
30
Anurima Banerji. “Legal Invention of an Artefact: Birth of Identity in Asian
America,” Economic and Political Weekly 37 (2002): 4154.

31
Cheryl I. Harris. “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106.8
(1993): 1706-1791.

32
Ibid., 1747.

179

33
Justice Henry Billings Brown (majority decision in brief). As cited by Mark
Elliott. “Race Color Blindness, and the Democratic Public: Albion W.
Tourgée’s Radical Principles in Plessy v. Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern
History 67.2 (2000): 325. On page 227 of American Counterpoint: Slavery and
Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown & Company,
1964), C. Vann Woodward writes the following description of the decision:
“Justice Brown was…in accord with the prevailing climate of opinion and the
trend of the times….His views were in accord with a host of state judicial
precedents, which he cited at length, as well as with challenged practice in
many parts of the country, North and South. Furthermore, there were no
federal judicial precedents to the contrary.” According to Otto H. Olsen on
page 331 of Carpetbagger’s Crusade (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965),
the decision “attracted little national attention, except from the Negro press,
which objected briefly, and…inspired no apparent reaction in the Tourgée
family.”
34
Mark Golub. “Plessy as Passing: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced
Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson,” Law & Society Review 39.3 (2005): 575.

35
Ibid., 578

36
Jacqueline Ruth Hawkins. “Defined By Possession: Property, Identity, and
Law in American Literature.” (Master’s Thesis, Florida State University,
2006): 32.

37
Franz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks trans. Charles Lam Markman (New
York: Grove Press, 1967): 211.
38
Mark Elliott. “Race Color Blindness, and the Democratic Public: Albion W.
Tourgée’s Radical Principles in Plessy v. Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern
History 67.2 (2000): 322.
39
As cited in Otto H. Olsen. Thin Disguise. , Plessy v. Ferguson: A
Documentary Presentation (New York: Humanities Press, 1967): 83.
According to Brook Thomas. “Plessy v. Ferguson and the Literary
Imagination,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 91 (1997): 45-65,
Tourgée invented this argument in his novel about a mixed race individual who
could pass as white entitled Pactolus Prime (New York: Cassel Publishing
Company, 1890).
40
Albion W. Tourgée cited in Mark Elliott. “Race Color Blindness, and the
Democratic Public: Albion W. Tourgée’s Radical Principles in Plessy v.
Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern History 67.2 (2000): 287-330.
180

41
For this and additional information on the history of U. S. segregation please
see: C. Vann Woodward. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1955). This Jim Crow environment is the scene for the acts
passing explored in the remaining chapters of this dissertation.
42
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993): 216.
43
For a discussion of the State’s argument please see: Brook Thomas. Plessy v.
Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997).
44
United States Constitution Online. http://www.usconstitution.net. (accessed
02 October 2007) Amendment 13 of the U.S. Constitution “abolished slavery
and was ratified on 6 December 1865.

45
Kathleen Pfeiffer. Race Passing and American Individualism (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Susana Blumenthal. “The Default
Legal Person.” UCLA Law Review 54.1 (2007): 1-115.
46
Cheryl I. Harris. “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106.8
(1993): 1706-1791.
47
Patricia Williams. The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Massachusetts: Harvard
U Press, 1991): 124. To show herself as competent to testify in matters of law,
Williams negotiates the founding tropes, figures, and metaphors of legal
discourse. These founding literary acts are commonly known as legal fictions.
Such fictions: 1) institute rules of evidence, 2) authorize (and frustrate) the
narration of claims in legal discourse, and 3) establish an implicit racial order.
Williams shows how dominant racial fictions determine what claims of racial
discrimination are possible or impossible to articulate—a task that requires her
to write within and against the narratives of legal discourse simultaneously.
48
Louisiana, Separate Car Act, Section 2, Act 111 (1890). As cited in Keith
Weldon Medley. We as Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna: Pelican
Publishing Company, 2003): 89.
49
Of course, this began when Europeans and Africans met and continued
during the slavery era. For further discussion of this as it pertains to mixed race
identity and perspective please see: Carina Ray. “The Origins of Mixed Race
Populations,” New African (2005): 56-57.
50
Derrick A. Bell Jr. Race, Racism and American Law (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1980): 207.
181

51
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 36.
52
Catherine R. Squires and Daniel C. Brouwer. “In/Discernible Bodies: The
Politics of Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 19 (2002): 296.
53
Ibid.
54
Amy Robinson. Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance
into the Visible.” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993): 199.
55
Ibid., 127.
56
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 289.
57
Keith Weldon Medley. We as Freedmen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna:
Pelican Publishing Company, 2003): 142.
58
Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulations trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995): 11.
59
Albion W. Tourgée’s “Brief for Plaintiff in Error,” as cited in Mark Elliott.
“Race Color Blindness, and the Democratic Public: Albion W. Tourgée’s
Radical Principles in Plessy v. Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern History
67.2 (2000): 322.
60
Sally Ackerman. “The White Supremacist Status Quo: How the American
Legal System Perpetuates Racism as Seen Through the Lens of Property Law,”
Hamline Journal of Public Law & Policy 21 (1999): 150.

61
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 39.
62
Albion W. Tourgée, as cited in Mark Elliott. “Race Color Blindness, and the
Democratic Public: Albion W. Tourgée’s Radical Principles in Plessy v.
Ferguson,” The Journal of Southern History 67.2 (2000): 322.

182

63
On page 50 of Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (New York: Harper and
Row, 1986), Gerard A. Hauser identifies four “propositions concerning ethos
“rhetoric and the self” which map on to Jean Baudrillard’s “successive phases
of the image” as delineated in Simulacra and Simulations trans. Sheila Glaser.
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995): 11-12. These are helpful in
understanding the “perspective by incongruity” afforded the (bi)racial
insurgent passer because of his or her mixed race identity.
Rhetoric can reflect a self Image is the reflection of a
basic reality (good appearance)
Rhetoric can evoke a self Image masks and perverts
a basic reality (evil appearance)
Rhetoric can maintain a self Image masks the absence of a
basic reality (sorcery)
Rhetoric can destroy a self Image bears no relation to
any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum (simulation)
From the insurgent passer’s perspective, race begins as a reflection of reality
(people are who they appear to be, passers appear white, so they are white).
Insurgent passers out themselves and “pervert a basic reality” because they
evoke and associate blackness with a body in which it should not exist.
Through rhetorical, political and physical acts, passers maintain this new
contradictory concept of self and begin to see how racial classification “masks
the absence of a basic reality.” The insurgent passer’s self lacks that which
could make him either white or black according to racist societal norms: a
white soul-mind and a black body. Finally, it is because the insurgent passer
sees that he has no self at all according to societal models, that he gains the
perspective from which to see the representation of race (i.e., phenotype) take
the place of race-racial character. In these four steps, insurgent passers can
generate reconsideration of racial issues in their own minds and the minds of
their audiences. They can access a unique perspective which allows them to
see how “simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a
simulacrum” (Baudrillard 11). Please see Marcia Dawkins. Between Lights and
Shadows: Toward a Socio-Rhetorical Theory of Passing. Unpublished. 2006,
for a more detailed explication of this concept.
64
Ruth Amossy. “Ethos at the Crossroads of Disciplines: Rhetoric, Pragmatics,
Sociology,” Poetics Today 22.1 (2001): 6.
65
Adrian Piper. “My Calling Card (#1),”
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz4-23-
08_detail.asp?picnum=32
(accessed 19 August 2008)

66
Monique Wittig. “The Category of Sex,” Feminist Issues (1982): 68.
183

67
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 21.
68
Council Better Business Bureaus. “New Research Shows Identity Fraud
Growth Is Contained and Consumers Have More Control Than They Think,”
Platypus Productions, Inc.
http://www.platypusvideo.com/articlenews/article.php?articleID=25 (accessed
3 November 2008). The Federal Trade Commission estimates that as many as
9 million people in the United States alone are victimized by this criminal act
annually, www.ftc.org. The Better Business Bureau estimates that the total
one-year cost of identity fraud in the United States in 2006 was $56.6 billion.
69
Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act. October 30, 1998. H.R.
4151. The legislation was amended in 2004 with The Identity Theft Penalty
Enhancement Act. http://www.ftc.gov/os/statutes/itada/itadact.htm#003
(accessed 3 November 2008). For additional information on identity theft and
its legislation please see: Mark Poster. “The Secret Self,” Cultural Studies
21.2 (2007): 118-140; Katherine Slosarik. “Identity Theft: An Overview of the
Problem,” Criminal Justice Studies 15.4 (2002): 329-343; Kurt M. Saunders
and Bruce Zucker. “Counteracting Identity Fraud in the Information Age: The
Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act,” Cornell Journal of Law and
Public Policy 8 (1999): 661 – 675.
70
Epic.org. “National ID at the Crossroads: The Future of Privacy in
America,” Epic.org. http://www.epic.org/events/id/resources/ (accessed 3
November 2008).
71
Kurt M. Saunders and Bruce Zucker. “Counteracting Identity Fraud in the
Information Age: The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act,” Cornell
Journal of Law and Public Policy 8 (1999): 661 – 675.
72
Anurima Banerji. “Legal Invention of an Artefact: Birth of Identity in Asian
America.” Economic and Political Weekly 37 (2002): 4153.

73
Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary 2
nd
edition. (1983): 902.

74
Anurima Banerji. “Legal Invention of an Artefact: Birth of Identity in Asian
America,” Economic and Political Weekly 37 (2002): 4155.

75
Linda Schlossberg. “Introduction,” in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in
Sexuality, Race and Religion eds. Maria Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg.
(New York: New York University Press, 2001): 1.
184

76
Paul Thomas. “Property's Properties: From Hegel to Locke,”
Representations 84 (2003): 35.
77
Néstor García Canclini. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and
Multicultural Conflicts trans. and ed. George Yúdice. (Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001); Lisa Nakamura. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and
Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002).
78
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 24.
79
For a discussion of “propertied self” please see: George Freidrich Hegel.
Philosophy of Right trans. T.M. Knox. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975); Adrian Piper. “Two Conceptions of the Self,” Philosophical Studies 48,
2 (1985): 173-197; Adrian Piper. “Property and the Limits of Self,” Political
Theory 8, 1 (1980): 39-64; Paul Thomas. “Property’s Properties,”
Representations (2003): 30-43.

80
Kurt M. Saunders and Bruce Zucker. “Counteracting Identity Fraud in the
Information Age: The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act,” Cornell
Journal of Law and Public Policy 8 (1999): 661 – 675.
81
Ronald V. Clarke. “Hot Products: Understanding, Anticipating and
Reducing Demand for Stolen Goods,” Policy Research Series Paper 112
(London: Policing & Reducing Crime Unit Home Office Research,
Development and Statistics Directorate, 1999): 1.
82
As aforementioned, these are Amy Robinson’s terms.
83
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993): 130.
84
Ruth La Ferla. “Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous,” New York Times
20 December 2003, Style Section.
85
Homi Bhabha. “Culture’s in Between,” in Multicultural States: Rethinking
Difference and Identity ed. David Bennet. (London: Routledge, 1998): 31.

185

86
Epic.org. “National ID at the Crossroads: The Future of Privacy in
America,” Epic.org. http://www.epic.org/events/id/resources/ (accessed 7
November 2008). These would require more data encryption, additional
credibility testing and new means of representing identity. One need only
attend to the REAL ID debate to follow this epistemological trajectory.
According to some accounts starting in 2008 “if you live or work in the United
States, you’ll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a
bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly
every government service.” In this scenario each individual with appropriate
documentation would undergo an issue process to secure a photo identity
document linked to an official government database. This database would be
updated with additional information and thereby subject to inaccuracy. Those
legally authorized to verify an individual’s identity would have access to this
database. Those who are not officially authorized to verify identity could do so
by circumventing the system, thereby creating unofficial databases which can
be accessed by potential identity thieves.
87
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 25.
88
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil trans. Walter Kaufmann. (New
York: Vintage Books, 1966). Nietzsche’s will to power is taken here to refer to
our most fundamental motive for action, even more fundamental than the act of
self-preservation. According to Nietzsche, the will to power is the basic means
through which living things “interpret” or interact with the world and, in this
sense, the world itself is "will to power, and nothing else besides." He writes:
“[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an
incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become
predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living
and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the
essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the
will to power, which is after all the will to life.” Since the will to power is
fundamental any other drives can be reduced to it.
186
CHAPTER FOUR
“SHE WAS ABOVE ALL SINCERE:”
(BI)RACIAL PASSING AND RHETORICAL ELOQUENCE

I

Plessy v. Ferguson situated passing within a social network of dominant power
relationships that are double-sided; prevailing yet contestable. The
appropriations and ironies of Plessy’s story point to the evolution of a counter
narrative that can explore passing’s range of (bi)racial possibilities more fully.
Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted provides this counter
narrative, neatly summarized when one of her characters comments that “it
would be ludicrous, if it were not vexatious, to be too white to be black, and
too black to be white.”
1
With sharp and critical prose like this Harper expands
the social imaginary by deploying traditional techniques of eloquence to speak
to the predicaments of passing as they reshape norms, practices, and
expectations of racial identification in the slavery and segregation eras. Her
eloquence speaks to these as matters of human concern eloquently, engaging
audiences who themselves were structured into legally stacked social groups.
In this chapter I will argue that Harper reshaped the social imaginary to
enhance the legal through an eloquence of fiction that articulates a view of the
times from a powerful but heretofore unrepresented subjectivity of the mixed
race passer as one who passes unintentionally as white and then intentionally
as black.
187
I begin in the next section by introducing some biographical details and
discussing Harper’s public literary persona at the time the novel was written. I
continue by setting the context of Iola Leroy and its critical reception in
Section III. In Section IV I utilize textual analysis to uncover Harper’s version
of the mixed race social imaginary through a depiction of her characters’
passing. I conclude in Section V by describing how Harper uses eloquence to
make passing a tool for observing and measuring at least two sets of life
outcomes: the outcome(s) if the individual were to pass as white and the
outcome(s) if the individual were to pass as black. I will show how this
comparative frame works ideologically to enhance the fourth persona with an
ability to arrive at a new, and more inclusive, consensus about mixed race
identifications that ask audiences to become less racist.
II
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825 – 1911) was a writer, lecturer, and
political activist who promoted abolition, civil rights, women’s rights, and
temperance. She helped found or held high office in several national
progressive organizations including the Unitarian Church, the Universal Peace
Union, the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women’s
Christian Temperance Union, and the National Association of Colored
Women. She is best remembered for being the first person of color to publish a
short story. Her poetry and prose preached moral uplift and counseled the
disadvantaged on how to extricate themselves from the demoralization of the
188
color line. She published her first volume of poetry in Baltimore at the age of
20, Forest Leaves or Autumn Leaves, but no copies are now known to exist.
Harper wrote a great deal and, because of her many investigative reports, was
called the mother of African-American journalism. At the same time she also
wrote for periodicals with a predominantly white circulation. Appealing to
both black and white audience proved to be a challenge to her public literary
persona.
The poems in Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life (1872) present the
story of Reconstruction as told by a wise and engaging elderly former slave,
Aunt Chloe. Harper’s serialized novel, Sowing and Reaping, in the Christian
Recorder (1876-77) expanded on the theme she introduced in her 1859 story of
The Two Offers. In Trial and Triumph (1889), the most autobiographical of her
novels, Harper presented her program for progress through personal
development, altruism, non-discrimination, and racial pride. In Iola Leroy
(1892) her final and most famous novel (which, until recently, was also her
only-remembered novel), she envisioned a Christ-like role for mixed race
individuals as African-Americans, who, by transcending their suffering, had
the opportunity to transform society. Because of her import many literary,
feminist, historical, and theological scholars have resurrected Harper’s legacy
in recent decades.
2
In 1992 African American Unitarian Universalists honored
her and commemorated the one-hundredth anniversary of Iola Leroy by
installing a new headstone. Harper’s call for full human development
189
regardless of racial or gender identity endures, as urgent and vital today as it
was during Reconstruction and its aftermath and epitomized in the wake of the
Plessy ruling.
Although extremely popular among readers and audiences during her
lifetime, Harper was not applauded by literary critics. For instance, in her
introduction to Harper’s Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted, Carby remarks that
Harper was accused publicly of passing as both black and female. While none
of her contemporaries claimed overtly that Harper was a white male the claim
was obviously implied. For example, it was noted that “she was so articulate
and engaging as a public speaker, audiences concluded that she couldn’t
possibly be a black woman. Some even speculated that she must be a man,
while others reasoned that she was painted to look black.”
3
Audiences
described Harper as an outstanding speaker, whose voice was sweet to the ear.
According to the historical record, Harper was a phenomenal rhetor who was
able to erase “the boundary between stories and lives.”
4

Evidently, Harper’s persuasive eloquence served a double rhetorical
function. In one sense her eloquence simultaneously embodied her skill,
knowledge, and rhetorical situation. It was transcendent in that it allowed her
to articulate an informed and convincing position on the roles that racial
classification, gender, and marriage played in the formation and performance
of mixed race identity in the wake of the Plessy ruling. According to Harper,
the Plessy ruling institutionalized a social imaginary that pushed mixed race
190
people to society’s margins, leaving them with no place to call their own.
5

Since then mixed race individuals have been depicted as torn and confused
about their racial identities, if they have been depicted at all. Harper’s novel
addresses the ways in which such stereotypes and understandings of mixed
race identity have been compounded by issues of gender, where mixed race
women have been positioned as exotic, erotic, dangerous, tormented, and even
tragic. Because she challenged these views embedded in the social imaginary
of the time, Harper’s eloquence was also transgressive. However, her
eloquence and willingness to challenge racial convention undercut her ethos in
the eyes of her multiple audiences, making her a passer who generated in her
audiences exactly what she argued against—disbelief and alienation.
Critical disbelief and alienation followed Harper in her life and in her
writing as a function of racial episteme, which created collective identities and
evidentiary standards that required extrinsic authentication.
6
These standards
are the determining factors of public knowledge, creating identities,
identifications, and divisions. Though now considered a prominent and
powerful American author, the consensus among Harper’s black and white
contemporaries was marked by a disdain for her rhetorical style, which used
melodrama, code-switching, and idealism, and appropriated aspects of other
male-authored narratives of passing such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel.
Nevertheless, Iola is the first novel authored by a person of color set in the
South during Reconstruction. As such Harper’s major rhetorical constraint was
191
found in navigating between multiple audiences and their attendant
perspectives.
James Weldon Johnson, who provided his own fictive rendition of
passing years later in An Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, explains this
dilemma as a function of an unwillingness or inability of black and white
audiences to share standards of discourse and, thereby, opinions and
worldviews.
The AfroAmerican author faces a special problem which the
plain American knows nothing about—the problem of the
double audience. It is more than a double audience, it is a
divided audience, an audience made up of two elements with
differing and often antagonizing points of view. This audience
is always both white American and black American…If the
Negro author selects white America as his audience he is bound
to run up against the long-standing artistic conceptions about
the Negro; against numerous conventions and
traditions…against a whole row of hard-set stereotypes which
are not easily broken-up…But when he turns from the
conventions of white America he runs afoul of the taboos of
Black America…there are certain phases of life that he does not
touch, certain subjects that he dare not critically discuss, certain
manners of treatment that he does not dare to use—except at the
risk of rousing bitter resentment…Their faults and their failings
are exploited to produce exaggerated effects. Consequently,
they have a strong feeling against exhibiting to the world
anything but their best points…they have discouraged in Negro
authors the production of everything but nice literature.
7

Harper’s novel is an expression of and response to this problem of distinct and
incommensurate audiences, worldviews, aesthetics, and orders through an
articulation of the fourth persona using eloquence. Because it deals with the
intentionality of passing, the text is addressed to multiple audiences. It is
addressed to the macrocultural white audience, as second persona/dupe, in
192
order to ease prejudices against blacks. It is addressed to the microcultural
black audience, as third persona/in-group clairvoyant, in order to provide
strategies for racial uplift. It is, simultaneously, also addressed to a mixed race
fourth persona audience that grapples with its racial identification and searches
out means of representation and expression in the social imaginary.
The gaps among racialized audiences precede what W. E. B. Du Bois
would later refer to as “double consciousness:” an ever-present and palpable
“two-ness…; Two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one…body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder.”
8
These warring identities create a rhetorical situation that can
be described as schizophrenic, wherein one must look at oneself always
through the eyes of others. As a consequence it becomes nearly impossible to
understand one’s own uniqueness. This is the primary exigence addressed in
Harper’s novel. Iola is rife with examples of written and oratorical eloquence
as means of fighting this war with a spirit of empowerment, self-determination,
and literacy. Harper engages Blair’s style of eloquence as
the art of speaking in such a manner as to attain the end for
which we speak…Whatever the subject be, there is room for
eloquence. As it is principally with reference to this end, that it
becomes the object of art, eloquence may be…defined, the art
of persuasion.
9

Her deployments of mixed race identity and passing showcase her own
intellectual, rhetorical, and aesthetic eloquence while idealizing her characters
as capable of pleasing, informing, and persuading audiences.
10

193
In order to widen the social imaginary Harper engaged aletheia to
provide alternatives for mixed race identification in her characters’ lives. She
concealed and revealed, utilized exhortation and verisimilitude, and moved
stylistically between the genres of standard (sentimentalism, historical fiction)
and vernacular language (slave narrative and social protest) and the racial poles
of black and white. Consequently, Harper exposed the many dichotomies that
mixed race individuals encountered, transgressed, and attempted to overcome
(e.g., black-white, American-Negro, child-parent, masculine-feminine,
enslaved-free, impoverished-bourgeoisie). In addition, she depicted passing as
a moral and rhetorical act that was practical, personal, and consequential.
These depictions elicited varied audience responses. Like the Crafts’
depiction, Harper’s garnered white sympathy from the dupe/second persona
audience because of passers’ phenotypical resemblance to white people. True
to form, duped audiences “facilitate the masking performance that deceives
them.”
11
They also appealed to the emerging pride of upwardly mobile African
American middle and upper class communities who sought mainstream
recognition and cultural outlets for their expressions.
12
Further, Harper’s
depictions moved mixed race identity and passing from a state of absence to
presence in the social imaginary.
This nexus of commercial acclaim, disbelief, and critical disfavor is
admittedly an odd place from which to begin a textual analysis of eloquence
and synecdoche in Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted’s representations of
194
passing. However, the goal of this chapter is not to refute Harper’s critics.
Instead, the goal is to interrogate and explore Harper’s use of passing in the
text as an iteration of the fourth persona that expands the social imaginary of
her time. In this sense Harper’s version of the fourth persona is, what Bahktin
would call, fundamentally dialogic: a mode of communication that is dynamic,
relational, and engaged in a process of (re)describing the world continuously.
13

From this perspective Harper presents an opportunity to explore the effects of
passing based on social and political commitments that widen the social
imaginary by expanding the boundaries between white and black.
Harper sought primarily to address the discrimination that many mixed
race individuals faced in the Reconstruction era, epitomizing the ways in
which race can be interpreted sincerely as a matter of commitments rather than
calculated genetically, assigned, or stolen as a matter of property.
14
In the
sections that follow, therefore, I will focus on the passing of her protagonists,
mixed race siblings Iola and Harry Leroy. In so doing I provide a brief plot
synopsis incorporating Cicero’s and Blair’s notions of rhetorical eloquence.
These concepts invoke the reflexive relationship between mixed racial identity
and the color line to exert power over the mind, induce audiences to action,
and inspire passion. This is consistent with Harper’s expressed aim to
“awaken” in the souls of white Americans, “a stronger sense of justice and a
more Christlike humanity toward black Americans.”
15
Harper makes an
ethical argument consistent with and extending from Aristotelian ethics, that
195
eudaimon (the good life) is both living well and living in a way that is well-
favored by a higher power.
16
Her portrayals of passing are both thematic and
interpretive method, creating a fourth persona perspective that acknowledges
aspects of mixed race identity we may not otherwise see.
With the life of the author and the critical reception of the novel in
place, I will now describe and analyze the novel in its parts. First, I will
provide a brief plot synopsis that also introduces the traditional concept of
eloquence. Second, I will discuss its representations of passing unintentionally
as white and then intentionally as black in the characters of Iola and Harry
Leroy. Third, I will explain how their passing as black is supported by
Harper’s uses of eloquence in a conversazione at the end of the novel. This
conversazione provides the space for mixed race individuals to speak
authoritatively with a commitment to black racial uplift in the prsence of a
largely white audience. Finally, I will show how this eloquence can help us
better recognize the continuing complexities of passing and mixed race
identification in contemporary U.S. culture.
III
Written in 1892 Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted is set in the United States
South from 1864 through 1867, with flashbacks to the 1840s.
17
Its namesake
and heroine, Iola Leroy, is the daughter of Eugene and Marie Leroy a wealthy
slave owner and his mixed race (one-quarter black) wife, whom he educated,
emancipated, and wedded. Iola has white skin and blue eyes. She is described
196
as “just as white as we are, as good as any girl in the land, and better educated
than thousands of white girls.”
18
Iola articulates her whiteness when she
defends slavery among many of her white classmates while attending school in
the North. She explains:
Slavery can’t be wrong…for my father is a slave-holder, and
my mother is as good to our servants as she can be. My father
often tells her that she spoils them, and lets them run over her. I
never saw my father strike one of them. I love my mammy as
much as I do my own mother, and I believe she loves us just as
if we were her own children.
19

It is safe to say that at the start of the novel Iola considers herself an ordinary
white woman though the audience may conclude that she is passing as white.
Thus, the very concept of racial identification is in conflict with itself from the
start.
The turning point in Iola’s and Harry’s racial identifications is marked
textually by the death of their father, the white male patriarch, caused by
yellow fever. Black identity, understood metonymically via the one-drop rule
because of Plessy v. Ferguson, becomes real to them in so far as it changes the
ways they think and feel within a social framework they did not design and
cannot readily control. For example,
when told she is legally black, Iola does not initially consider
her white identity a ‘misdemeanor’ or an act of betrayal or theft.
Instead she reframes the ‘crime’ of passing as white men’s
appropriation of her property: ‘I used to say that slavery is right.
I didn’t know what I was talking about…Mother, who is at the
bottom of this downright robbery?’
20

197
This robbery involves a theft of Iola’s material property as well as the loss of
her legal claim to whiteness and its privileges. Informed that she is part black,
and therefore considered black legally, Iola is infuriated. Upon hearing the
awful news, “an expression of horror and anguish swept over Iola’s face, and
turning deathly pale…almost wild with agony...paced the floor as the fearful
truth broke in crushing anguish upon her mind.”
21
How ironic that Iola turns
pale with the agony of blackness. Nerad explains Iola’s reaction.
Iola here occupies the psychological position of a white person
in perceiving that her whiteness, along with her claim to the
paternal estate, her right to virtue, and her freedom have all
been stolen.
22

In the tradition of Plessy v. Ferguson, this news can be read as identity theft
and as a rhetorical “response to the changing character of domination and the
conditions of existence it seeks to impose.”
23
In Harper’s novel the “changing
character of domination” results from the fact that Iola and Harry’s mother
Marie cannot inherit their father’s (Eugene’s) estate because she is considered
black legally. Eugene’s wicked cousin, Alfred Lorraine, who prefers seeing
Iola’s father dead rather than married to a former slave, confiscates their estate,
tricks Iola into returning, and sells her and her mother into slavery.
Rather than sulking and suffering indefinitely, Iola becomes righteously
indignant. She chooses to take the black part for the whole of her racial identity
and begins passing as black. However, this choice is neither the effect of the
macroculture’s legal declaration that she is black, nor the belief that she is
somehow black inherently or internally. Rather, she uses synecdoche to
198
identify as black because she refuses to associate with the white race that
enslaves and steals from its own. Iola’s choice to pass as black flies in the face
of biological imperatives and instead is based on her own sincerity. She
announces: “I intend, when this conflict is over, to cast my lot with the freed
people as a helper, teacher, and friend.”
24
She takes pride in this new identity
and assumes a sincere position, taking on historically valid roles for black
women as nurse, teacher, and staunch advocate for racial equality and uplift.
Along the way, Iola is sold into slavery and held captive by an abusive
master. For abolitionist purposes she can be considered a white slave like
Ellen Craft. She is rescued and becomes a nurse in the army. Dr. Gresham, a
white Union hospital physician, develops affection for Iola but is disturbed by
her tender care of Tom, a black man. Dr. Gresham despises miscegenation and
checks his feelings for Iola when he learns that she is of mixed race.
Nevertheless, Gresham loves and proposes to her but would prefer that
she hide her identity as mixed race (read black) and live with him as a white
woman. Iola refuses. Harper explains that although Iola found Dr. Gresham
“the ideal of her soul exemplified,” she could not bring herself to marry a man
“of that race who had been so lately associated in her mind with horror,
aversion, and disgust.”
25
In so doing Iola creates the rhetorical condition, and
hence the possibility, of her persuasive and convincing self-identification as
(passing as) black. Gresham responds in disbelief and unwillingness to
interpret Iola’s identity as she does.
199
She is one of the most refined and lady-like women I ever
saw…Her accent is slightly Southern but her manner is
Northern…I cannot understand how a Southern lady, whose
education and manners stamped her as a woman of fine culture
and good breeding, could consent to occupy the position she so
faithfully holds. It is a mystery I cannot solve.
26

In expressing this sentiment Gresham represents a white male patriarchal
perspective. He professes a belief in love, acceptance, and equality but is
unwilling to embody them through his actions toward Iola. Moreover, he
reveals his investment in the biological and visible natures of race and in the
acquisition of social and cultural capital in Iola’s gender when his proposal
resounds with the language of possession: “Consent to be mine, as nothing on
earth is mine.”
27
He relies on his observations of Iola’s appearance, behaviors,
and verbal and non-verbal communication messages (e.g., idiosyncratic
language use, emotional leakage) as indications of a racial identity he defines
and would hope to contain.
28

Gresham’s wish for Iola’s silence where her racial identity is concerned
emphasizes the normalized cultural perspective of passers as threatening in
light of the Plessy ruling. Specifically, passers who are mixed race and possess
extensive and diversified social networks and who have learned the proper
manners can mobilize their actions toward attaining economic resources and
social rewards allotted to white people only. In articulating this perspective
Gresham is unable to untangle the thickets of class and race. As a result he sees
the opportunity for a better and freer life in whiteness only, and not in the
upper class background both he and Iola share. He is unable to understand why
200
Iola would choose not to identify as white. His pause at the notion of offspring
who “show signs of color” constitutes the end of their relationship. Should Iola
have succumbed to the temptation to pass as white, as is the case with many
narratives of passing, it is highly probable that she would have met a tragic end
because her motives would not have been socially sanctioned (e.g., interracial
romance, family betrayal, domestic illegitimacy, and self-oriented
achievement).
29
Thus, Gresham symbolizes an unworthy solution to Iola’s
problem of mixed race identity. Marriage to him would change her status, quell
racial anxieties, confound race with class, and shroud any transgressive and
transformative effects of her passing beneath a shadow of imposed silence.
Gresham makes her choice of racial identification a choice between either
himself and his family or Iola’s black family.

Meanwhile, Iola is able to warn her brother Harry about all of this and
he joins a colored regiment of the Northern Army. He wavers initially about
the decision to pass as black, unwilling to accept the lesser social status and
privilege that accompany it. As events unfold Harry becomes more assertive
and confident in identifying himself partly, and then fully, as black. His
identity is solidified when he marries Miss Delaney, a non-ambiguous and
visibly identifiable African American woman. This is important for at least two
reasons. In one sense Harry’s marriage resets the racial recognition that he and
Iola have so troubled by way of passing as white and then as black. However,
this marriage also makes a bold ideological critique of the one-drop rule. By
201
pairing a couple of different complexions Harper undoes the typical
assumption made in passing novels that reproductive rights are only bestowed
on those who refuse even the slightest hint of interracial association. Though
Harry’s marriage signifies a choice to pass as black, this apparent interracial
union does not completely reassign the biracial logic to characters within the
black population. Rather, it grants the possibility for generational evidence of
a mixed race identity within the symbolic and material constraints of the Plessy
v. Ferguson ruling, the one-drop rule, and legalized segregation. As a result,
the biological determination of race looms as a shadow cast over all racialized
subjects, both black and white. Harper uplifts this shadow to reveal the
legacies of the Plessy ruling that embed mixed race identity within the black
category, thereby working against a definition of black as inferior and stain.
Harry’s, and then Iola’s, choice in marriage partners is one manner in
which Harper constructs the narrative conditions in order to argue that race and
gender are not just rhetorical but “intersectional,” meaning they cannot be
considered or categorized in isolation.
30
The sophisticated plot of the novel, in
which Harry’s and Iola’s racial identities both complement and supplement
those of their spouses, allows passing and marriage to function as strategies of
representation and access which can uphold and subvert structures and rules of
domination. Not only is race identified as a way of thinking and
communicating that determines and sanctions appropriate marriage partners,
202
but, Harper intimates, marriage must also be considered an instrument of racial
identification in a hetero-normative and patriarchal context.
Analysis of Iola’s experiences in comparison to Harry’s demonstrates
this crucial point. We already know that Iola has refused the proposal of her
white suitor, Dr. Gresham. Further dramatizing the constraints of gender on
self-determination, Iola chooses to marry Dr. Latimer instead. Latimer, another
mixed race person passing as black, is a man whose scholarship and personal
philosophies resist racial stereotypes and emphasize his commitment to black
racial uplift. Their union in marriage is a significant rhetorical move because it
functions as synecdoche for race itself, abetted by the synecdoche of passing.
Take, as an example, Latimer’s marriage proposal:
‘As a teacher, you will need strong health and calm nerves. You
had better let me prescribe for you. You need,’ he added, with a
merry twinkle in his eyes, ‘change of air, change of scene, and
change of name.’
‘Well Doctor,’ said Iola, laughing, ‘that is the newest nostrum
out. Had you not better apply for a patent?’
‘Oh,’ replied Dr. Latimer, with affected gravity, ‘you know you
must have unlimited faith in your physician.’ ‘So you with me
to try to faith cure?’ asked Iola, laughing.
31

Latimer symbolizes the best available cure for Iola’s troubled racial
identification. As her healer and husband he becomes Iola’s avowal of her
mixed race identity, of her pass as black, and of her sincere social position as
black woman with a black family (as wife, daughter, and sister). The larger
point is that for Iola’s pass to be persuasive, she had to embrace her role in the
raced and gendered familial and national hierarchies that initially concealed
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her under a layer of white skin. Though Iola does exercise agency in her
choice of partner, Harper’s larger comment is that any passer’s identity will be
read as either white or black and, consequently, in relation to her or his white
or black spouse; unless one cannot tell whether the spouse is white or black
either.
Harper thus invokes the practice of passing as a response to the absence
of fully representative categories of racial identity and the insecurities that
ensue. Therefore, “it is vitally important to [Harper] that mixed race people
identify themselves as black and that they identify their best qualities as the
expressions of their blackness” in the segregationist context.
32
Not only does
passing as black provide Harper a platform for undoing the power imposed by
metonymic logic of the one-drop rule, it also inverts DuBoisian double
consciousness. Rather than presenting an internally assimilated white person in
black skin, Harper widens the social imaginary by presenting a previously
unarticulated dichotomy: alienated mixed race persons in white skin who are
committed sincerely to black political interests as a result of careful
deliberation. Consequently, passing becomes a practice through which a
mixed race person can benefit by changing his or her representational strategy
in order to exhort the group into which he or she passes. Passing also allows
mixed race people to enact and engage an identity that can represent them
within the strict limits of a white-or-black-only binary logic. And, finally,
204
passing allows Harper to position herself through this literary revision as the
fourth persona.
In the section that follows I will demonstrate the ways in which Harper
supports her depictions of passing eloquently in order to further destabilize the
normalized black and white categories of race in a post-Plessy v. Ferguson
setting. First, I will engage a discussion of traditional eloquence as it reinforces
passing in the novel. Then, I will move to a discussion of transcendent
eloquence and Harper’s conversazione as tools for widening the social
imaginary and adding depth to the fourth persona perspective.
IV
As previously argued, synecdoche allows the passer to take a part of himself or
herself for the whole and identify as either white or black. Eloquence, a trope
rooted in the classical tradition and derived from the Latin word eloquentia,
means “to speak out,” in this case from the racialized subject position.
33
In
speaking out through mixed race characters that pass intentionally as black
Harper engages the transformative and transgressive effects of eloquence to
create knowledge that alters the social imaginary.
To understand Harper on these matters, I turn to two rhetoricians whose
influences are felt throughout her work: Cicero and Blair. In De Oratore,
Cicero defines eloquence as:
one of the supreme virtues…which, after encompassing a
knowledge of facts, gives verbal expression to the thoughts and
purposes of the mind in such a manner as to have the power of
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driving the hearers forward in any direction in which it has
applied its weight.
34

Eloquence is the means of persuasive communication. But in the Ciceronian
tradition the means are identified closely with the message, creating a link
between eloquence and wisdom. “The stronger this faculty [of eloquence] is,”
declares Cicero, “the more necessary it is for it to be combined with integrity
and supreme wisdom.”
35
Harper uses Iola’s eloquence to dispel the popular
myth that mixed race and black women were incapable of moral virtue. For
instance, even after learning that Iola is legally black, the white Doctor
Gresham locates in her “his ideal of the woman whom he was willing to
marry.”
36

Later rhetoricians such as Vico extended Cicero’s definition to explain
that “eloquence is nothing but wisdom speaking.”
37
The consistent theme is
that the acquisition of knowledge should be followed by its eloquent
conveyance to one’s audiences. Blair extends this view, stating that eloquent
speech is most effective when it is both passionate and intellectual. Moreover,
Blair suggests that the eloquent rhetor’s speech or “language resemble[s] his
character.”
38
This cuts both ways. On the one hand, eloquent speech can
constitute and articulate new subject positions in passing. On the other hand, it
can forestall the stability of these positions by questioning the veracity of the
author’s persona (i.e., Harper as passer). In this sense the characters Harper
represents must navigate between rather than simply conform to or distance
themselves completely from the black and white material and symbolic worlds.
206
The passers move between contexts with eloquence-synecdoche and engage
rhetoric in an ontological sense, finding an individual place within a collective
national narrative of self-discovery and truth.
Harper’s renditions of passing also engage the epistemological aspects
of rhetoric via eloquence as addressed by Hugh Blair. In Lectures on Rhetoric
and Belles Lettres Blair writes that “eloquence is a high talent and of great
importance in society: and that it requires both natural genius, and much
improvement from art.”
39
He asserts that when passions and emotions are
aroused in “high eloquence” rhetoric exercises power over the human mind
and makes us potentially greater than we are when we are not aroused. The
goal of the ideal eloquent orator is not only to interest, inform, instruct, and
convince but also to move her audiences to a place of self-discovery and
growth enabling them to abandon prejudices against the rhetor and her cause.
Harper demonstrates this high degree of eloquence through the conversazione
in Chapter XXX, to create a context within which each voice evokes a
response, establishes personal relationships, and ultimately reinforces
consubstantiality and identification. This requires that passers (in this case
Harper as well as her characters Iola and Harry) display mental sensibility,
imagination, sound judgment, a powerful command of language, delivery, and
pronunciation.
Harper employs eloquence to craft her argument about the nature of
conflict, the virtues and dangers of cooperation, and the opportunities of
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identification and consubstantiality in passing as black. In other words, the
personae and voices she invents and animates suggest real-life distinctions
between intraracial and interracial social worlds and expressions. As her
characters pass from white to black and back they demonstrate the roles of
language and behavior in reinventing identity and catalyzing social change.
At this point it is important to return to reconsider Harper’s passing
protagonists in order to raise a key question. Is it accurate, and more than that
is it just, to claim that Iola and Harry were passing as white if they are not
aware of any aspect of their racial identity that is not white? A brief discussion
of the language and look of passing from the fourth persona perspective is
required in order to answer this question.
In so far as looks are concerned, passing is based on episteme that
declares the visible to be a true and an accurate measure of identification and
character.
40
Episteme is violated when passers alter their communication,
behaviors, or relationships thereby enhancing uncertainty and ambiguity as
well as dissociating themselves from disadvantaged identities and associating
themselves with privileged identities.
41
As discussed in each chapter of this
dissertation, white and black are privileged identities because they are
recognized and have assigned (yet unequal) statuses. Mixed race is a non-
privileged identity because it is unrecognized and therefore has no place from
which persons so identified can speak out. As a result, passers must decide
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how they will self-represent as black or white in order to become identifiable
and master eloquence to speak out for transformative and transgressive effect.
As in previous chapters, the language of passing flows within rhetorical
encounters among various audiences. Building on the discussion of
Robinson’s and Morris’s arguments, I assert here that Iola’s and Harry’s
passing constructs diegetic and exegetic audiences that add depth and
dimension to the fourth persona. If Iola and Harry are passers, then they and
their associates are dupes. The in-group clairvoyant, or excluded audience,
would be their parents and extended family. Harper and the reader constitute
the fourth persona. The multiple personae implicated here are important
because they demonstrate that something exists beyond what is visible.
Personae are also important because they highlight several dangers inherent in
the question of unintentional and unconscious passing raised by Harper’s text.
First, this vocabulary places passing within a paradigm of deception
regardless of intent or outcome. This negatively-valenced labeling suggests
that passing is enacted in terms of interpersonal deception as “falsification,
equivocation and concealment” and that the message content of a pass depends
entirely upon audience/personae interpretation.
42
Hence, Harper’s comment
that those who pass as black “must put a label on…, saying, ‘I
am…colored…,’ to prevent annoyance.”
43
Falsification is used to describe
fictionalizing, counterfeiting, forging and lying whereas concealment refers to
withholding knowledge, physical evidence or truth. Equivocation is the
209
process by which characters avoid discussing those issues or factors relating to
acts of passing. From this perspective it can be argued that Iola and Harry
concealed initially though unknowingly, and that Iola later equivocated with.
Gresham as her feelings for him developed. This frames passers as liars and
cheats rather than as skilled rhetoricians who utilize synecdoche and eloquence
in order to create and sustain identifications that influence audiences
entrenched in social and moral conflicts (i.e., racism and segregation).
A second danger of this question of unintentional passing is that it
relies primarily on externally proscribed authenticity and assumes a subject-
object relationship among rhetorical personae. In this paradigm the mixed race
person is an unidentifiable passing object while the dupe, in-group clairvoyant,
and fourth persona are subjects who determine and evaluate her or his
identity.
44
In place of this demeaning subject-object relation, Harper engages
the racial identification model termed “sincerity” by Jackson, a method of
interpolating identity which assumes a subject-subject relationship and allows
for understanding of a passer’s intent. In this way passing is less a strategy or
tactic of personal gain and more of an argument that expresses one’s spiritual,
emotional, and political commitments and actions. A sincere approach suggests
that passers take the synecdoche (the part with which they identify publicly as
the whole) to heart.
This means that identity is neither a matter of an authentic essence nor
an arbitrary social construction. Instead it is a symbolic and material co-
210
creation by passers, their audiences, and institutional structures of
identification. Enacted as a series of movements, identity is expressed as an
ongoing and eloquent drama of becoming. As part of a sincere drama of
passing, identity can be performed as a set of sincere relations among subjects
who share emotional and political ideologies and sensibilities.
Rather awkwardly put: Identity is the being you are interpreted
as by yourself or by others, including how you rhetorically
interpret others as rhetorically interpreting you (a form of
double-consciousness) and how others are persuaded or not by
your self-identifications, based, for example, on their reading of
your inherited character through your physical appearance[,
statements and affiliations].
45

This description of identity formation and maintenance is consistent with the
definitions of rhetorical eloquence provided by the classical rhetorical
tradition. In one respect both identity and eloquence are situated performances
that signal character development. In another respect both are matters of self-
representation as well as qualities that must persuade and convince the
audience of the veracity of the claim made in passing via synecdoche (i.e.,
identity as white or black).
An opportunity to do just that comes at the end of the novel when the
Leroy family (including the siblings’ spouses) associates with progressive
northern intellectuals, who gather at a conversazione to discuss the post-war
sociopolitical conditions facing the black race. Unlike the rest of the story
which is told as a series of interpersonal flashbacks, the conversazione is a
formal conversation in which participants give position papers that are
211
discussed and debated. The interracial group aims to sway public opinion
about blacks’ achievements, and the astute Dr. Latimer proves his scholarly
ability before Dr. Latrobe, a white southerner skeptical of blacks’ intellectual
equality.
Other characters demonstrate eloquence in the conversazione through
their abilities to speak folk dialect, Standard English, as well as a hybrid
combination of the two. This ability exemplifies a more contemporary type of
eloquence that Pearce and Littlejohn call “transcendent.” Harper’s use of
“transcendent eloquence” presents passing as a moral difference rhetorically
(passing as white versus passing as black) so as to build understanding and
respect socially in the eyes of both communities. Part of the process involves
creating new categories against which the original biracial categories can be
measured, and developing a “creole-like language” to enable communication.
46

The scene of the conversazione demonstrates several features of transcendent
eloquence: philosophical, comparative, dialogic, critical and transformative.
The conversazione is a rhetorical situation aimed at inventing and
reviewing “subjects of vital interest to our welfare.”
47
Five position papers are
presented and discussed that illustrate the in-between nature of biracial identity
(as black): “Negro Emigration,” “Patriotism,” “Rallying Cry,” “Education of
Mothers,” and “Moral Progress of Race.” Each paper demonstrates an element
of transcendent eloquence. The first paper, concerning expatriation to Africa,
is philosophical in that it explores several assumptions about knowledge, being
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and values behind conflicting ideals of black identity in a post-slavery context.
One one hand Africa is presented as a comfort zone, a place where black
people will no longer be alienated and repressed and can be identified as
people and part of the majority population. Their presence on the continent
will be one of redemption and civilization, signaling the twin myth of Africa
and Africans (and their descendents) as savage and childlike. On the other
hand, the United States is presented as a hostile home, a place where African
Americans are called to bring about the true conditions of democracy by
working to end racial prejudice. “America…is the best field for human
development; the best place to settle down and work out our own salvation.”
48

This shows that like mixed race individuals, the black community itself is
displaced and bifurcated, continually expressing its double consciousness and
in search of solid ground.
The second paper is comparative and presents an alternate argument
concerning patriotism and assimilation. Delivered by a reverend, this paper
portrays white people as superior, as more humane and pious than black or
mixed race people. In fact, it is asserted that it is “a privilege for colored man
to be linked to his destiny and to live beneath the shadow of his power.”
49
This
position is rebutted by Dr. Latimer, who uses comparative logic to remind the
audience of the legacies of the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. “‘Law,’ he said, ‘is
the pivot on which the whole universe turns…we have had two evils by which
our obedience to law has been tested—slavery and the liquor traffic.’”
50
In this
213
case the law is the moral law of brotherly love and the U. S. political ideal of
“all men are created equal.”
51
It is also the law of segregation and one-drop
rule instantiated by the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson. Patriotism is about
surpassing the customary and legal limitations of institutionalized racism and
discrimination in favor of identifying all racial groups as equal and equally
visible. It is a call to a different and freer patria, a call for all U. S. citizens to
live out their pledge of allegiance with absolute “liberty and justice for all.”
52

The third paper is not a paper at all. It is a poem and “A Rallying Cry”
written by an older woman named Mrs. Watson. This poem is dialogic and
invitational because it aims beyond persuasion and conviction and at
exploration. It begins, “Oh, children of the tropics, Amid our pain and wrong
have you no other mission Than music, dance and song?”
53
Written for a black
and mixed race audience, the poem opens a new perspective, an available
opportunity and not an insistence. Although some will choose to accept this
invitation, the point is not to secure the adherence of audience members to the
perspective offered by the rhetor. Rather, the point is to create a context to talk
about the nature of black identity and the responsibility of black people to take
action to better their situations. This is why Harper does not address whites
and white racism as an obstacle. Instead she uses the poem to illustrate a way
to deal with the situation through a nationalist perspective built on, what
Barack Obama would later call, “the audacity of hope.”
54
Harper writes: “in
the pallor of that anguish I see the only light, To flood with peace and gladness
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Earth’s sorrow, pain, and night.”
55
Rather than identifying against white
supremacy, and risking its reinforcement as reality, Harper creates a context
within which those who are ready to act in favor of black racial uplift can
convince themselves to listen and learn. It is offered in the interest of pleasing
ideal and excluded audiences and not for the sake of belittling or defeating
them.
The fourth paper, written and delivered by Iola Leroy, is about family
structure and gender role modeling. This paper is critical because it directly
addresses the powers and limits of black and mixed race gendered identities.
Iola suggests the interconnectedness between individuals, families and
communities. This is not surprising considering the events of Iola’s own life.
Her thesis is that people should see themselves as moved to create certain
kinds of people. Consider the following response in support of its soundness:
“I do not think…that we can begin too early to teach our boys to be manly and
self-respecting and our girls to be useful and self-reliant.”
56
It seems that
Harper, through Iola, argues that the power of self-enrichment relies on how
individuals negotiate the norms of existence. The ensuing conversation reveals
her insistence on the fundamentally ontological role of rhetoric in cultivating
an ideal identity. Signaling the ways in which gender norms are circulated and
enforced, she provides eloquent evidence for the constraint I will refer to as the
gender of race. The gender of race defines personhood, knowledge and places
value on individuals according to a moral order that grants social access and
215
opportunity to those who meet its standards of “the true strength of
race…purity in women and uprightness in men.”
57
Harper asserts that life—
and its forms of resistance to oppression—are profoundly shaped by the
simultaneity of race, class, gender, morality and sexuality. Her critique is that
all audiences are potential agents of change with an obligation to recognize the
seemingly unrelated factors that impact life experience. Therefore, they must
adapt their methods of social action accordingly.
The fifth and final paper, on moral progress, is transformative because
it changes the setting, expectations and nature of the issues identified thus far.
“Instead of narrowing our sympathies to mere racial questions,” Harper writes,
“let us broaden them to humanity’s wider issues.”
58
Harper steps outside the
frame of the conversazione in search of a fresh perspective by firmly situating
racial progress in the context of human history writ large. Through the voice
of Reverend Carmichael, she addresses the social and rhetorical legacies of
slavery that must be acknowledged. The social legacies include segregation
and its effects—nihilism, self-loathing, under-education and increasing black
imprisonment. The rhetorical legacy of slavery is embodied in the African
American rhetorical gospels of hope, suffering, love, freedom and justice that
set the stage for the rhetorical situation of the conversazione itself.
Harper connects these legacies to slavery when Robert (her mixed race
uncle) reminisces about these qualities in the hush harbor discourse of the
enslaved: “how we used to go by stealth into lonely woods and gloomy
216
swamps. To tell of our hopes and fears, sorrows and trials.”
59
Historically,
hush harbors were places where the enslaved gathered to plan escapes, worship
and hold unauthorized secret meetings. Research reveals that hush harbors are
not merely physical locations, but also conceptual metaphors for strategies of
passing, where the enslaved escaped the visible policing that identified them as
enslaved, inferior, and invisible. Hush harbor rhetoric, like the conversazione,
allowed its rhetors to create an alternate public sphere within which they, as
otherwise invisible and ambiguous, clarified their identities, ideologies, and
commitments.
60

On a related note, the language that many passers encounter and engage
throughout the novel shows that the normal discourse of one group does not
match that of the other. Moreover, these language differences illustrate that
those who can neither code switch nor translate vernacular dialects into
standard syntax are unable to travel socially. Therefore, mixed race identity
and passing are means of eliciting and negotiating shared, as well as distinct,
experiences between black and white audiences. Take the shifting depiction of
Robert Johnson’s (Iola’s and Harry’s uncle) voice, which embodies several of
the moral conflicts with which he grapples. As mentioned above, Robert
speaks the Standard English of the bourgeois conversazione. What is important
here is that he links it to the folk dialect of the enslaved, indicative of the
upward mobility evidenced in the events of his own life. Consequently, he can
converse with rather than simply address multiple audiences—white, black,
217
and mixed. His role, like those of most (bi)racial passers in the text, is
transgressive and transformative. He embodies Harper’s ideal of progress
because he is someone who was a slave and has moved beyond it. His
ontology, along with Iola’s and Harry’s, is suggestive of an inclusive model of
transcendent eloquence and passing that embodies the fourth persona. This
model understands race and gender in conjunction with class and
communication. It also demonstrates how class can be a corrective for the
perils of an otherwise stigmatized identity. Harper is critiqued for this stance
by those who do not examine her writing from an intersectional or fourth
persona perspective. However, her ideological position is supported by the
willingness of some to pass as either white or black and support their decisions
eloquently.
Harper’s demonstrations of traditional and transcendent eloquence
suggest that mixed race individuals who passed as black learned specific
identity lessons as they demonstrated blackness sincerely through ideologies of
racial uplift. Her eloquence also responds to the Plessy ruling and the rule of
hypodescent, allowing for the possibility of unification in the social imaginary.
Eloquence exposes dichotomies and allows passers to travel within interracial
and intraracial contexts. It is also employed to redefine passing as a way for
mixed race people to place themselves within U.S. familial and racial
structures and hierarchies. Iola and Harry draw on eloquence in order to
concretize their own experiences and identities. Their passing opens a space
218
within which the practice and ordering of daily life connect, combine, and
circulate. For Harper, this is the power of passing; to present the possibility of
identity in multiple moments of concealment and revelation (aletheia).
But how effective is this power? How is it aided by eloquence to
provide recognizable structures for mixed race identity? What kind of identity
is created? Is it desirable? Does it matter? In the next section I will discuss the
power of passing in terms of outcome: whether Iola, Harry, and Harper, as well
as their audiences, experience and believe in the identities put forth and
whether the intended goals of each were reached.
V
One outcome of Harper’s eloquent strategy is that passing is intersectional and
depicted powerfully as it intertwines with and is identified in marriage. A
related outcome is that passing is itself transformed into an intersectional trope
that reinforces traditional class-consciousness by blending synecdoche and
eloquence to transform terms.
61
As argued in Chapter Two, instead of seeing
the ways in which, for instance, race and gender combine to create the situation
causing Iola to pass, Iola’s passing is interpreted by those around her as a
series of thickets in which various aspects of human identification are
conflated. Her race is conflated with her class, while her gender and sexuality
are conflated with her sex.
62

These conflations demonstrate the ways in which terms are transformed
and animated as an ongoing exchange in which passers perform and argue for
219
their desires eloquently. Passers complicate the concept of discrete and
apparent categories of racial identification and also complicate the ways in
which personal, social, and economic rewards are distributed within and
among those categories. This is why Harper’s representations of passing are
best described sincerely.
As aforementioned, sincere passing is passing that simultaneously uses
interests and commitments strategically to grapple with the pressures of a
multiply burdened intersectional identity. Sincere passing responds to
individual and collective forms of discrimination and exclusion and strives to
achieve new outcomes through aletheia, concealment and revelation of
racialized identities. This description supports Harper’s larger representation of
(bi)racial passing as a rhetorical and moral issue within the traditions and
traditional constraints of a racialized and segregated world.
Another outcome of Harper’s eloquent strategy is a direct response to
the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the novel Harper uses (bi)racial passing to
present her audiences with at least two sets of events: the events if the mixed
race individual were take the privileged part for the whole and the events if
said individual were to take the non-privileged part for the whole. In this sense
the outcomes associated with (bi)racial passing are both eloquent and
counterfactual. They are so because passing is revealed as a method for
overcoming the inability to simultaneously observe different outcomes for the
same person (a missing data problem when attempting to measure
220
discrimination “objectively”) and because passing is a transgressive and
transformative translation of identity into rhetorical expression.
Harper’s depictions of (bi)racial passing illustrate that every individual
has potential outcomes under every set of circumstances, even though only one
of these outcomes is typically observed or realized. The causal effect of
interest to this chapter has been the differences between these potential
outcomes enabled by Harper’s use of synecdoche-eloquence. That is, the
effectiveness of passing in positive and/or negative terms as demonstrated in
characters’ commitments to social, political and rhetorical lifestyles and
worldviews. The inability to observe both of these outcomes for a single
individual is overcome by Harper’s assessments and discussions of the
outcomes of passing while her characters sustain the projected identity (as
positive and privileged) and the outcomes when the passers’ sustain identities
as black are revealed (as negative and stigmatized socially and at the same time
positive and privileged morally).
By presenting (bi)racial passing as a counterfactual problem, Harper
demonstrates that sincere action will be to some extent diminished if one lacks
an adequate supply of opportunity and community with which to identify.
Someone who is unidentifiable like a passer (i.e., unidentifiable passing
object), and therefore without family, friends, and/or community will be unable
to harness many opportunities for sincere activity or eloquent speech, and what
little (s)he can accomplish will not be profound. To some extent, then, living
221
sincerely requires good fortune and good decisions. Iola’s and Harry’s
experiences reveal that happenstance can rob anybody, even wealthy white
slave owning families, of security. Nonetheless, Harper insists, the highest
good of sincerity is not something that comes to us by chance. It is an
important social and rhetorical choice. Thus, she suggests, the purpose of
passing is to find a community in which mixed race individuals and
communities can become more sincere. Passing becomes the means of
expressing and exercising that sincerity by using synecdoche in choosing to
identify as black and using eloquence to communicate that choice and live out
its implications.
In other words, Harper’s representations of passing suggest that
behaviors and attitudes have meanings only within the context of specific
selves and specific situations. Like rhetoric itself then, passing is a circulation
of meanings in a market that communicates visually and verbally. This being
the case, passing highlights the symbolic social construction of the “truths”
that inform cultural and historical attitudes and actions. In this way Harper re-
contextualizes passing as (bi)racial, causing audiences to examine their own
collective and individual motivations based on the categories with which they
identify. These re-identifications can lead to changes in sincerity (moral,
political, and ethical commitments) and changes in actions. Consequently,
audiences are challenged to exercise their agencies by questioning how to
222
relate and respond to a society in which people are told they are free, but are
not free to be who they are. Iola and Harry’s passing accomplish exactly that.
Further, their passing demonstrates their distinct life outcomes if they
were to identify as white only and as black only. What is most eloquent of all,
is Harper’s rhetorical move to eschew this either-or identification in favor of
an understated yet powerful third alternative; holding on to mixed race identity
in passing (bi)racially as black. For it is in passing as black that both Iola and
Harry find their identities as mixed race rhetors and resist the self-doubt and
omnipresent readiness to retreat that precede traditional acts of passing in
literature. Time and again, and in varied settings, Harper refuses to animate the
dread and revulsion accompanying forced confrontations with mixed race
identity. She also refuses to imbue her characters with the shame of denial and
deception. These refusals allow her mixed race characters to identify with most
blacks and most whites, though always with subtle and subversive effect. With
malleable yet locatable identities they uplift shadows (phainomena) that have
defined blackness in opposition to whiteness and as inferior contaminant. By
Harper’s light we see more clearly into whiteness and blackness as privileged
identities that are utterly and ruinously unacquainted with their
in(ter)dependences.
Taking Harper’s eloquence a step further into downright tragedy I will
focus on popular representations of passing in the contemporary novel and film
The Human Stain in the next chapter. Thereafter, I will explore the
223
problematics and possibilities of passing as a model for rhetorical theory in a
culture that prefers to use mixed racial ambiguity as grounds for mainstream
entertainment.
224

CHAPTER FOUR REFERENCES
1
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 245.
2
There are no known extant copies of Forest Leaves. Among Harper's works
not mentioned above are Poems (1857), The Martyr of Alabama and Other
Poems (1892), The Sparrow's Fall and Other Poems (1894), and Atlanta
Offering (1895). The complete poems are available in Maryemma Graham, ed.,
Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper (1988). Frances Smith Foster's A
Brighter Coming Day (1990) is a valuable anthology of the entire range of
Harper's writing, including speeches, journalism, poetry, fiction, and letters.
Foster has also edited Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and
Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper (1994). Iola
Leroy has been reprinted as recently as 1988. An early criticism is Benjamin
Griffith Brawley's "Three Negro Poets: Horton, Mrs. Harper and Whitman,"
Journal of Negro History (1917). Studies of Harper include Melba Joyce
Boyd's Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W.
Harper (1994) and Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley's "Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper: 19th Century Pioneer in the Women's Suffrage Movement," a research
paper written at Wesley Theological Seminary (1993).

3
Hazel Carby quoted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., foreword to Iola Leroy or
Shadows Uplifted Frances E. W. Harper (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988): ix.
4
William J. Scheik. “Strategic Ellipsis in Harper's ‘The Two Offers’” Southern
Literary Journal 23 (1991): 18.
5
Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix. Black, White or Mixed Race?: Race and
Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage (London:
Routledge, 1993).

6
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Foreword to Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted Frances
E. W. Harper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): vii-xxii.
7
James Weldon Johnson. “The Dilemma of the Negro Author,” American
Mercury XV.60 (1928): 477-481.
8
W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Classics,
1903): 8-9.
225

9
Hugh Blair. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letteres (Philadelphia: Porter &
Coates, 1873): 261.
10
Ibid. According to Blair, these are abilities of the eloquent and ideal orator.
In addition, Blair also stressed the need to be virtuous as the key component to
eloquence. Based on her depiction of Iola Leroy It is clear that Harper
subscribed to this view as well.
11
Charles E. Morris III. “Pink Herring & The Fourth Persona: J. Edgar
Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, Third Edition
ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing, 2005): 666.

12
Vashti Lewis. “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola
Leroy,” Phylon 45.4 (1984): 316.
13
Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays ed. Michael
Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1988).
14
John L. Jackson. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005). In Real Black, Jackson writes that race is
an “over-imagined real” that can only be understood in the context of
performance. His model of sincerity is the “something else” of race, which is
the alternative to authenticity and essentialism. For Jackson, sincerity is
tactical and passing shows that race can be interpolated as a matter of
commitments and actions. Passing is a useful ethnographic tool because it
shows how collective identities function as economies of evidence, categories
we brush up against as we fashion individuality and uniqueness. These
collective identities produce “scripts,” of which race is one. This script is
enacted and re-enacted in passing.
15
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 282.
16
Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics trans. David Ross. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988).
17
Like Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group,
2000), which is set in the time of post WWII with flashbacks to incendiary
incidents of passing, Iola Leroy is comprised of multiple settings and outcomes
for passers. In this way, each text depicts passing ideologically as the
culmination and catalyst for a series of events with specific outcomes.
226

18
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 66.
19
Ibid., 79.

20
Julie Cary Nerad. “Slippery Langauge and False Dilemmas: The Passing
Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper,” American Literature 75.4 (2003): 831.

21
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 105.
22
Ibid.

23
Richard L. Wright. “The Word at Work: Ideological and Epistemological
Dynamics of African American Rhetoric,” in Understanding African American
Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations eds. Ronald L.
Jackson II and Elaine B. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 2003): 95.
24
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 320.

25
Ibid., 317.

26
Ibid., 57.
27
Ibid, 112; 230.
28
Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); D. B. Buller and J. K. Burgoon.
“Interpersonal Deception Theory,” Communication Theory, 6 (1996): 203-242.
29
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000).
30
Kimberle Crenshaw. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A
Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and
Anti-Racist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory ed. D. K. Weisberg
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989): 57-81.

31
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 272-273.
32
Geoffrey Sandborn. “Mother’s Milk: Frances Harper and the Circulation of
Blood,” ELH 72.3 (2005): 695.
227

33
Oxford English Dictionary Online. “Eloquence,” (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50073349?query_type=word&queryword+
eloquence& (accessed 10 September 2007).
34
Marcus Tullius Cicero. De Oratore (London: Methuen & Co, 1904):
III.xiv.55.
35
Ibid.
36
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 273.

37
Giambattista Vico. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1944): 199.
38
Hugh Blair. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letteres. (Philadelphia: Porter
& Coates, 1873): 273.
39
Ibid, 264.
40
Marcia Alesan Dawkins and Marc Choueiti. “You Only Think You Know
Me: An Analysis of Passing in Prominent Hollywood Films,” (paper presented
at the annual international meeting for the International Association for Media
and Communication Research, Paris, France, July 23-25 2007).
41
Daniel G. Renfrow. “A Cartography of Passing in Everyday Life,” Symoblic
Interaction 20.4 (2004): 485-506.
42
D. B. Buller and J. K. Burgoon. “Interpersonal Deception Theory,”
Communication Theory, 6 (1996): 203-242.
43
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 245.
44
Marcia Alesan Dawkins and Marc Choueiti. “You Only Think You Know
Me: An Analysis of Passing in Prominent Hollywood Films,” (paper presented
at the annual international meeting for the International Association for Media
and Communication Research, Paris, France, July 23-25 2007).
45
Steven Mailloux. “Identity as Interpreted Being: The Fidelity of Rhetorically
Performing Race,” (paper presented at the annual meeting for the National
Communication Association, Chicago, Illinois, November 15-18, 2007).
228

46
W. Barnett Pearce and Stephen W. Littlejohn. Moral Conflict (Thousand
Oaks, California: Sage, 1997). In this text the authors explore forms of
eloquence appropriate to transcendent discourse. "To be eloquent,” they write,
“is to represent the highest form of expression within a frame of rules adopted
by a moral community. Within a moral community, eloquent speech elicits
attention, respect, and compliance. Between moral communities, however, it
can create frustration, hatred, anger, and even violence” (157). Transcendent
discourse requires an eloquence which bridges communities. Pearce and
Littlejohn argue that transcendent eloquence must be philosophical,
comparative, dialogic, critical, and transformative. As such, it must uncover
the communities' basic assumptions, develop categories to compare
incommensurate differences, seek to explore rather than convince, assess the
strengths and weaknesses of both worldviews, and seek to reframe the conflict
into more productive terms. Chapter eight examines three projects which have
modeled aspects of transcendent discourse.
47
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 243.
48
Ibid, 247-8.
49
Ibid, 249.
50
Ibid, 250.
51
Second Continental Congress. “Declaration of Independence Preamble 2.1,”
(1776): http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/340/Declaration.html (accessed 28
October 2007).
52
USA Patriotism. “The Pledge of Allegiance,” http://www.usa-
patriotism.com/reference/pledge_anthem.htm (accessed 28 October 2007).
53
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 251.
54
Barack Obama. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the
American Dream (New York: Random House, 2006).
55
Frances E. W. Harper. Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988): 253.
56
Ibid, 253.
57
Ibid, 254.
229

58
Ibid, 260.
59
Ibid, 260.
60
Vorris L. Nunley. “From the Harbor to Da Academic Hood: Hush Harbors
and an African American Rhetorical Tradition,” in African American
Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives eds. Ronald Jackson and Elaine
Richardson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004): 221-241.
61
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Class Passing: Social Mobility in Film and
Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).

62
Catherine Squires and Daniel C. Brouwer. “In/Discernible Bodies: The
Politics of Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 19 (2002): 283-311.
230
CHAPTER FIVE
“A CROW THAT DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO BE A CROW:”
READING THE HUMAN STAIN AND PASSING
FROM TEXT TO FILM

I

Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000) and Robert Benton’s cinematic
adaption (2003) are narratives in which no one is quite what he or she seems.
The novel, for which Roth won his second Penn Faulkner Award, rounds out a
trilogy that includes American Pastoral and I Married a Communist. In it Roth
features a character who remarks lamentably that, “with every passing day, the
words that I hear spoken strike me as less and less of a description of what
things really are.”
1
That character is the sister of Roth’s passing protagonist,
Coleman Silk. Her lament is one definition of passing in this text: language
transformed from description to doublespeak and apologia, measured by
standards of appropriateness rather than standards of truth. Roth seems to
envision passing in the way Plato does, as the mark of a society ruled by
rhetorical proscription and a measure of how far our actual experiences differ
from our ideal states. In other words, language, forced into the box of political
correctness, homogenizes thinking and establishes moral standards that
identify society and its members conservatively.
Roth’s point about the fall of language mirrors his tale about the fall of
Coleman Silk. Written as a modern day Greek tragedy, The Human Stain is set
during the Presidential impeachment hearings of the 1990s and during the post-
231
war Jim and Jane Crow era of the 1940s and 1950s. Silk is a classics professor
at Athena College, a black/mixed race man who was once well respected in his
small community before an accusation of racism separated from him the white
and Jewish identity he spent fifty years creating and projecting. According to
Roth’s narrative, passing is a form of human deliberation that is fundamentally
tragic because it is a function of who the passer is: a tragic mixed race (read
black) individual. It is a passer’s “human stain.” Therefore, passing, rather
than institutionalized racism, is the cause and effect of itself. As a
consequence we read about Silk’s life experiences as support for the
proposition that every union stimulates a drama of separation, a “we” and a
“they” for every “singular I.”
2

Benton’s film adds dramatic theatrical elements to the theme of reading
passing as a form of human deliberation. For example, take the film’s taglines.
“How far would you go to escape the past?” And, “don’t give away the secret
of the year’s most acclaimed mystery.”
3
These suggest the mysterious appeal
of passing as tragic pleasure, as an act of concealment and revelation
(aletheia), and as a lifestyle choice. The film is a detective story in which
audiences piece together the facts of Silk’s past. They observe Silk’s passing
while his secret is divulged in encounters among first, second, third, and fourth
personae. Audiences are then asked to marshal evidence for Silk’s passing
persona, to chart his trajectory, to bear witness to a story never told by its
232
protagonist, and ultimately to read passing as a form of transracial
entertainment not so different from minstrelsy.
In the pages that follow I will compare and contrast the ways in which
audiences are asked to read passing in both the novel and film. First, I will
begin with a brief discussion of the passing crow, the argumentative metaphor
for passing employed in both iterations of The Human Stain. Then, in a textual
analysis, I will connect this metaphor to what Roth calls “the human stain” and
to synecdoche and tragedy in the novel. Themes encountered include the tragic
mulatto as well as competing identifications, imitation, and choice (classical
era) as well as themes of order, purity, and performance (modern era). I build
on this analysis by exploring how the film is designed to sharpen audiences’
optical and ethical awareness of passing, mixed race identity, and minstrelsy in
the faces of segregation and suffering. Finally, I conclude by explaining how
these tragic representations of passing challenge contemporary society to flesh
out ways to think and talk about race from a fourth persona perspective, hoping
to stimulate institutional repair and transformation.
II
“Tragedy, as critics from Aristotle onward have noted, is a genre
fundamentally engaged with the complexities of responsibility, choice,
causation, and reasoning.”
4
The Human Stain, as novel and film, borrow and
retool Aesop’s fable, “The Crow and the Raven,” in order to shape the primary
argumentative metaphor for passing as tragedy. In this fable the crow seeks to
233
change its identity because of the ways in which others react to the raven it
resembles.
A crow became very jealous of a raven, because the latter
was…held in great respect by men. She was very anxious to get
the same sort of reputation herself; and one day, seeing some
travelers approaching, she flew onto a branch of a tree at the
roadside and cawed as loud as she could. The travelers were in
some dismay at the sound…till one of them…said to his
companions, “It’s all right, my friends…it’s only a crow and
that means nothing.” Those who pretend to be something they
are not, only make themselves ridiculous.
5

Aesop’s moral is tragic because it emphasizes the crow’s determination of its
own fate. The crow deserves ridicule because it presents a preposterous
persona that cannot be supported. A connotative reading suggests that the
crow neither knows nor esteems itself because it compares itself with a raven,
its so-called superior. Its inferiority complex in the “eyes of men” is a
condition it purports to escape by passing as a raven. This is its mistake. The
crow must be comfortable in its own skin and be willing to conform to the
“promise of the visible as an epistemological guarantee” in order to pass
effectively.
6
Additionally, the crow must be willing and able to stylize and
deliver an appropriate raven persona.

The insinuations are that it is possible to
pass effectively in so far as one projects the persona he or she believes in, and
that audiences cannot be persuaded by a passer who has no faith in the persona
projected. Aesop’s passer is ineffective and humiliated because audiences are
not duped. Instead they recognize and regard the crow as crow rather as raven.
234
As a result the crow retreats, never to be heard from again. It loses its ability to
communicate and therewith its credibility. In the process it appears ridiculous.
Compare these interpretations to the version presented in The Human
Stain. In this version we meet the crow in a pet shop cage.
The girl smiled and said…“Prince is the only bird that can
fly…He made a beeline for the door and went out into the trees.
There were three or four other crows that came. Surrounded him
in the tree. And they were going nuts. Harassing him. Hitting
him on the back. Screaming. Smacking into him and stuff. They
were there within minutes. He doesn’t have the right voice. He
doesn’t know the crow language. They don’t like him out there.
Eventually he came down to me because I was out there. They
would have killed him.” “That’s what comes from being hand-
raised,” said Faunia. “That’s what comes of hanging around all
his life with people like us. The human stain…” That’s how it
is.
7

Roth’s passing crow, Prince, is not only a nod to the tragic character Oedipus
but is the only bird caged in a pet shop because he is the only one that can fly.
He is both a captive and an outsider. However, he is also the only bird that can
possibly escape his present condition as prisoner. The reader first learns that
Prince attempts to hide his background by tearing down articles that tell his
origin story. His next escape attempt involves flight. He attempts to assimilate
with those he resembles by speaking the “crow language” in which he is not
fluent. Prince is banished because of his utterances. Therefore, he returns to the
pet shop and remains a jailbird because he cannot assimilate. His experience
proves that there exists no space for a crow that does not know how to be a
crow. This is because the very same mobility that creates possibilities for
passing as a wild crow can leave the domesticated crow with no recognizable
235
identity. The application to this study is that passing is a tragic act. As such it
is fundamentally deliberative, hinges on ethos, and is influenced by the
collective values and institutional order of Jim and Jane Crow segregation.
8

In both versions of this fable the crow is ultimately undone because of
its inability to sustain the persona it desires to project. In the Aesopic rendering
the crow’s voice confounds its appearance as a raven. Human audiences are
not duped. In Roth’s transcription the crow’s voice betrays the constraints of
its domesticated upbringing. Wild crows are not duped. In either case the
crow caws ineloquently with a voice that discloses its origins. These anecdotes
suggest that that passing is based as much on a passer’s eloquence, talent for
synecdochic identification, and confidence as it is on an audience’s ability to
read the performance.
9
These anecdotes frame passing in the novel and film as
tests of knowledge, character, and responsibility. These are tests passers and
audiences fail tragically.
As presented in The Human Stain, Silk is the crow passing in a Jim and
Jane Crow environment. This scenic relationship is no coincidence. The
setting requires Silk to engage in practical and political reasoning. Silk’s
movements are described as “swooping, almost like birds do when they fly
over land or sea and spy something moving, something bursting with life, and
dive down…and seize upon it.”
10
Swooping suggests passing quickly from one
state to the next. This strategy is most effective when Silk encounters
constraints of institutional segregation. As previous case studies indicate, the
236
lack of protection under the law and social stigma associated with blackness in
slavery and Jim/Jane Crow eras created the context for social inequality that
set The Human Stain. Textual analysis will show that Silk’s reasons for
passing are similar to the crow’s and are confirmed by social encounters in
which he is made to feel different from whites, and is “shut out of their world
by the vast veil.”
11

Likening Silk to the figure of the passing crow introduces important
questions for the study of passing in a segregationist setting. For instance, how
does tragedy allow us to read passing as unique expression of human
deliberation that conceals and reveals the institutional constraints that create it?
Or, what tensions are emphasized between on-stage minstrelsy and off-stage
“real world” Jim and Jane Crow practices? And, what does passing do? Does
it entertain? Does it make a person ridiculous as Aesop suggests? Does it
promote self-definition and collective discussion? I will elicit answers to these
questions in the section that follows by applying classical descriptions of
tragedy, the tragic mulatto, and Burke’s “paradox of purity” to Silk’s passing
in the novel and film.
12

III
Because Silk is the crow passing in a Jim and Jane Crow environment, he is a
synecdochic representative and a “rhetorical lens through which we read others
as well as ourselves. Or, better… [the] rhetorical figure with which we think
identity in public or private.”
13
He is at once a hero who defies racism and a
237
tragic character slain for his defiance. Like all acts of passing studied herein,
Silk’s is chiefly synecdochic. It is merely one manifestation of the practice
that stands in to represent the whole. As his story leaps off the page and to life
in film his acts of passing express as well as conceal his identity. Like any
classical tragedy Silk’s story is “the imitation of an action that is serious and
also, as having magnitude, complete in itself…with incidents arousing pity and
fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”
14
Moreover, his
story allows us to read passing as the result of complex deliberations and
interactions, whose roots can be found in an individualistic way of life and in
the consequences for that life. This tragic interext emphasizes the tensions
between collective political ethics and individual motives and desires, between
origins and personae, and between the need to choose an identity and the belief
that he has a choice.
A key aspect of this story is that Silk stands in ambivalent relation to
the tragedy of his historical and social setting. On one hand, he endures many
unfortunate occurrences that cause suffering. For instance, consider Roth’s
description of one of Silk’s initial humiliations. Silk goes about his Saturday
afternoon routine as a freshman at Howard University and is called a “nigger”
for the first time.
And…when he eagerly went off on Saturday with his
roommate…and they stopped in Woolworth’s to get a hot dog,
he was called a nigger. His first time. And they wouldn’t give
him the hot dog. Refused a hot dog at Woolworth’s in
downtown Washington, on the way out called a nigger, and, as
a result, unable to divorce himself from his feelings…In the
238
segregated South there were no separate identities, not even for
him...No such subtleties allowed, and the impact was
devastating. Nigger—and it meant him.
15

This incident indicates the untenable position he occupies in society. Silk
understands his blackness as the cause of his problems rather than the racist
Jim/Jane Crow system that imprisons him. Following this cultural logic Silk
interprets blackness as the cause rather than the effect of racism (and as a
dialectical rather than a positive term). He fails to understand, or perhaps
understands all too well, that the routinized behaviors at the heart of Jim/Jane
Crow subsidize his interest to possess whiteness. Feelings of anxiety and
personal doubt produced by inhabiting the social status of “nigger” spill into
and stain all of his activities. In order to achieve some sense of stability and
security he brackets out the aspects of his identity associated with blackness
and embraces the aspects associated with whiteness. He interprets strategically
that whiteness is a protective measure or insurance, a shield from degradation,
external domination, and a line of demarcation with regard to privilege,
protection, and full autonomous participation in mainstream U.S. society.
16
As
follows, the institutional priority of whiteness is upheld. Jim/Jane Crow
segregation laws support Silk’s interpretation of whiteness as privileged
identity by associating physical and psychological limitations with blackness
as its converse.
17

On the other hand, though Silk is presented as the suffering victim in
the tragedy he is also presented as the agent of tragic developments that
239
impede his success. This presentation implicates his ambiguous racial identity
in the danger he poses. By way of illustration, take Roth’s description of
passing as Silk’s ability to choose a racial identity because his own origins
seem ambiguous to audiences. This ability is discovered in Silk’s teenage
years. In October 1944 Silk passed as eighteen and then as white in order to
join the Navy. Roth explains that
he could easily lie about his age—to move his birth date back
by a month from November 12 to October 12, was no problem
at all…It didn’t immediately occur to him that, if he chose to,
he could lie about his race as well. He could play his skin
however he wanted, color himself just as he chose…it occurred
first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of
someone on the brink of committing his first great crime.
18

Passing is Silk’s “first great crime” because it evades the limits of the color
line and racial episteme. Evading these limits is the gateway to other “great
crimes.” But the question is crimes against whom? Are crimes committed
against audiences? Silk’s family? Silk himself? Are crimes against the color
line and the institution of segregation? Churning with anxiety about the
ramifications of this “crime,” Silk tries to settle the questions. These questions
are answered only as Silk’s persona as white and Jewish is constructed and
undone and as incongruities among appearance, truth, and origin are exposed.
In Chapter Three, we saw the power of theorizing passing as a crime of
identity and the ways in which identity is concerned with property and one’s
proper place, adjusted in and through the interplay of communication. This
kind of adjustment is supported and espoused first by Doc, Silk’s high school
240
boxing coach. “‘If nothing comes up,’ Doc said, ‘you don’t bring it up. You’re
neither one thing or the other…that’s the deal.’”
19
This “deal” transforms Silk
into an ambiguous agent who can choose to pass through the rigid and static
boundaries of racial identification because he can employ synecdochic
representation.
Even though Silk can harness ambiguity to pass as he chooses, his
passing remains a doomed effort to escape what the inescapable. This
depiction of passing is essentially tragic, presenting “an imitation of action and
life…of happiness and misery.”
20
Moreover, the depiction of passing as escape
also suggests the element of ‘pure escape’ that lies at the roots
of liberalism. And it suggests the paradox of ‘pure escape.’ For
in freeing oneself perpetually, one would in a sense remain
perpetually a prisoner, since one would never have perpetually
escaped.
21

Silk desired more than life could offer on the wrong side of the color line, he,
like Prince the crow, sought a life without physical, racial, or ideological
constraint. He wanted to be
as free as his father had been unfree. Free now…of the
impositions. The humiliations. The obstructions. The wound
and the pain and the posturing and the shame—all the inward
agonies of failure and defeat. Free instead on the big stage. Free
to go ahead and be stupendous. Free to enact the boundless,
self-defining drama of the pronouns we, they and I.
22

Ironically, this determination to be free culminates in tragedy as audiences
realize that he is “a man who is put into a box, is suffocating, and wants to
break free but…has forgotten how.”
23
Silk is presented as the agent of his own
demise.
241
Silk failed to realize that true freedom is not available to him because
he has not transcended race, but has traded one set of racial and behavioral
constraints for another. His mother expresses this beautifully when she
laments that he “is white as snow and…think[s] like a slave.”
24
This implies
that, despite social impetus, the tragedy of passing is inherently intrapersonal.
It stems from the fact that we are “inevitably stained creatures. Reconciled to
the horrible, elemental imperfection.”
25
The imperfection is revealed when
passers compare themselves to others and when audiences test and evaluate
passers’ performances and utterances in relation to exclusive and essential
categories, like raven and crow or white and black. The insecurity and
discomfort abetted by feeling rotten with imperfection fuel the passer’s self-
determined escape at the expense of others with whom he could identify,
thereby prolonging the tragedy.
Support for Roth’s rendition of passing as tragic act is provided by
Aristotle’s definition in De Poetica, because it is mimetic of life itself. The
Human Stain takes this interpretation a step further because Silk embodies and
exposes the tragedy. Silk’s is the story of a “fictional character who, through a
secondary process of characterization, makes his own life a fiction.”
26
This
imitation is valuable because it is a means by which to observe rather than
obscure truths, and to reveal the limits of human rationality and powers of
human art. Passing is situated as a gap filler, between Silk’s deliberately
formed opinions, judgments, and actions, and the narrative reversals and
242
judgments of necessity. As such its depiction has significant socio-
psychological, ethical, and rhetorical implications.
One socio-psychological implication is the invisible and inescapable
“human stain,” the secrets kept and divulged by third and fourth personae that
constitute the text of Silk’s life. The subtleties of this statement are such that
full quotation is in order. Roth explains that
we leave a stain, a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity cruelty,
abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be
here…it’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The
stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there.
The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that
precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and
perplexes all explanation and understanding.
27

The human stain signifies more than the melanin that arbitrarily colors the
skin. It reminds us “that there isn’t much more personal to us than our skin, or
that more plainly reflects our mortal condition.”
28
It also insinuates that
transgressions are never invisible even if they are triumphal. In other words,
challenging episteme and crossing symbolic and material borders requires
movement that changes how we look and how we sound and, therefore, can
never go unnoticed.
The metaphor of the human stain complicates the tragic metaphor of
the passing crow and its definition of passing. One complication is the problem
passing poses to the American tradition of transformation: “to become a new
being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama
that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive
243
demands.”
29
Passing is an ultimate transformation and one that disturbs the
hierarchies upon which identity politics are built. The “rapturous drive” it
requires is fueled by the assimilationist demand of the Horatio Alger myth,
abetting the liberal ideology of independent achievement.
The idea…occurs in an open society, where birth, family, and
class do not significantly circumscribe individual
possibilities…The belief that all men, in accordance with
certain rules, but exclusively by their own efforts, can make of
their lives what they will has been widely popularized.
30

Silk holds fast to this mythic belief even as it is confounded by the realities of
racial injustice he endures. He envisions himself as the quintessential
American, a “singular I” invested in the values of liberty: “self-reliance, self-
improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline…and hard work.
The values of thrift and personal responsibility…rooted in a…faith in free
will.”
31

The kind of liberty Silk seeks is equated with the identity and ideology
of the U. S. “default legal person” with statuses as white, male, heterosexual,
and citizen.
32
For these reasons Silk’s passing requires a passing on, or
symbolic death, thereby hiding and unveiling “a difference,” a flight from
oneself “which is the condition of all subjects positioning themselves as an
‘I.’”
33
Seen this way, his passing is an attempt to assimilate within a socio-
symbolic order and hierarchy built on ideal forms that preclude assimilation as
mixed race.
244
Silk’s best attempt at assimilation is passing as Jewish and maintaining
a balance between white privilege and a history of suffering and
discrimination. In order to lay claim to this identity he must sever ties with his
family of origin by way of the black mother. U.S. law made having a black
mother constitutive of one’s place in terms of liberty and access to opportunity.
This is most acute when, in a segregationist context, passing means moving
into a different spatial situation in which autonomous subjectivity is
established.
34
Cutting ties with the family can be interpreted as the final stage
of dénouement, or Silk’s transition from the black to the white sphere of social
activity.
From this perspective Silk’s passing is the decisive experience of
separation from the mother’s body that birthed him into a state of subjugation.
Thus, the black woman as mother is revealed as the source of his insecurity,
who
remains in last place within the color/economic hierarchy, her
disadvantaged status reinforcing the already existing prejudice
against her. She is always a fly in the buttermilk, imagined as
the least likely candidate for cultural assimilation, just as her
dark skin would seem to make it less likely that she could
reproduce white children or assure them a secure white identity.
It is this woman furthest from whiteness who is therefore
imagined as being also furthest from the advantages that
whiteness has to offer.
35

Sadly, it is through this experience of severing the metaphorical umbilical cord
that Silk inaugurates the space for his individual motivation and purification as
the “singular I.”
245
In order to purify himself his “change of identity, to be complete from
the familistic point of view,…require[s] nothing less drastic than the
obliteration of one’s whole past lineage”.
36
Here Silk is consubstantial with
the enemy on at least two levels. He is his own antagonist and must eradicate
his black side if he is to pass as white. As aforementioned, this was
accomplished partially by cutting ties with his black mother. Roth paints the
heartrending moment as matricide:
[M]urder the mother…that’s what he saw he was doing to
her…Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of
freedom! It would have been much easier without her. But only
through this test can he be the man he has chosen to be,
unalterably separated from what he was handed at birth, free to
struggle at being free like any human being would wish to be
free. To get that from life, the alternate destiny, on one’s own
terms, he must do what must be done.
37

Matricide extends Silk’s own mortification or symbolic suicide and acts as the
impetus for his rebirth. Going forward his black persona is dead and his white
and Jewish persona is born. He proceeds to use and enjoy his white reputation
along with his professional reputation as a professor of classics, “as white a
subject as there was in the curriculum.”
38
In fact, his elder brother Walter
believes that “Coleman is more white than the whites. There is nothing beyond
that…to say.”
39

Roth’s novel accentuates the deliberative qualities of passing by
emphasizing the strategy of purification, requiring Silk to eradicate the
disfavored part in order to father a new white and Jewish legacy.
40
Silk’s first
attempt at this was dating a Nordic girl named Steena for roughly two years
246
while he pursued his doctorate at New York University. During this time he
made no mention of his racial background as black. When he felt comfortable
enough in the relationship to introduce Steena to his family he brought her
home for Sunday dinner. The visit went well enough until they arrived at
Pennsylvania Station later that evening. It turns out that Silk, so enmeshed in
his thoughts and impressed by his self-determination and racial progress, made
an error in judgment. He failed to notice everyone’s discomfort. Steena, who
appeared to get along quite well with his sister and mother, broke down and
shouted, “I can’t do it!”
41
She could not associate with Silk now that she
uncovered and saw his racial stain.
This incident of peripety causes Silk to temporarily recross the color
line by “swooping upon” and dating a black woman, Ellie. The relationship is
doomed when she opens his eyes to the fact that he is not a unique “singular I,”
at least not in Greenwich Village, “the four freest square miles in America.”
42

He no longer occupies the only fourth persona position. She transforms him
into an in-group clairvoyant/third persona. When she shows him how many
mixed race people are passing as white in Greenwich Village, he soon realizes
that he is not “free to go ahead and be stupendous” as long as he is with Ellie.
43

Silk re-crosses the color line, this time permanently, by marrying a secular Jew
whose origins are also questionable. Silk’s marriage upholds the race-gender
intersectional exchange that is violated in passing. As a mechanism of
heterosexual reproduction his marriage verifies his white identity, creating the
247
possibility for its generational evidence. His fear of fathering dark children is
that they will “show…sign of his secret” thereby pointing to his family of
origin.
44
White children solidify the status of his new family, and his newly
created self, as white. Further, the advantage of claiming Jewish background
mitigates the “crazy fear that all he had ever wanted from Iris Gittelman was
the explanation her appearance could provide for the texture of their children’s
hair.”
45

As if Silk’s passing were not complicated enough, Roth introduces
additional ethical implications in his professional life. These ethical
implications are at the heart of Roth’s larger argument about passing as the
corruption of language that relies ironically on eloquence.
Coleman had taken attendance.., [and] as there were still two
names that failed to elicit a response by the fifth week of the
semester, Coleman in the sixth week, opened the session by
asking, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are
they spooks?”
46

This innocuously intended but ruinous utterance in a classroom, which Athena
College’s administration condemns as a racist epithet, is the beginning of
Silk’s renewed estrangement from the macroculture. It turns out that the
missing students are black. When they hear about Silk’s question, they file a
complaint charging him with racism. Silk explains that he was using “spooks”
as a synonym for phantoms and not as an epithet. He is banished by Athena
College, just as the ancient goddess Athena banished the crow that brought her
bad tidings in “Athena and Erichthonius,” and therefore transformed from
248
white to black in the audience’s eyes.
47
Thus, the scene of Silk’s final
destruction is set tragically.
The tragedy (and irony) is that Silk cannot denounce the charge without
unveiling the secret that he is a passer. In fact his motives for saying “spooks”
depend on his racial status as black or white. If he is black, then he is not a
racist and the word “spooks” is merely a synonym for phantoms. If he is white,
then he is a racist and the word “spooks” means that because of their dark skin,
these black students can blend into the night like ghosts. This is a reversal of
the traditional tests of will and character assigned to his persona as passer. If
he is black, then he is typically considered racist against or ashamed of black
people because he passes as white. If he is true to his white persona, then he is
true to himself and has no obligation to anyone other than himself; racist or
not. In the end he refuses to fight the charge thereby preserving the coherence
and credibility of his character as white and Jewish. As a consequence he dies
at the hands of an anti-Semite after having already committed metaphorical
suicide by choosing to pass in the first place.
The “spooks” episode is one among many that makes The Human Stain
a prime candidate for the study of passing as it pertains to rhetoric and to
tragedy as a clash between individual and collective values. Such study
involves the Burkean “paradox of purity” and the “dialectic of tragedy,”
whereby Silk is torn between what kind of action to take based on his personal
ethics or desires and what kind of action is aligned with the group of which he
249
was and/or is a member.
48
He is then forced to “‘suffer’ the kind of knowledge
that is the reciprocal of his act.”
49
Passing is framed as an epic conflict between
“I” and “we,” a series of deliberations and counter-deliberations that constitute
“his own inner being.”
50
In one sense, Silk’s passing can be considered a
matter of rampant individuation unchecked by communal values to apply to his
experiences. In another sense it can be argued that the very same forces
abetting individuation are also those that structure Silk’s life around a “we;”
the communal/collective values that limit opportunities for those who fall short
of the ideal images of proud and noble black person and mainstream default
persona as white male.
51

The value conflict exists on a second level, between competing
collective as well as individual values. Such collective values of mainstream
society dictate that as long as he asserts the black aspects of his subject
position, his life chances are limited. This is why he wants to escape.
Collective values inculcated by his family tell him to be proud of and assert his
(nearly invisible) blackness even though he interprets it as the source of his
problem in the context of segregation. In response he sets out to reinvent
himself in the ideal image of the default persona and eventually create a new
familial definition as white based on “his exhilarating notion of freedom.”
52
By
invoking such an individual ethic Silk rejects, displaces, and erases his original
familial background and collective values to become the first of his new line.
His passing, marriage, and eventual parenthood are socio-cultural entrance
250
tactics that support the material and symbolic purity of whiteness as white only
space.
This crossing out and crossing over is the plot’s complication because it
reintroduces individual values that are grounded in and defined by the subject
position of first-person I—Coleman Brutus Silk, professor of classics, the only
son of a Jewish-American bartender in East Orange, New Jersey. This singular
subjectivity, I, takes the form of a “palimpsest, representing the sum of all the
erasures and overwritings. And the body remembers.”
53
Silk’s body, the site of
his struggles, is a text capable of multiple and simultaneous readings, the site
upon which the recollections of his life are constructed. Therefore, it is only
when his body is dead that his story can be brought to life and even then only
in terms of fragmented memories and through the voice of another.
By way of flashbacks Roth articulates the “paradox of purity” as a
justification for Silk’s passing. Theoretically considered, the “paradox of
purity” implies that binary oppositions such as white/black or present/past are
functions of the negative as applied to a socially constructed border. Without
symbolic intervention one side cannot be more pure, absolute, or negative than
the other. Symbolic intervention makes such division possible, powerful, and
seemingly natural. As a result we are or are not. We are black or white,
embodied or “spooks,” crows or ravens, each of us embroiled in logics of
comparison and insecurity.
251
Framed tragically, passing forces the passer and audiences to grapple
with the material circumstances that motivate comparison, deliberation, and
action. Its use invites the audience to watch what happens when Silk roots out
psychological demons. However, the text is an exposition of how wrong he is.
This brings us to the questions posed by Aesop’s and Roth’s figure of the
passing crow. Does passing make a person ridiculous? Does is make race
ridiculous? Or, does it promote self-definition and collective discussion?
Silk’s passing is proof of his deep knowledge of how race functions in
Jim/Jane Crow society and of his deliberative capacity.
54
Silk is a person
whom society identifies as black but who is not motivated to represent himself
in those terms. Therefore he is a threat to the social order. Although he
explains that “all he wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not
black, not even white—just on his own and free,” he equates freedom with
whiteness and blackness with constraint.
55
In the end he must support his acts
of passing symbolically.
56
As a passer occupying the liminal space between
white and black Silk has several options. Symbolic action could take the form
of reasoning that he is motivated by the oppressive circumstances often
experienced by black people and is seeking an escape by ascribing to the daily
routine practices labeled “white only.” This resolves his paradox because Silk
is motivated by blackness as a subordinate position in biracial hierarchy.
Symbolic action could also exacerbate the tension between the collective
political ethic of “we” to be faced by not passing as white and being identified
252
as black versus the opportunity to find and develop a “singular I” as a white
man. These acts can be considered protests against a racist biracial hierarchy
that fail to question the categories themselves.
Symbolic action could also account for a passer’s decision to exercise
the freedom and will to reject the order and hierarchy that require monoracial
identification and replace it with another order that uses more inclusive terms
as bases for individual and collective identification. Symbolic action could also
temporarily substantiate an act of passing by changing the positions that
dialectical terms occupy in a hierarchy while serving the interests of the
hierarchy itself.
57
Silk’s choices among these alternatives communicate that the
question “who am I” is made meaningful in particular ways depending upon
the context, time, space, and place in which that “I” is instantiated.
While my comments thus far have focused on passing as personal and
tragic act in the novel, I now turn to the performance of passing in the
cinematic adaptation of The Human Stain. In the following sections I chart
Silk’s passing as it relates to exposed racial tensions of the Jim/Jane Crow
regime and exposed transracial tensions of minstrelsy. I explore more
specifically the ways in which synecdoche and tragedy intersect with
environment of Jim/Jane Crow to illustrate and infringe upon racial
categorization and the passer’s ethos.

253
IV
If the literary version of The Human Stain is a tragedy through which we
imagine Silk’s undoing, then the cinematic version is a detective story in which
we watch Silk’s emergence. Audiences observe Silk’s passing while his secret
is divulged in the movement among second and third personae, who ultimately
refuse to grant him access to their social worlds. As in the novel, audiences are
asked to read racial passing as tragic act. However, in the film they are also
asked to watch Silk suffer a triple exclusion as a consequence of passing:
exclusion from the white body politic, from the black community, and from the
realm of the living. These exclusions are the culminations of social anxiety
over passing and mixed race identity. As Boltanski reminds us, the fact that
audiences become spectators to the exclusion and suffering faced by a mixed
race individual brings with it the moral question of what they can and should
do about it.
The novel focused primarily on Silk’s passing as white and left the
subject of Silk’s appearance to readers’ imaginations. The film complicates the
story because it is a visual medium. Rendering Silk visible is a symbolic
gesture that some critics have argued can be likened to blackface used in
minstrel shows. The film dramatizes the notion that purities or impurities
visible to the naked eye are rarely, if ever, accurate measures of character. By
rendering Silk’s stain invisible (by casting Sir Anthony Hopkins as the elder
Silk) the film actually exposes it. In so doing the film reverses the logic of
254
traditional racial performance in a segregated environment. The film assists
audiences in seeing multiple dimensions of passing, their own reactions to
these dimensions, and the fragmentation and misrecognition employed to
highlight racial tensions.
These tensions are reflected by the choice in casting Hopkins as the
elder Silk and mixed race actor Wentworth Miller as the younger Silk.
According to Plaszewski,
reviewers nationwide have been distracted by the producers’
decision to cast Hopkins, a Welsh actor, in the lead
role…Casting Hopkins was courageous, because it requires the
audience to transcend significant barriers with regard to
preconceived notions of racial distinctiveness within
mainstream film. And Hopkins’ captivating performance as a
man struggling with self-imposed identity in the face of defeat
is flawless—regardless of the actors “authentic” racial
background.
58

Plaszewski’s interpretation is important and correct from a fourth persona
perspective because it implies that although the performative figure and setting
of Jim/Jane Crow made segregation visible, the passer’s social performance
made integration an invisible and consistent occurrence. However, she fails to
completely address the claims of those who interpret Hopkins’s performance
as a potential form of minstrelsy.
Some suggest that Hopkins’s performance in the film a modern day
version of minstrelsy minus the blackface. This is because the character he
plays is a light-skinned African American who transforms his race from black
to white unquestionably. Believing Hopkins’s performance requires some
255
casuistic stretching on the part of the audience.
On one hand the audience watches the
subversion of whiteness. On the other hand the
audience sees an assertion of white privilege. In
this way Hopkins’s casting reflects how “white
culture has resided in blindness about its
dependency on represented (and thus effaced)
black bodies.”
59
According to Lott, this kind of
cultural expropriation has historically divested mixed race and African
Americans of controlling interest in their own representation.
60
When viewed
from this perspective critics assert that the film appears to deal more with the
familiar theme of segregation’s effects on Silk and those he touches and less
with illuminating segregation’s institutional nature.
Benton tries to overcome these critiques by asking audiences to
suspend disbelief and watch a form of, what might be called, racial drag. In
this way they can embrace Hopkins playing Silk as mixed race, white, and
Jewish even though they know he is not, just as historical audiences embraced
many white and Jewish minstrels’ performances in blackface (e.g., Al Jolson in
The Jazz Singer). In fact Miramax, the company that produced the film, primed
audiences and reviewers to ensure this specific read:
Miramax…sent special instructions to movie critics to make
sure that all of them knew about so-called ‘passing for white’
and would describe the otherwise white protagonist…as a
‘light-skinned black man’ who was guilty of the heinous crime
Figure 8: Hopkins as elder Silk
256
of claiming the ‘honor’ of being white when he was tainted by
the blood of the inferior black race.
61

Many reviewers and audience members found this difficult because they
“seemed to think that someone who was passing (as white) should look visibly
black.”
62
Unlike those performers whose comedy in blackface defined
minstrelsy and employed blackness as the face for their own expressions,
Silk’s tragic ending underscores the reality that those who passed from black to
white will always remain tragically stained. The stain is set as Silk’s life
unravels according to the template of the tragic mulatto, who, like Aesop’s
crow, is always made ridiculous by his deceptions. If the medium is the
message, then the film displays something the novel does not dare whisper:
that Jim and Jane Crow caricature lives on, making blackness meaningful only
as, Fanon asserts, it falls short in “comparison.”
63
The definition of
black/mixed race as incomplete and stained in the context of racist segregation
is justification for the passer’s acts.
The film argues microscopically for the connections between the ways in
which an individual passes to connect his experiences as a black/mixed race
person to his present and future experiences as a white and Jewish person. It
also sparks collective discussion as it argues macroscopically for the
connections between particular Jewish and African American responses to
American demands of assimilation. From this perspective Jewish minstrel
performers and passers represent opposing sides of the “passing crow” story.
Whereas many minstrel performers reinvented themselves through black
257
musical traditions and became Jewish-American success stories, Silk, an
African American who reinvents himself as white and Jewish, is destroyed for
abandoning the sounds of his original community, racial identity, and past.
The juxtaposition of the elder Silk played by Hopkins and the figure of
the minstrel alluded to above elides a post-race perspective. Instead, it invites
a connotative reading—that mediated representations and perceptions of race
and passing have not resulted in progress but continue to (re)produce the
petrified positions of race and racial inequity. But what does this mean for this
reading of Silk’s passing as a reversal of the traditional transracial
entertainment or performance of minstrelsy in a Jim and Jane Crow setting?
For one, it points to the material and symbolic aspects of segregation in
the popular invention of a nineteenth-century white minstrel performer Thomas
“Daddy” Rice, whose performances birthed the character of “Jim Crow.”
64
In
so far as these minstrel performances were supposedly derived from reality
they provided reasons in support of the social conditions of segregation. These
social conditions justified several aspects of minstrel performance: they
reminded audiences that the performers were really white; they reminded
audiences of the true nature of black people and, hence, that they were
incapable of portraying themselves; they supported the idea that blacks who
defied these stereotypes, if they existed at all, were exceptional and not
ordinary; and they defined the space between whiteness and blackness as one
of imitation and comedic entertainment or tragic undoing. However, the
258
imitation inherent in the blackface of minstrel performance also pushed back
against segregationist rules and conditions. Lott explains:
to the extent that such acts merely seemed, they kept white
involvement in black culture under control, indeed facilitated
that involvement; but the power disguised by the counterfeit
was also often invoked by it, suggesting the occasional
ineffectiveness, the mere seeming of the counterfeit itself.
65

This reading suggests a fundamental paradox of minstrelsy and/or passing
either as white or black. Namely, that the so-called counterfeit performance
enhances and undermines the so-called legitimate article from which its acts
are appropriated.
Second, the film exposes distinct ramifications of racial passing for white
artists like Jolson and Hopkins and black and mixed race artists like Miller, the
actor who played the young Silk. Ironically, for the waves of Jewish
immigrants in the early twentieth century blackface was not interpreted as a
denial of ethnicity but rather as a technique to translate it to American culture
writ large. Howe writes, “black[face] became a mask for Jewish
expressiveness, with one woe speaking through the voice of another.”
66
These
portrayals were, for the most part, demeaning to black people and their cultural
expressions and equated their experiences with a joyous misery. Yet it is
argued that they were also part of an intra-cultural conversation about the
status of Jewish identity in America.
67
While minstrel performers traded white
and black faces for social, economic, and cultural gain, U. S. popular culture
has never been as kind to mixed race passers who exploit the in-between. In its
259
destruction of Silk The Human Stain places this social fact before the
audience’s eyes, reminding them that when whites don blackface the result is
entertaining, but when black and mixed race characters project white personae
they are isolated.
Third, it means that passing can be read as an inverse of a particular
strand of assimilation via minstrel performance. This is a vague connection
made in the novel because Roth’s primary concern is how an individual
expresses Jewish identity when he is not affiliated authentically with it.
However, his fiction undergoes a doubling process whereby Roth, a self-
identified Jewish man, writes as Silk, applying and then removing his own
symbolic blackface only to reapply it posthumously to his character. In this
sense Roth’s own Jewish American identity becomes a means of cultural
translation for the passer, a reversal of the ways in which African American
identity and cultural practices served as the face and sound of Jewish American
cultural expression in minstrel performance.
The film does make this connection when the elder Silk hears a Berlin
song and says, “that’s Irving Berlin. I hear that and everything in me just sort
of unclenches, and the wish not to die, never to die, becomes almost too great
to bear.”
68
This connection to Berlin, a man who stands in synecdochic
fashion for many white and Jewish entertainers who reinvented their identities
by way of black musical traditions, reverses and reflects Silk’s motives for and
acts of passing—when the elder Silk embodies the fourth persona he “becomes
260
the other to himself, in order to ensure the same benefits as other, who
historically performed” him.
69
He becomes the materialization of the final
transition from blackness to whiteness, thereby undercutting the logic of
minstrel performance made literal by the minstrel’s ability to unmask his true
white identity. The elder Silk cannot unmask his true identity as black and
expect to live on.
The juxtaposition of passing and minstrelsy in the film embeds Silk’s
passing in the historical figure of “Jim Crow,”
70
a theatrical invention whereby
a (usually) white body exaggerates and exhibits blackness. This figure became
a naturalized colloquialism representing institutionalized racism. As the color
line was cemented the figure of Jim Crow testifies to the fact that institutional
proscription reinforces the historical functions of rhetoric in the production of
race as naturalized distinction—tying the paradox of purity to epistemology
and biology. Additionally, the theatrical figure and institutional regime of
Jim/Jane Crow grounds the liminal space between whiteness and blackness in
mimetic ideologies of assimilation that are deliberated tragically and
performed mysteriously by Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. Under
Benton’s direction, Miller plays out the mystery as a series of spatial
intermissions between a remembered black world and the promise of a white
and Jewish world, a space in which Silk learns the logic of racial passing—
how, when, and why to lighten up. Miller’s performance also exposes the
difference between the elder and the young Silk by performing the mimetic
261
comparison that catalyzes the
paradox of purity and imbues
passing with symbolic and
material significance. Miller
explains this significance as
part of a mixed race identity.
He says that
there is the sense of being between communities and you
sometimes wonder if you don’t have to answer to any group or
interest, that you're some sort of racial Lone Ranger, but the
flipside of that is that a racial community, functioning at its
best, provides not only a sense of identity…but a sense of
security and support. When I run into trouble, what group will
rally to my defense, come to my aid? The answer, and it’s scary,
might be no one.
71

The film places this social fact before the audience’s eyes, reminding them that
both racial “exigencies found their conjunction in” the passer (the purity of
white-only and the impurity of colored) “in all their vehemence, on the move,
akin in the common need of” one another.
72
Passers are “whipsawed by the
inimical teeth of this [racialized] world. By the antagonism that is the world.”
73

It is for this reason that when whites don blackface the result is often
considered entertaining, but when African American and mixed race characters
project white personae they are exiled from the black community and expelled
from the mainstream white body politic.
As an example, take the vignette in which the elder Silk (played by Sir
Anthony Hopkins) remembers the time he and Steena went to a record store to
Figure 9: Miller as younger Silk
262
purchase Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. This vignette is indicative of
the passer’s constant fear of being outed. Embodying the fourth persona he
remembers himself as the young Silk, who the audience watches as he enters
the store in which a black saleswoman immediately recognizes and stares at
him incredulously. She approaches him and says:
Woman: “Did you go to East Orange High?”
Silk: “Yes.”
Woman: “I thought you looked familiar. Charlie Hamilton
is my cousin.”
Silk: “It’s been a while. How is Charlie? How’s he
been?”
Woman: “Good. Actually, he’s getting married.”
Silk: “Good for him.” “Now, the Rachmaninoff
please.”
Woman: “Is that your girlfriend?”
Silk: “Yes. Yes it is.” (Change of tone). “Look.
Maybe I should come back some other time.
Then we can talk. Okay?”
Woman: “Fine. Here. That’ll do the trick a lot better than
Rachmaninoff.”
(She glances over at Steena, summing her up in
one fell swoop and hands him a jazz record
instead).

As another iteration of Aesop’s fable, this exchange reiterates the central
theme of the narrative: that Silk’s decision to protect his persona as white and
Jewish depends on what he says and upon who is able to see, hear and/or read
it. Silk’s acts of passing inevitably stain those around him by requiring either
their attention and complicity or ignorance and deception. Accordingly, the
interaction is marked by Silk’s inability to sustain eye contact with the black
saleswoman because of their mutual recognition. All the while Steena (his
white girlfriend) stands behind them in a listening booth smoking a cigarette
263
and watching. She is unable to hear the interaction because she wears
headphones.
In what Robinson refers to as a “spectatorial triangle,” Steena
resolidifies her position as the second persona or dupe by reading Silk
metonymically as a white and Jewish man. Steena, unconsciously presuming
mimesis and facilitating her persona as the dupe, reads Silk’s white appearance
as the indicator of his internal and authentic whiteness. The saleswoman, on
the other hand, represents the third persona who reads the tension between
Silk’s assumed authentic black identity and what she believes is his
performance of white identity metonymically. These competing points of view
are linked to each one’s ability to hear what Silk says and to judge the image
he presents accordingly. The film’s viewing audience and the elder Silk
comprise the fourth personae, who keep the secret and watch as the elder Silk
is humiliated for his acts of passing as white and Jewish.
Silk’s passing also complicates the symbolic and material
representations of Jim/Jane Crow because he is motivated by its order and
metonymic logic.
74
As passer Silk occupies an “ideological null zone,” a
liminal space within the biracial hierarchy and order.
75
In sustained acts of
passing Silk experiences shame and guilt because he cannot express himself in
terms of his full complexity. For instance, Silk was tempted to share his secret
with his wife after the birth of their youngest white child
as though the battle that is each person’s singular battle could
somehow be abjured, as though voluntarily one could pick up
264
and leave off being one’s self, the characteristic, the immutable
self in whose behalf the battle is undertaken in the first place.
76

In the end he was “saved…by the wisdom that says, ‘Don’t do anything’” and
unwilling to jeopardize his authorized and embodied evidence of whiteness
(since his children were issued white birth certificates).
77
Although he seemed
secure in his persona he was never able to communicate openly with either his
white or his black families. This inability to communicate is not only
reminiscent of the passing crow, but is also reinforced by Silk’s elder brother
Walter’s demand that he disappear, “Never. Don’t you dare ever show your
lily-white face around that house again!”
78
Silk is imprisoned indefinitely on
the white side of the color line.
In disappearing across the color line, becoming a “spook” himself, Silk
purifies his relationship to the black-or-white-only system of racial
identification by becoming a patriarch of a white Jewish family. This
purification process is an ironic combination of victimage, scapegoating, and
mortification because he kills a part of himself that he feels is really someone
else. This is epitomized when the younger Silk pulverizes a black opponent in
the boxing ring and refers to him as a “nigger.” This pivotal moment is critical
because it purifies Silk from blackness by calling it out in someone else. It also
signals his redemption by whiteness. From this point on he is redeemed and
operates within the original order from a subject position that is not rejected by
mainstream society, one that is even deemed superior. However, remaining in
conversation with Aesop’s fable Roth provides an alternative ending. His
265
explanation of Silk’s passing as a disappearing act, an attempt to resolve the
“paradox of purity,” yields the final evaluation that “all the cleansing is a joke.
A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is
the quest to purify, if not more impurity?”
79
We are all, it seems, ridiculous,
merely “perpetual prisoners” of the “shameless impurity [that]…confounded
America” during the post-war Jim/Jane Crow era.
80
In this sense Roth is
exposing a fallacy inherent in episteme, as imposes stability on categories that
are fundamentally unstable and hides the operations through which the
appearance of stability is created. Passing dramatizes the operations that create
purity and stability.
To summarize, passing works on two interconnected levels in literary
and cinematic versions of The Human Stain. On one level it is conceptualized
as a means of constituting, maintaining, and mobilizing identity. This identity
is materialized in the passer’s self-determined lifestyle and in the “stain” or
legacy he leaves behind.
81
At the same time passing is profoundly active on
the symbolic level. It engages aletheia to illuminate some things and hide
others. It emphasizes the ways in which racial categories of white and black
borrow style and delivery from each other in order to authorize their own
hierarchical positions. As a vehicle for delivering both symbolic and material
aspects of passing, neither the novel nor the film is inherently teleological,
demonstrates a priori truths, or arrives at fixed conclusions. In fact, the
266
quintessential characteristic of each is in its uses of passing to rearrange ideas
and bodies with which people are familiar in order to expose new possibilities.
One possibility discussed has been the film’s displays of the
relationship between passing and minstrelsy. This relationship adds depth and
complexity to Aesop’s moral—that “those who pretend to be something they
are not only make themselves ridiculous.” Silk is far from ridiculous. In many
respects he is an all too real catalyst for collective discussion. This is because
the color line is drawn on his own body continually setting the human stain,
and burying him in a casket of self-consciousness and secrecy. What he
appears to want most in life, the independence to be set free in the world, is
precisely what imprisons him. Like the crow his sacrifice is his ability to
communicate. He is ultimately unable to accept that which he most desires—
affection, notoriety, and consolation—because he is like Aesop’s crow, out on
a limb reciting Sophocles and Homer ineloquently, all the while paralyzed
because he will never know exactly how his caws are read and interpreted by
his audiences. This is his ultimate tragedy.
Another possibility is generated by a fourth persona perspective. From
this perspective passing can be read as tragedy and as an “enriching, active
alternative to an either-or model of reasoning,…[that] enlarges the possibilities
for communication.”
82
Passing is presented as entertainment, diversion, as
means of social critique, and as the universal experience used to deal with
otherness: either from the gods, from fellow citizens, from ourselves, or from
267
socio-political discourse itself. It is, in part, because of its universality that both
versions of The Human Stain remain rich and important sites for rhetorical
criticism and analysis.
The novel and film are valuable contributions to the fourth persona
because they raise audiences’ awareness about passing and, by consequence,
mixed race identification. Whether we empathize or agree with his actions,
Silk does challenge racial episteme. In doing so he depicts the lengths to
which some passers go to extricate themselves from the suffering imposed by
the color line and shape an ideal “American” identity. In so doing the novel
and film contribute to the ways in which we can collectively work through
issues of legitimacy based on racial identification as either black or white only.
This has involved taking up the subject to of passing to encourage
understanding of how the passer functions in popular culture as a restrained
figure, and how disciplining that figure might constitute an epistemic
acknowledgment of racial limits.
In this chapter I have discussed passing as a tragic act based on the
passer’s ethos and capacity for deliberation. I have also focused on the ways in
which passing engages aletheia, by concealing and revealing important aspects
of identities, personae, cultural practices, and social institutions (i.e., Jim/Jane
Crow and minstrelsy). I will now conclude by suggesting some implications
of passing for collective communication and for the future of assessing
transracial entertainment.
268
V
The Human Stain stands as a powerful critique of mid-twentieth century
passing in the context of juridical, political, and cultural policies that
demanded racial segregation. It also suggests that Hollywood’s traditional
white frame is implicated in films that foreground mixed race actors and/or a
transracial aesthetic. Audiences are invited to reexamine everything they think
they know about mixed race representation and passing to better understand
the meanings of these phenomena when taken from history and law to
literature, film, and popular culture. As text and film, the story asks audiences
to affirm and reproduce as well as challenge and undo what we already know
about racial perception, classification, and hierarchy. My analysis suggests
that a tragic frame for passing encourages an allegiance to racial episteme and
reliance on the process of racialization that ignores the nuance of mixed race
identification.
It is for this reason that The Human Stain unfolds as a series of
complex tragedies that hinge on peripety and discovery through memory, and
are awakened by something unveiled or heard through aletheia. Its renditions
of passing are enacted by the characters enmeshed in a “paradox of purity” and
social order in need of catharsis.
83
Both versions of The Human Stain take on
the possibilities and dangers posed by those who pass and appear to be whom
society assumes they cannot be. As a process, passing suggests that identity is
both poetic and architectonic, an interpretation of whom and why we are and
269
of that which we are not. It also suggests that the greatest motivation for
passing is the impossible search for empowerment and liberty. This reading
confirms the intersections of synecdoche with irony, appropriation, eloquence,
and tragedy exhibited in the cases examined previously by showing that
passing is a way to achieve exceptional results by persuading dupes to see and
accept one as ordinary. It reveals the role of the third persona, in seeing two
truths about the passer’s identity. Finally, it highlights the wider perspective
provided by the fourth persona, who sees selves implicated in all the personae
(passer’s, second, third, fourth) as they affect life choices and are shaped and
reshaped by the institutions of law, custom, and family.
As argued here and in each of the previous chapters, passing is invoked
as a rhetorical response to the absence of fully representative identities and the
suffering and insecurities that ensue. It is a rhetorical response to racial
tensions raised by personal motivations and the institution of Jim and Jane
Crow segregation. At the same time passing reminds us of the importance of
contingency and context, that arguments have rhetorical meanings only within
the context of specific selves and specific situations. Like segregation itself,
passing is a rhetorical exchange, a struggle between performance (symbolic
social construction), essence/substance, and access to resources that affect life
chances (materiality). Unlike segregation, however, passing enables a
synecdochic both/and rather than a metonymic either/or understanding of race
and racial identification. Further, passing implicates audiences, causing them
270
to examine their own collective and individual motivations based on the
categories with which they identify and identify others. Consequently,
audiences are challenged by questions of identity and distance. The question
of identity is how to relate and respond to a society in which people are told
they are free, but cannot disambiguate themselves from racial categories that
imprison them? The question of distance is how the fourth persona’s distance
from the passer, second and third personae, and the author or director who
presents the tragic story can generate enough desire to inspire action?
These questions are addressed when passing is seen as cathartic. It can
stimulate institutional change when passers are discovered, creating an
exogenous shock in the minds of audiences and to their material worlds. In this
case discovery catalyzes the development of new justifications or new reasons
for future interpretations and identifications of race. It also suggests that
passing unearths and destabilizes the ideological and epistemological
foundations of race and racial performance, affording passers the opportunity
to change the institution from within by creating endogenous reinterpretations
of the material realm that produce new justifications or new reasons for future
actions (e.g., new legislation and interpretations of race like the 2000 Census;
or new post-race and anti Affirmative Action legislation).
I will address the nature of passing as an agentive rhetorical force in the
final chapter, describing it as its own rhetorical model. Passing will be
described as a dramatization of the role of social performance in “a theater,
271
where the thin line of interaction between actors and audiences becomes
inextricably and authentically blurred. Where roles are interchanged and
intertwined in courageous, encouraging, and compassionate ways. Where
everyone can win” when catharsis is achieved, “the play is cancelled,”
84
and
the theater is forever destroyed.

272

CHAPTER FIVE REFERENCES

1
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
328.

2
Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969): 22.

3
“The Human Stain,” Internet Move Database.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308383/taglines (accessed 16 September 2007).
4
Simon Goldhill. “The Language of Tragedy: Rhetoric and Communication,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy ed. P. E. Easterling.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 132.

5
Aesop. “The Crow and the Raven,” in Aesop’s Fable translated by V. S.
Vernon Jones, ed. George Stade, (New York: Fine Creative Media Inc., 2003):
226.
6
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993): 4.
7
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
242.
8
Jim/Jane Crow provides the material and symbolic boundaries of access and
opportunity necessary for Roth’s representation of passing. This racist
institution capitalized on the use of skin color as shorthand for character
content. Further, segregation imposed legal punishments on those who
consorted across racial lines in public and private settings. The Plessy decision
culminated in a series of laws that restricted the equal access of people labeled
non-white to many public areas, accommodations, and modes of
transportation. In accordance with these laws, public officials used signs and
symbols to create “Whites Only” and “Colored” spaces. These symbolic
restrictions were reinforced by acts of physical intimidation that dominated the
racial scene. In turn, the material space created between black and white in
legal and social spheres of influence created a symbolic expanse “which
necessitated the sudden leap which passing represented.” Therefore, as Roth’s
passing crow suggests, “without representing Jim Crow…it is impossible to
represent passing.” Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance
into the Visible.” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993): 97.
273

9
Amy Robinson. “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of
Common Interest,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 716. In this section of the essay
Robinson discusses reading as a “shift from a politics of substance to a politics
of optics” wherein “identity itself no longer possesses the reassuring signs of
ontological distinction that we are accustomed to reading.”
10
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
126.
11
W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage Books,)
190: 9.
12
Roth’s and Benton’s passing protagonist, Coleman Brutus Silk, is a
character whose name provides physiognomic and historical clues to the secret
of his identity. His first name “Coal-Man” implies that his first racial identity
was black. “Brutus reminds the reader of Marcus Junius Brutus, an ancient
Roman statesman who led a conspiracy to assassination Julius Caesar. This
middle name implies that the next phase of Silk’s identification process
involves treason and murder. His surname, “Silk,” is a substance that may be
used to capture prey or to build a protective case or cocoon. This name, the
only familial marker he retains upon deciding to pass, is, as he later explains to
his white children, the shortened version of his fictional grandparents’ name
from “somewhere in Russia,” the Silberzweigs. It is the sealant that secures his
transition from black to Jewish and white. Many critics speculate that Silk’s
story and character are inspired by the life of Anatole Broyard.
13
Steven Mailloux. “Thinking with Rhetorical Figures: Performing Racial and
Disciplinary Identities in Late-Nineteenth-Century America,” American
Literary History 18.4 (2006): 699.
14
Aristotle. “De Poetica,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Modern Library, 2001): 1460.
15
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
102-103.
16
For more information on the jroles of whiteness please see: Cheryl I. Harris,
“Whiteness as Property,” Harvard L. Rev. 106.8: 1706-1791 (1993). George
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998). Richard Dyer. White (London and New York:
Routledge, 1997). David Roedigger. The Wages of Whiteness (New York:
Verso, 1991). Mary Waters. Ethnic Options: Choosing Ethnic Identities in
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
274

17
Zora Neale Hurston. “Crazy for This Democracy, “I Love Myself When I Am
Laughing…And Then Again hen I am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora
Neale Hurston Reader ed. Alice Walker. (New York: The Feminist Press,
1979): 167-168. Hurston writes, “these Jim Crow Laws have been put on the
books for a purpose, and that purpose is psychological. It has two edges to the
thing…By physical evidence, back seats in trains, back doors of houses,
exclusion from certain places and activities, to promote in the mind of the
smallest white child the conviction of First by Birth, eternal and irrevocable
like the place assigned to the Levites by Moses over the other tribes of the
Hebrews…By the same means, the smallest dark child is to be convinced of its
inferiority, so that it is to be convinced that competition is out of the question,
and against all nature and God.” In this excerpt Hurston explains the socio-
psychological and ethical ramifications of segregation. She also argues that
legal segregation created a consubstantial relationship between particular
African American and Jewish cultural and historical experiences, a point I will
return to in the next section of this chapter.
18
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
109.
19
Ibid., 98-99.
20
Aristotle. “De Poetica,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle. ed. Richard
McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001): 1460.
21
Kenneth Burke. Grammar of Motives (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1969): 36.
22
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
109.
23
Wentworth Earl Miller III, interview by Walter Chaw, “Miller’s Crossing:
Filmfreak Central Interviews Actor Wentworth Miller about The Human
Stain.” http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/notes/wmillerinterview.htm (accessed
15 September 2007).
24
Ibid., 139.
25
Ibid., 242.
26
Thomas Falkner. “Novel Approaches to the Classics: Part III.” Amphora
(2006): 3. www.apaclassics.org/outreach/amphora/2006/Amphora5.1pdf
(accessed 10 March 2007).
275

27
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
241-242. Italics in original.
28
Mike Mason. The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and
Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything (Wheaton: Crossway Books,
1994): 43.
29
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
342.
30
Robert S. Weiss. The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to
Norman Vincent Peale (New York: Basic Books, 1969): 3.
31
Barak Obama. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American
Dream (New York: Random House, 2006): 54.
32
Susana Blumenthal. “The Default Legal Person,” UCLA Law Review 54.1
(2007): 1-115.
33
Deberati Sanyal. “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing, Culpability in
Holocaust Criticism,” Representation 79 (2002): 11.
34
Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991); Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life
(Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
35
Harryette Mullen. “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of
Whiteness,” Diacritics, 24.2-3 (1994): 73.
36
Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form Third Edition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973): 37.
37
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Company):
138-139.
38
Ibid., 336.
39
Ibid., 336.
40
Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form Third Edition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973): 37.
41
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Company,
2000): 125.
276

42
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Company,
2000): 135.
43
Ibid., 109.
44
Ibid., 177.
45
Ibid., 136-137.
46
Ibid., 6.
47
In Greek mythology, the Goddess Athena hid the monster-child
Erichthonius, created when Hephaestus, in his lust, spilled his seed on the
ground (Gaia). When Erichthonius is discovered three women kill themselves.
A crow brings this news to Athena, and for being the bearer of bad tidings, she
turned crows from white to black—blackness as punishment, a curse. The
Human Stain provides a novel spin on the legend. Athena (the college) is the
refuge of Silk, the hidden “monster,” until Bill Clinton in his lust spills his
seed on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, thus creating a climate of political
correctness so severe that it forces Silk out of his hiding place. The film
explains that it is after Silk reveals his secret to his girlfriend Faunia that the
two become truly intimate. They are killed almost immediately afterward.
http://www.geocities.com/medea19777/athena.html (accessed 20 May 2008).
48
Kenneth Burke. Grammar of Motives (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1969): 36-40.
49
Ibid., 38.
50
Ibid., 39.
51
Collective identifications occur when positive terms have been made
dialectical and come to be the qualities by which a group of persons is
substantively judged (e.g., race, class, sexuality, gender). Positive terms refer
to aspects or objects of the visible world. Dialectical terms refer to intangible
ideals. These ideals are often attached to positive terms that reflect aspects of
the material world and can affect biological processes. The process by which
this attachment happens is what Burke calls “symbolic action” or language.
52
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
138.
53
Bryant Keith Alexander. Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture and
Queer Identity (New York: AltaMira Press, 2006): 83.
277

54
As it pertains to the material aspects of passing and Jim Crow segregation,
the paradox of purity materializes as the color line that makes “white” a higher
order of being, a higher classification that is categorically distinct from
“black.” This color line is the border between the symbolic and the material,
more commonly referred to as the system of “Jim and Jane Crow” segregation.
The daily routine practices of segregation demonstrate that race is reduced to
skin color and deployed to substantiate an ideology of difference and
inequality. Therefore, segregation itself is the performance of race materialized
through social practices. This institution of Jim Crow is ordered by a
metonymic logic that spotlights contrast and comparison and, in conjunction
with physical markers, symbolically stains those who are not members of the
white class. This occurs most obviously in terms of racist slurs and signs that
constitute what kind of person belongs where. As a result people never forget
who they are—“white only” or “colored”—their roles and their boundaries.
Material and symbolic invisibility of white as the higher class is acute when its
negative character is raised to the level of absolute purity. This purity defines
whiteness as Silk understands it in The Human Stain, a subject position whose
appeal is found in its appearance without mark. Black is valuable only in so far
as it is a barometer for one’s symbolic and material distance from whiteness.
55
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000):
120.
56
Ibid.
57
This was the strategy used by the defense counsel in the 1924 New York
State Supreme Court case Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, which according to the
Burkean critique of Carlson, explained Alice’s passing as a function of her race
rather than of her race as “black.” For a detailed discussion of this case from a
Burkean perspective please see the following article: A. Cheree Carlson. “You
Know It When You See It: The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in
Rhinelander v. Rhinelander.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 111-
128.
58
Kimberly Cooper Plaszewski. “Human Stain’s Lessons about U.S.
Assimilation,” Los Angeles Times 17 November 2003. E3.

59
Susan Gubar. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 40.

60
Eric Lott. “‘The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface
Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly 43.2 (1991): 226.

278

61
A. D. Powell. “Passing” For Who You Really Are: Essays in Support of
Multiracial Whiteness (Palm Coast: Backintyme, 2005): 3.
62
Allyson Hobbs. “The Fictions of Race, Custom, and Law: The Problem of
Racial Passing in U.S. Social and Cultural History, 1840-1950.” (Ph.D. Diss.,
University of Chicago, 2007): 30; Peter Ervin, personal interview.
63
Franz Fanon. Black Skin, White Mask. trans. Charles Lam Markman (New
York: Grove Press, 1967): 211.
64
C. Vann Woodward. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1974).
65
Eric Lott. “‘The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface
Minstrelsy.” American Quarterly 43.2 (1991): 228-229.
66
Irving Howe. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the Eastern European
Jews to America and the Life they Found and Made (New York: New York
University Press, 2005). According to Howe, many Jewish performers like
Jolson, Sophie Tucker and George Jessel took to the minstrel stage during the
Jim Crow era, succeeding a wave of Irish-American performers. Berlin was
their most successful composer. Playing with and upon African American
physical, cultural and musical traditions, they were able to generate economic
success for their acts as well as solidify their Jewish American social status
against the backdrop of “inferior” blackness.
67
Jeffrey Melnick. A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and
American Popular Song (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
68
Though “Blue Skies” is not one of the minstrel and ragtime works that Berlin
wrote for white performers, it was featured in the first feature-length motion
picture with sound entitled, The Jazz Singer, in which it was sung by Al
Jolson. In this Oscar-nominated film the son of a Jewish Cantor defies his
father in order to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz singer. In doing so he
performs in blackface. Scholars engage in a debate about this use of blackface.
Some argue that The Jazz Singer avoids confronting the tensions between
American assimilation, Jewish identity and African American discrimination.
Others assert that the story is about blackface as a means for Jews to express a
modern Jewish identity in the new U.S. context and that blackface is a medium
for Jewish intracultural communication. For more discussion of this topic
please see a review of The Human Stain by John Leland. “The Perils of
Improvising a Racial Self.” www.nytimes.com (accessed 10 November 2003).
279

69
Bryant Keith Alexander. Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture and
Queer Identity (New York: AltaMira Press, 2006): 79.
70
“‘Jim Crow’ was a caricature created by Thomas “Daddy” Rice in 1832.
Advertising his caricature as an impersonation, Rice constructed “Jump Jim
Crow” as a theatrical response to African American cultural practices. Rice’s
caricature served as a deprecatory term for a black person in the wake of
Plessy v. Ferguson. By 1904, however, the Oxford English Dictionary reports
that this hostile synecdoche for African American bodies had come to function
as the definitive signifier of institutional racism.” (Robinson 98-103).
71
Wentworth Earl Miller III, interview by Walter Chaw, “Miller’s Crossing:
Filmfreak Central Interviews Actor Wentworth Miller about The Human
Stain.” http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/notes/wmillerinterview.htm (accessed
20 November 2008).
72
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Company):
315.
73
Ibid., 316.
74
Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form Third Edition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973): 37-39.
75
Wentworth Earl Miller III, interview by Walter Chaw, “Miller’s Crossing:
Filmfreak Central Interviews Actor Wentworth Miller about The Human
Stain.” http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/notes/wmillerinterview.htm (accessed
20 November 2008).
76
Philip Roth. The Human Stain (New York: Knopf Publishing Company):
179.
77
Ibid., 179.
78
Ibid., 145.
79
Ibid., 241-243.
80
Ibid., 3.

280

81
Passers who create identities for themselves out of the limited racial
categories available—white or colored—run into difficult problems. One
problem is that since passing is a means by which racially ambiguous
individuals embody recognizable identities, these identities are meaningful
only in relation to other recognizable identities. As a result, the passer’s
projected identity is meaningful because it adheres to a tragic logic of imitation
and resemblance, not because of its relation to any so-called real referent or
form. Another problem is that identities created in passing, removed from the
“real” stability of Platonic forms and strictly essential definitions of race, often
fuel a desire to ignore the co-evolving symbolic and material constructions of
race. Material definitions of race based on essence and blood justify the
epistemological assumption that skin color accurately reflects social status and
identity.
82
Karen A. Hodges. “Unfolding Sophistical and Humanist Practice through
Ingenium,” Rhetoric Review 15.1 (1996): 87.
83
The plot is replete with peripeteia, anagnorisis, and pathos while character
is always obscured. These terms are defined and discussed at length in
Aristotle. “De Poetica,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Modern Library, 2001): 1455-1487. Peripeteia is the reversal of
the protagonist's fortunes that, according to Aristotle, is part of the climax of a
tragedy. Anagnorisis is the term used to describe the moment of recognition (of
truth) when ignorance gives way to knowledge. According to Aristotle, the
ideal moment of anagnorisis coincides with peripeteia, or reversal of fortune.
Pathos signifies a scene or passage designed to evoke the feeling of pity or
sympathetic sorrow in a reader or viewer; and attempt to inspire an emotional
reaction in an audience. The emotions evoked are resolved in a cathartic
moment, usually at the end of the tragedy.
84
Peggy A. Retchin, personal communication.
281
CHAPTER SIX
THINGS SAID IN PASSING:
TOWARD A RHETORICAL THEORY OF (BI)RACIAL PASSING

I
Ellen and William Craft, Homer Plessy, Frances E. W. Harper, and Philip Roth
provide powerful demonstrations of historical and fictional passing in slavery
and segregationist settings. This dissertation has been about these
demonstrations and what they communicate about (bi)racial passing as a mid-
range theoretical expression of rhetoric. What has emerged is a collection of
perspectives that I call things said in passing. These things are best expressed
as axioms or passwords, each of which presents a relationship between passing
and one other concept within rhetoric’s critical vocabulary. Considered
together the passwords connect the cultural and cognitive limits of language to
the representation and reduction of our own identities and worlds as
components of complex systems.
The intention I declared at the outset was to argue for the analytical
merits of passing as part of a complex system based on racial identification as
either white or black. Put differently, I hoped to demonstrate a need for what
the practice can offer to the study of identification as mixed race and rhetorical
phenomenon. By way of the case studies, I have argued that identification is
what happens during these rhetorical encounters, where things said and done in
passing create substances by simultaneously challenging and confirming
audiences’ predispositions and predilections. In the pages that follow I will
282
articulate my mid-range theory of passing that summarizes my findings,
interprets their meanings, opens up avenues for future research, and accounts
for limitations.
II
The best place to begin when articulating a theoretical approach is with the
assumptions generated by the literature and cases upon which it is based. The
literature and cases make assumptions about passing, which then have
important implications for a rhetorical theory of the phenomenon. The first
assumption is that (bi)racial passing connects mixed race identity to social,
symbolic, cultural, and ethical interests. These interests are founded partially in
the perceived danger of mixed race identity as a challenge to racial episteme
based on the one-drop rule. And, they are founded partially in racial doxa to
generate effects, motivations, and possibilities for passing. The second
assumption is that passing foregrounds identification (with and as), motivation,
and interdependence in the context of audience prejudices and preferences. In
identifying with an audience, the passer must “confirm prejudices and respect
preferences.”
1
This means that “the motives actually used in justifying or
criticizing an act [of passing] definitely link it to situations, integrate one
man’s [sic] action with another’s, and line up conduct with norms.”
2
Based on
these assumptions and the analyses conducted I can present
Password 1: Passing is a series of rhetorical encounters driven
by synecdoche and metonymy. Passers use synecdoche to
283
project personae as either black or white. These personae rely
on the social structure through which they are developed,
deployed, and then interpreted by audiences via metonymy.
Conceptualizing passing as a series of rhetorical encounters provides a fresh
intersectional perspective on the manner in which human lives are affected by
shifts and changes in racial identifications. That is, we must understand how
passers create and enact personae symbolically, through which they choose to
experience a particular situation materially. To reach this understanding it has
been necessary to examine the assumptions that ground acts of passing, to
describe the rhetorical situation of each encounter in some detail, and to
formulate carefully the problem of choice that each presents.
The practical problems with which life confronts each passer are
questions as to which of two or more possibilities shall be chosen. The
mutually exclusive alternatives of identifying as either white or black are
possible in each case and are attractive for different reasons. The pull in
different directions, and passers’ inward division, calls for deliberation, study
of the rhetorical situation, and decision. In Chapter Two, Ellen Craft passes as
white in order to attain freedom from slavery. She then passes as black to raise
awareness of the issue and call audiences to support abolition. In Chapter
Three, Homer Plessy passes as white in order to disprove the one-drop rule.
He passes as black in order to call attention to those who are relegated to
second-class citizenship. In Chapter Four, Iola and Harry Leroy are born and
284
raised as white. They choose to become black and work for racial
rehabilitation. In Chapter Five, Coleman Silk chooses to identify as Jewish in
order to escape disadvantages associated with blackness while remaining a part
of an ethnic community that has experienced oppression. Several
commonalities among these choices lead to
Password 2: Passing is deliberative, deccusative, dramatic,
and about delivery.
When I say that passing is deliberative, I mean that passing expresses the
passer’s attitudes and motives, as well as her or his relations to socio-cultural
institutions, relations to alternative categories from which (s)he chooses, and
methods used to make the choice. Each passer shares an attitude toward
language and life that allows the critic to bind them together from a fourth
persona perspective. This perspective sees the dupe/second persona as an
audience that makes its own deception possible, and the in-group
clairvoyant/third persona as an audience that decides whether the pass will be
sustained through silence or negated through revelation.
According to Morris, the fourth persona resembles both of these and,
by nature, is mixed. The fourth persona is mixed because it is partially
identified by its silence (like the third persona) and because it is an implied
audience of a distinct ideological persuasion (like the second persona). The
mixture is based on the fourth persona’s identity as a marginalized audience
that, like the passer, understands the dangers and impositions of the color line,
285
recognizes motivations for passing, and is therefore brought to life through the
rhetorical encounter. In other words, the fourth persona is birthed by and does
not exist without passing. This is why it is silent while the pass is sustained. It
is in the interests of the fourth persona to sustain acts of passing so that they
can be interrogated and aid in the constitution and expression of mixed race
identity.
When I describe passing as deccusative, I mean that each encounter
presents at least one rhetorical and/or identity intersection that makes up the
form, words, and mechanics of the encounter (see Figure 10). The following
figure lists each act of passing and the rhetorical principles engaged. Each of
the points on the grid can be considered an intersection at which the content,
form, words, style, and mechanics of a pass are sustained.

Synecdoche
Irony
Eloquence
Appropriation
Tragedy
Cases
Craft ● ● ●
Plessy ● ● ● ●
Harper / Iola &
Harry Leroy
● ●
Roth-Benton /
Silk
● ● ● ●

For instance, in the case of Ellen and William Craft, synecdoche-irony enables
a more complete understanding of the ways in which passing seems to be about
race, but is also about how race mediates family, gender, class, and ability
relations. The manner in which the Crafts created Ellen’s disguise illustrates
Figure 10: Rhetorical Intersections of (Bi)racial Passing
286
these intersections. They began by creating a racial persona suggested by
Ellen’s white skin. Next, they developed a male persona to mask the
inappropriate nature of their relationship (of white woman traveling with black
man). Then, Ellen acquired physical impairments to deal with Mr. Johnson’s
class-status, which presented the challenge of literacy and the Crafts’ learning
disability of illiteracy. As women began to flirt with Mr. Johnson as eligible
bachelor, Ellen acquired new ailments, including fainting spells and
rheumatoid attacks that required William’s presence and attention. In this
case, white train passengers are dupes, William is the in-group clairvoyant, and
readers, abolitionist audiences, and critics become the fourth persona. All of
these social identities require attention and analysis from a theoretical
perspective that privileges mixedness and intersectionality.
As a series of rhetorical encounters, passing intersects the micro and
the macro, where synecdoche is taken along with irony, eloquence, tragedy,
and/or appropriation. Not only is each act of passing synecdochic, but each
case study is synecdochic because it is a part used to make points about the
phenomenon of passing in general. Thus, every instance of successful passing,
like Ellen Craft’s, can be considered a synecdoche of the whole of passing that
is successful and involves irony. Every failed act of passing, such as Coleman
Silk’s or Homer Plessy’s, can be considered a synecdoche of the whole of
ironic and/or tragic acts of passing. In fact, Plessy v. Ferguson and the
cinematic and literary versions of The Human Stain are internally synecdochic,
287
as the beginning each drama contains its end and the end summarizes the
beginning, “the parts all thus being consubstantially related.”
3
As such, they
should not necessarily be considered tales of woe but, instead, grim depictions
of real life. They emphasize causality and necessity in addition to the limits of
law and custom. In them we can locate intersections where synecdoche meets
secondary rhetorical concepts and dramatizes interpersonal and communal
relations.
The deliberative and deccusative elements of passing suggest its
dramatic nature. When I describe passing encounters as dramatic, I mean that
passers and audiences make interpretations based on shared epistemological
and ontological assumptions. For example, Harper’s novel disrupts the idea
that a mixed race person’s pre-passing identity is real and that the passing
identity is appropriated somehow by challenging the biology versus
environment dichotomy. Moreover, she problematizes assumptions about a
passer’s intent, usually portrayed as deception and/or betrayal. In Harper’s text,
passers are born and raised as whites, meaning that they do not know they are
mixed race and do not know how to be mixed race. Harper’s characters
discover their black legal identities in the wake of the Plessy v. Ferguson
ruling. They decide to accept these identities on their own terms, thereby
destabilizing the color line that assigns racial identity to appearance. In so
doing they espouse a rhetoric of black racial uplift that requires eloquent
persons to represent the race in a positive light to the macroculture.
288
Finally, passing encounters are about delivery. This means that they
involve a transfer of meaning from one direction to another based on
substitution or contiguity that is embodied primarily by synecdoche. For
instance, Plessy’s mixed race identity enabled a discursive mobility and
simultaneity that challenged racial episteme and resulted in a judicial concept
that constrained citizenship by law and by force. Tourgeé’s rhetoric painted
Plessy as a free person in spite of such constraints. The Court’s rhetoric
captured that likeness and presented Plessy as profoundly unfree. Not only
was Plessy convicted wrongly of identity theft because whiteness was deemed
property, but his own identity as mixed race was stolen and ignored by the law
and the land. Further, the Court’s decision devalued blackness as the basis for
self-ownership by imbuing whiteness with material rewards, recognition, and
inheritance. Plessy’s temporary passing, sustained at the intersection of
synecdoche-appropriation, stopped short of making an ontological
identification as either white or black because he retained a mixed race identity
that was unsustainable outside of passing. Connecting these four features of
passing—deliberative, deccusative, dramatic, and delivery—suggests
Password 3: Passing is a dynamic rhetorical response to
biracial definition and differentiation made by mixed race
individuals. As such, passers can project racial identifications
in either the black or white direction. To mark my meaning,
289
passing in this study is not synonymous with racial passing but
with (bi)racial passing.
This password allows me to distinguish my analyses of passing from
traditional critiques, which ignore the possibility that a mixed race passer can
pass as black as well as white. Labeling the acts (bi)racial instead of racial
signals this possibility and also signals the socio-symbolic white-black
intersection that is embodied in each act of passing. Each act of passing
highlights this multiracial intersection and passers’ contradictory, resistive, and
subversive responses to it. Ellen Craft, Homer Plessy, Iola and Harry Leroy,
and Coleman Silk (not to mention Frances Harper and Philip Roth) stand as
markers of the precise points at which the experiences of white and black
groups converge and diverge because of racial definition and differentiation
based on phenotype, biology, and epistemology. Their abilities and
sensibilities to engage doxa and channel ambiguity along racial and gendered
lines allowed them to alter their social statuses—sometimes temporarily and
sometimes permanently—by inventing and projecting new personae that
conform with audiences’ prejudices and preferences.
Password 3 indicates that, in any act of passing, meanings are shifted
from the part to the whole (from mixed race as white and black to black or
from mixed race as white and black to white, etc.) via substitution at racial and
rhetorical intersections. As the Greek word for synecdoche (συνεκδοχή) means
literally “to take with something else,” this proposition provides a powerful
290
description of motion for the dynamics of passing revealed in the context of
this project.
4
This definition of synecdoche is confirmed most directly by
analysis of Plessy v. Ferguson and suggests that (bi)racial passing is
fundamentally appropriative. In other words, passing reveals that blackness
and whiteness are multiracial concepts that do not really belong to any one
individual or group. Instead, individuals or groups appropriate racial symbols
(e.g., rhetorical markers of eloquence and/or visible markers of color, dress,
etc.) in order to transgress boundaries for the purpose of inclusion, or in order
to exclude others. When black or white personae are appropriated to the
exclusion of others, as Homer Plessy did, identity begins to take on a political
dimension. Ultimately Plessy was embroiled in a battle that resulted in the
over-determination of black identity via the metonymic one-drop rule and the
enshrined epistemology of authentic whiteness, thereby creating the counterfeit
passer as identity thief. This racial epistemology is linked closely to value
systems that are observable in the appropriative behavior of passers.
Axiological issues are evident in Chapter Four’s analysis of passing at
the intersection of eloquence-synecdoche and based on sincerity (aletheia).
This case study revealed that the pursuit of an authentic racial identity as either
black or white can be an ethical and psychological choice as well as a
rhetorical one. Iola’s and Harry’s unconscious passing as white and then
conscious passing as black effectively infused the one-drop rule with some
dignity, providing a notion of black racial identity that was sensitive to the
291
interests of mixed race individuals. Harper’s Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted
involves “synecdochical reflexivity” through transcendent eloquence that
entails culturally inflected language use and code-switching to express
personal and political values.
5

Synecdochical reflexivity integrates the author into the context of
writing her life experience as an illustration of subjectivity and standpoint.
Harper’s own experience as a woman accused of passing as white and male—
because a black woman could not possibly write so eloquently—suggests a
reflexive conception of self-regulation and a recursive concept of social
structure where writing and talking about passing are concerned. Moreover,
Harper’s rhetorical choices are linked to Plessy’s appropriative dynamic and
Roth’s/Silk’s tragic dynamic because the passer’s persona can be questioned
based both on phenotype and on the symbolic relationship between phenotype
and eloquence (the delivery of socially inscribed language that refers to an
assumed authentic racial identity as black or white). Harper’s gendered
depictions of (bi)racial passing also highlight and reproduce biracial and
patriarchal structures in the act of exchange from single to married life,
showing how Iola’s and Harry’s identities are interpreted as either black or
white and always in relation to their male or female spouses. By reclaiming an
economy of evidence based on racial sincerity (aletheia) to support Iola’s and
Harry’s ontological choices, Harper uses synecdochic reflexivity to close her
narrative by challenging the very logic of racial exclusion that catalyzed the
292
drama of the pass. Thus, the (bi)racial passer is represented as an effect and
agent of power and as an individual entangled in self-spun webs of meaning.
An even more complex reflexive dynamic occurs in The Human Stain,
when a white/Jewish author (Roth) appropriates black identity in writing about
Coleman Silk’s passing, making use of synecdoche-tragedy and minstrel logic.
Roth is a complex figure because he not only reads Silk’s pass from black to
white, thereby ignoring mixedness, but passes as Coleman in order to write a
story whose moral revolves around the revelation of a universal experience he
calls “the human stain.” In this way, and by utilizing his journalist character
and literary doppelganger Nathan Zuckerman, Roth “positions his own
whiteness under the sign of the unbiased and impartial observer.”
6

Consequently, whiteness is solidified as an “‘authenticating document’ that
secures the prerogative of commercial authorship by marketing his initial
distance” from the tragic passer he creates.
7
This reflexive dimension
distinguishes a rhetorical theory of (bi)racial passing from strict social and
historical accounts because it links the symbolic definitions and uses of white
and black in popular nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century literary
cultures to the material and juridical definitions brought about by slavery and
Jim and Jane Crow segregation.
Iola Leroy and The Human Stain also demonstrate synecdochic
reflexivity between the macro and the micro by showing how the family serves
as a microcosm of larger national structure, in which individuals internalize
293
and enact structural/material ideology on a personal level. Here we have the
“ideal synecdoche, since microcosm is related to macrocosm as part to whole,
and either the whole can represent the part or the part can represent the whole.
(For “represent” here we could substitute ‘be identified with.’)”
8
Thus,
(re)situating passing within the merged contexts of macro-level social and
legal structures and micro-level familial, communal, and interpersonal
relations illuminates passers’ axiological and ontological decisions resulting
from and in response to the color line.
Each case takes place within the time and place constraints of U.S.
slavery and segregationist settings. I have discussed the main principle here at
length: that the biracial fixation of these eras forced mixed race individuals to
identity either as black or as white and to take on the social roles associated
with each racial category and group. At the same time, each case is its own
occasion and a response to a specific exigency. Each passer exhibits unique
individual motivations. Ellen and William Craft pass to escape from slavery,
Homer Plessy passes in the interest of civil rights, Iola and Harry Leroy pass in
order to transcend the limitations of the one-drop rule, and Coleman Silk
passes in order to escape the physical, emotional, cognitive, and material limits
of Jim and Jane Crow segregation. Though distinct, each of these acts of
passing can be considered a substitutive, reflexive, and intersectional encounter
among rhetors, audiences, and rhetoricians. The theoretical scaffolding for
294
these interactions is Robinson’s and Morris’s depiction of passing, introduced
in Chapter One (see Figure 11).

This figure depicts the interdependence among personae. Specifically, it
illustrates that each persona is birthed by an intersectional encounter between
itself and another. It also demonstrates the roles of white or black racial
identification based on overarching relational, historic, and situational
constraints. In this model the fourth persona reflects the passer because it also
is mixed and understands the dangers and impositions of the color line,
recognizes motivations for passing, and is created within the rhetorical
encounter. It sits between the second and third personae because it is partially
identified with each, by its silence (like the third persona) and as an implied
audience with an assumed ideological perspective (like the second persona).
Figure 11: Dramatic Theater of Passing as Rhetorical and Intersectional
Dupe
Passer
In-group
4
th
Persona
white black
Situation-Occasion
Time-Place
295
Dupe
Passer
In-group
4
th

Persona
Either
white
or
black
Either
black or
white
Situation-Occasion
Time-Place
SYNECODOCHE Irony
Tragedy
Appropriation
Eloquence
Beneath this empirically observable layer is a deeper level at which
each act of passing—that takes place at any or all of the intersections depicted
in the figure below—is sustained. The simultaneity of these dramatic and
tropological intersections is expressed in Figure 12, entitled “Rhetorical
Persona and Concepts of (Bi)racial Passing.” Here, a more complete scene of
a pass encapsulates its tropological roots and audience encounters.

Figure 12 depicts passing as a process through which mixed race individuals
attempt to align themselves with dominant ideological, epistemological, and
social forces through rhetorical performance. This is why (bi)racial passing is
described best as a circulation of meanings with no definitive point of entry or
permanent escape. Some passers attempt escape by making passing a
permanent way of life passing as white or black, while others use it tactically,
traveling from one area to another in order to alleviate discrimination and
Figure 12: Rhetorical Persona and Concepts of (Bi)racial Passing

296
oppression and to expose institutional problems. On the other hand, every act
of (bi)racial passing challenges essentialist thinking and potentially creates a
space for agency, rejuvenated self-determination, and an opportunity to
overcome existing structural and social constraints. This model of (bi)racial
passing enables me to capture meaningful correspondences that contribute to
Password 4: (Bi)racial passing engages the neoclassical debate
between Plato and the Sophists and challenges the binary of episteme
versus doxa through aletheia.
Put simply, Password 4 means that rhetoric itself is an encounter with passing
that works to situate doxastic knowledge about race (in terms of speech and
behavior patterns, for example, including how to walk and dress) within an
episteme that understands race as the material truth of melanin and thereby
invests skin color with an immediately recognizable social significance. This
is consistent with Burke’s perspective on “sensory representation,” which is
synecdochic because the audience “abstract[s] certain qualities from some
bundle of electro-chemical activity…and these qualities…can be said to truly
represent.”
9
In any act of (bi)racial passing, the passer utilizes doxa—
knowledge ascertained by sight and sound—as a means to connect with the
epistemological presumptions and prejudices of second persona/dupe and third
personae/in-group clairvoyant audiences and to create the fourth persona.
For instance, in appropriation passers borrow elements in order to
create of something new, more just, or more inclusive. Eloquence allows
297
passers to ensure that what they say is in line with who they decide to be and
how they wish to influence audiences. Irony enables the art of fashioning a
self based on recombining recognizable behaviors and identity traits that
usually are used to hide. And tragedy renders passing a means of adapting to
and attempting to escape the prison of imposed identities. Passers are able to
change what knowledge means by changing what audiences find meaningful
during rhetorical encounters.
The ability to challenge the nature of knowledge is another important
implication of Password 4 that marks a shift from traditional theoretical
models. A rhetorical theory of (bi)racial passing posits both that episteme is a
form of taken-for-granted doxa and that doxa can be considered a form of
episteme. This suggests that “the true moment of rhetoric” may exist “between
the poles of Plato and Sophists” because
the Sophist is at home in Plato’s Republic and Plato is rife with
scars from its battles with sophistic rhetoric. Thus we don’t get
to pick one pole or the other, rather a series of rhetorical
doubling occurs in which difference and multiplicity abound.
10

In attempting to satisfy both Plato and the Sophists, (bi)racial passers
demonstrate an incredible knowledge and depth of experience. In order to
catalyze and sustain their acts passers must gather knowledge of their own and
others’ truths and understand the politics of the moment and environment (the
rhetorical situation). This understanding comes across through passers’
projected personae and challenges traditional biosocial means of racial
identification. Passers also challenge the episteme-versus-doxa binary because
298
doxa
Dupe
Passer
In-group
4
th

Either
white or
black
Either
black
or
white
Situation-Occasion
Time-Place
episteme
Aletheia -- Sincerity
SYNECODOCHE Irony
Tragedy
Appropriation
Eloquence
Figure 13: Passing as Neoclassical Engagement

verification is based no longer on the passer’s phenotype, biology, or
ambiguity but on the passer’s motivation and commitment to social and/or
political exigencies. These motives and commitments are expressions of
aletheia, which constitutes a purposeful unveiling of identity expressed as
reasons or justifications for committing to particular social and/or political
interests. In other words, the realities that passers experience are shaped by the
logos used to make sense of the experience. As identities are unveiled through
passing encounters, situational contingencies also are unveiled. These
unveilings demonstrate the power of symbols to construct truths, even when
they are not discussed (see Figure 13).
For example, Coleman Silk understood that his duped audience took
him for white and Jewish. Therefore, he could not admit to the University
committee that he began his life as a black man to repudiate the charges of
racism leveled against him. This shows that evidence of the effectiveness of a
pass is the lack of a need to justify the projected persona. Consequently, it is
299
reasonable to expect an increase in discursive and behavioral support at the
start of a pass and prior to the identity projected in passing achieving favorable
reception and recognition. Thus, Silk’s passing succeeds rhetorically, even if it
is ultimately tragic in a social and practical sense. This rhetorical framework
shows how passers actively shape and, at the same time, are shaped by their
symbolic environments. We can conclude that (bi)racial passing uses aletheia
to change epistemological, ontological, and/or axiological truths on personal or
institutional levels.
As the Aesopic fable of the crow suggests, in passing all truth claims
are subject to analysis as interpretations, and their claims to validity must be
based on audience acceptance rather than on any privileged access to
authorized truth. This acceptance is a form of doxa, proving that the selves
passers invent to greet and grapple with society are rhetorically mediated
assemblages of contingencies, interests, and connections. Doxa also raises the
issue of the nature of truth itself. Doxa presents truth as a function of a
metonymic framework that constrains the audience’s perception of that truth.
Aletheia represents truth for the passer at the intersection of synecdoche with
irony, eloquence, appropriation, and/or tragedy. Thus, passing implies that
doxa is not opposed diametrically to episteme but, rather, to aletheia.
Truth as aletheia is about knowing that the version of truth projected is
only a version. In other words, passers show their audiences what truth can
look like in a particular rhetorical situation—as either a white or a black
300
person. Each case study indicates that (bi)racial passing overcomes the
inability to create and/or observe different outcomes for the same person at the
same time. In the Crafts we find outcomes as enslaved or freed persons. In
Plessy we find outcomes as white or colored. In Iola and Harry Leroy we find
outcomes as white and black, freed and enslaved, single and married. In
Coleman Silk, we find outcomes as Negro or Jewish. These passers can be
considered personifications of multiracial intersectionality that reveal racial
sincerity based on their decisions to commit to particular social and political
causes (whether individually or collectively).
These disparate life outcomes as either white or black present the critic
with two ways of figuring truths based on aletheia: vertical and horizontal. In
the former, established conventional power infused is with episteme. Passers
employ synecdoche to represent themselves as either black or white and, in
effect, to announce their epistemologically recognizable identities with respect
to others. At the same time, however, passing also concerns a horizontal truth,
an escape, via doxa, from the oppression and cultural confinement of
compulsory racial identification. The effect of (bi)racial passing expresses
graphically passers’ senses of their own power and victorious self-
determination. (Bi)racial passing encounters episteme and doxa at the
intersection of these vertical and horizontal axes and, through aletheia, both
reconciles and exploits the tensions between them. First, passers absorb
audiences into the act as dupes, in-group clairvoyants, or fourth personae so
301
that we may feel and share the act’s intensity. Then each audience finds an
ideal distance from the act so that we may consider its larger meaning (see
figure below).

As depicted in the figure above, aletheia can be considered a z-axis, vertically
perpendicular to the intersection of episteme and doxa (at the x-y zero point).
The z-axis/aletheia axis refers to the depth of (bi)racial passing. This three-
dimensional representation of the truths of passing illustrates its major
characteristics (deliberative, dramatic, delivery, and deccusative) and explains
that every act of passing hinges on aletheia/sincerity, making it the axis along
which all passes revolve and rotate.
So far I have reviewed passing’s synecdochic-metonymic tensions,
primary characteristics, redefinition as (bi)racial, and challenges to episteme
and doxa as well as the nature of truth. Summarizes as passwords, the above
leads to the conclusion that(bi)racial passing is a rhetorical project of
Figure 14: The Truths of (Bi)racial Passing
Aletheia
(Intersectional
truth of (bi)racial
passing, bridging
gap between
episteme and doxa)
Episteme
(Vertical truth representing social constraint)
Doxa
(Horizontal truth representing
302
controlling how passers and audiences identify themselves and the world that
beckons them to action. In particular, passers can shape their self-presentations
and establish templates for experience that help audiences make sense of their
own lives. Manipulating symbolic space, passers can augment or diminish
emotions, enhance identification, rouse action, and celebrate social and
personal values in the personae they project. This leads to
Password 5: Value systems are apparent in motivations for
passing, which can include economic gain or success, cultural
and/or social acceptance, survival, security, recreational
advantage, self-determination, and social justice. Passers’
personae are aligned with motives and social values through
perspective and magnification.
Perspective is about how the passer is represented in relation to his or her
context(s). One purpose of this study has been to show (bi)racial passers in
their everyday environments and provide them with a sense of context within
those settings. One finding across all cases is that passers’ and audiences’
perspectives are limited to that which they perceive as real. In this sense
passing can be likened to a leap of faith, as the passer lays hold of some goal
(e.g., personal or institutional freedom) that seems unattainable in passing’s
absence. Ellen Craft found her means of escape in the person of a disabled,
white, wealthy, slave owning male. Homer Plessy gained a public political
platform by representing himself first as white to utilize specific rights and
303
privileges, and then as black to give voice to the underprivileged and
unrepresented. Harry and Iola Leroy’s passing created a space of
empowerment for mixed race African Americans within the constraints of the
compulsory one-drop rule. Coleman Silk created a contemporary occasion by
which to further complicate and explore the quest for self-determination.
Additionally, each case marks its own beginning an end within the
ongoing drama of mixed race representation and identification. Key moments
within these dramas can include the position of the passer and audiences with
respect to each other and material points of focus such that the world presented
to audiences coheres with the passer’s vision and motives. Each chapter has
emphasized one or more key intersections to more fully understand the
dynamics of (bi)racial passing and motivations of (bi)racial passers.
11

The case studies show that in effective (bi)racial passing, passers
manipulate symbolic space to establish tactical relationships between
themselves and audiences, and between audiences and their senses of
themselves. Utilizing aletheia, passers arrange perceptions so that certain
features of the surrounding symbolic environment loom large in audience
consciousness while others fade into insignificance. This symbolic work is
reminiscent of the synecdochic qualities of (bi)racial passing described in
Passwords 1 and 3. Specifically, every instance of (bi)racial passing is partial,
emphasizing certain topics and silencing others. The intersectional uses of
appropriation, eloquence, irony, and/or tragedy as demonstrations of aletheia
304
exacerbate this tendency by constructing strategic accounts of situations that
will induce audiences to respond to passers in specific ways.
Through the lens of rhetorical theory, we can see (bi)racial passing as a
form of (multiracial) communication between dissimilar social groups (blacks
and whites as well as Platonic philosophers and Sophistic rhetors). Passwords
4 and 5 suggest that both episteme and doxa are products of rhetorical action
and performance and that they merge at the precise points in which they
intersect with aletheia. Moreover, these passwords imply that (bi)racial
passing is a representational tactic and rhetorical practice that is affected by
institutions that naturalize social hierarchies based on raced, gendered, classed,
sexually oriented, and other identity characteristics. (Bi)racial passing, then,
differs from traditional cultural and historical models of racial passing, which
assume that action is shaped solely by social relations, economic competition,
and/or deception.
Constant movement among audiences and passers sustains the fourth
persona and other rhetorical encounters inherent in passing. By combining
synecdoche with one or more of the secondary rhetorical principles, passers
create ethotic appeals that provide reasons and justifications for their acts of
passing. The case studies reveal that a primary reason for passing is the danger
associated with outing. As Robinson and Morris remind us, the in-group
clairvoyant/third persona is a constant presence who can provide “proof” of a
passer’s racial identity that will resituate them in an episteme. Consequently,
305
(bi)racial passing is both an occasion and a provocation because it points away
from the passer and toward the interpretations that occur as audiences
encounter the passer. The passer must be flexible, fluid, and comfortable
moving through the layers of meaning. This movement leads directly to my
sixth, and final, password:
Password 6: (Bi)racial passing addresses the coexistence, inherent
conflicts, and coevolution of the material and symbolic aspects of
racial identification.
This password coalesces with the others to form a fourth persona perspective
that exposes and exploits tensions between imposed racial identification and
definition of the passer and opportunities for the passer’s redefinition and self-
determination. Thus, any act of passing is a reminder that definition (who a
person is in the symbolic environment) and identity (what a person is
pertaining to the material environment) should not be confused. The case
studies show that racial identification is simultaneously material and symbolic
as well as constraining and enabling. The theoretical model developed allows
me to address these dimensions of identification, treating passers’ rhetorical
performances as arguments.
Arguments can justify the past after the fact or provide reasons to act in
the future. An example of arguments as justifications can be found in Harper’s
characters Iola and Harry Leroy. Iola and Harry were unaware that they were
passing as white because they did not know that their mixed race mother also
306
was passing. An example of arguments as reasons is found when Coleman Silk
is called a “nigger” and is denied service at Woolworth’s. A key to the power
of (bi)racial passing—whether sustained by justifications or reasons—is that
the representations induced often are inherently self-fulfilling. Passers
represent themselves through ethotic appeals that utilize rhetorical principles
and physical markers. When successful, passers become identified as the
representation. Therefore, (bi)racial passing is a rhetorical intervention where
it is most needed: at the intersection of agency and structural constraint (please
see the figure entitled “(Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic”).
The figure entitled “(Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic”
illustrates the governing dynamics that connect the realm of rhetoric to the
realm of racial identification. The material environment consists of social
practices and their physical consequences. Although the material is real and
has real effects, these effects never manifest themselves except through the
symbolic realm, which consists of ideological, discursive, performative, and
argumentative tactics. As aforementioned, the symbolic realm arguments may
take the form of reasons and justifications.

307
doxa
episteme
doxa
Dupe
Passer
In-group
4
th
Persona
Either
white or
black
Either
black or
white
Situation-Occasion
Time-Place
SYNECODOCHE Irony
Tragedy
Appropriation
Eloquence
episteme
Aletheia -- Sincerity
SYMBOLIC
MATERIAL
structural constraint

If reasons are commonly held by society, they are constraining. For instance,
the reason that mixed race individuals pass is to deceive. If reasons are held by
only a few members of the community they are enabling. Homer Plessy, for
example, argued that phenotype is neither directly correlated to racial
identification nor a cause for segregation aboard public conveyances.
When justifications or reasons are commonly held, the symbolic and
material coevolve into a constraining and stable racial episteme. Change in
episteme is enabled by new justifications of the material. The new
justifications can develop from exogenous material shocks (adaptation, e.g.,
individuals develop an attitude of racial sincerity based on aletheia and work
individual agency
structural constraint
individual agency
Figure 15: (Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic
308
toward biracial unification) or agentic endogenous reinterpretations of existing
material arrangements individuals refusing to categorize themselves on the
census or creating a new category say from non-existent to mixed race.
Two key points must be raised at this juncture. First, that passing goes
beyond a simple relationship between individual and society to include many
competing institutions, groups, networks, nations, families, and so forth. The
passer’s choice to represent him- or herself as either one thing or another is the
synecdoche or “representative anecdote” for these complex relationships. The
second point is that the ratio of justifications to reasons, or of endogenous
justifications to exogenous justifications, maps the process by which the
material and symbolic aspects of racial identification converge. These aspects
converge as passers provide reasons and justifications for their acts as they
relate to the arrangement and properties of the passer’s racial parts and a
hierarchy based on racial episteme. (Bi)racial passing highlights the
construction of a biracial hierarchy that is achieved by synchronized behaviors
associated with “white” and “black” and that constrain the behavior of mixed
race individuals.
I conclude that (bi)racial passing establishes racial identity by
embracing continuous movement in the realms of language, space, place, and
time. So before answering the question of “who am I?” the passer first must
answer the questions: “Where am I?” “When am I?” “What am I?” As a result,
passing addresses many social pressures and demonstrates individual agency.
309
For passers, identity construction becomes a process of passing from one
persona to or through another, through language, symbolic and physical space,
time, and place. This requires an understanding of motives and an honest
accounting for every act of passing. For this reason, (bi)racial passing also can
be considered a species of rhetoric that interprets past events and deliberates
about the future. It creates an image to leave in the audiences’ minds. It
involves naming involuntary and voluntary actions and determining one’s own
standards for identification and representation. Finally, it extends beyond any
single passer and constitutes an invitation to connect with the shifting
identities, cultures, lives and philosophies of all people whose identities are in
some way “stigmatized.”
12

So far I have described passing theoretically, as a set of passwords used
to prove passers’ identities as either black or white as they gain access to
resources that are unavailable to them as mixed race. These passwords
describe passing as: a rhetorical encounter driven by synecdoche and
metonymy; a deliberative, deccusative, dramatic and delivery-oriented
practice; (bi)racial in either the black or white direction; an opportunity to
challenge episteme-doxa binary via aletheia; an expression of individual and
cultural value systems, hierarchies, and socio-political commitments; and as
reflecting material and symbolic aspects of racial identification.
Next, I will discuss the implications of this rhetorical theory of passing
for the representation practices of mixed race individuals. I hen describe
310
potential future research within the context of the model presented. I conclude
by discussing the main points of a rhetorical theory of passing and highlight
the importance of studying passing for the field of rhetoric.
III
Passwords 1 through 6 are made visible by the fourth persona, who stands at
least momentarily apart from full participation in the action of each encounter.
Passwords also are protected by rhetorical moves—synecdoche and
metonymy, in conjunction with eloquence, appropriation, irony, and tragedy—
which give the passer a measure of security when creating ethotic appeals.
Full security, however, requires that the passwords remain hidden from duped
audiences. Homer Plessy and Coleman Silk were punished precisely for this
security breech. However, passwords can be intercepted by dupes and
clairvoyants alike. When so intercepted, or when uttered by the passer, they
raise the potential for outing. This means that a passer’s effectiveness is
measured extrinsically by the audiences that encounter it. Further,
effectiveness presumes a relationship between “subjects (who authenticate)
and objects…that are interpreted and analyzed from…outside because they
cannot simply speak for themselves.”
13
Effective passes are based on material
factors, like phenotype, and performative factors, like eloquence and other
social actions.
These passwords provide the opportunity to discuss outcomes.
Because it responds to the absence of fully representative categories of
311
identity, and the insecurities that ensue therefrom, passing enables mixed race
individuals to benefit by changing their own representations while others
remain unchanged. This is consistent with the case studies, in which a
predominantly personal gain is associated with positive outcomes. For
instance, in The Human Stain, Silk achieves professional and economic
success as a Jewish man that would have been largely unavailable to him as
black even while experiencing familial loss, personal humiliation, and social
expulsion. In a macroscopic sense passers can benefit from positive outcomes
such as interpersonal or economic gain, while experiencing an overall negative
outcomes. In Shadows Uplifted, Iola Leroy’s privilege is taken away when her
father dies and her truer identity is revealed. This suggests a limitation of this
study and a need for future research to account for encounters in which the
passer does not believe he or she is passing, and while audiences believe he or
she is.
Future research should explore the manifestations and outcomes of
(bi)racial passing more extensively, including additional identity intersections
such as age, relational status, disease, religion, and occupation. Additionally,
future research should examine the in and out-group(s), the duped, and the
outer(s) along with the passer him- or herself. Outcomes also should also be
examined in greater detail to determine whether audience perceptions of mixed
race identity are transformed or reaffirmed in response to representations of
passing. If beliefs, values and attitudes are changed, then, as aforementioned,
312
the overarching outcome will be the move from depictions of episteme versus
doxa to aletheia as well as from mere depictions of passing as limited means of
exercising personal agency to a representation of actual social power. In this
way passing can no longer be defined or described as a surface activity (doxa
only).
In addition, expanded study specifically of character and plot
development in literary cases, and biography in historical and legal cases is
required to further investigate the intersectional nature of identity. Such
research should develop the approach in Chapter Two, examining how
performing and maintaining one identity (e.g., race) may require concealing
another (e.g., ability, class, gender, etc.). It should also address important
questions about the effects of passing on society and language as well as the
individual. For instance, what are the histories of key terms that pertain to
passing such as mixed race, biracial, and post-race? Is it possible for an
individual to pass as mixed race? Is today’s claim to a post-racial moment
proof of passers’ successes?
In the end, and in synecdochic fashion, mixed race representation is
complex. The process of (bi)racial passing is always moving, always
signifying, always imagining new personae and rhetorical possibilities. I have
argued that possibilities for discontinuity and ambiguity occur at the
intersections between passers and audiences as well as the intersection between
episteme and doxa (between passer and representation of passer) and between
313
synecdoche and metonymy. The “intersection” metaphor conveys the
humanity of representation in (bi)racial passing and the points at which it is
also open to interpretation and negotiation. Neither episteme nor doxa alone
constitutes a perfect means of identification or representation. Instead, I have
proposed a theory that posits a subject-subject relationship among audiences
and personae, which revolves and rotates on the z-axis of aletheia/sincerity.
This relationship “demand[s] a mutual granting of autonomy and interiorized
validity that outstrips authenticity’s imperfect operationalizations.”
14
This
suggests that an exclusive commitment to racial difference can be troubling.
One reason is because such commitment gets in the way of identification and
more complete and multi-dimensional representation. If difference is
everything then we are left with the discomfort of mixed race alienation.
Further, exclusive focus on difference can elide important connections between
people’s bodies as containers and their identities as contained (or vice versa),
between identities and ideologies, between material and symbolic
environments, between passers and audiences.
Thus, I conclude by reasserting that mixed race identification in
(bi)racial passing is an issue of interpretation and representation: a strategy for
understanding the substances of things by considering them in and of
themselves, yet flexibly, viewing them in terms of ambiguities provided by
their contexts. This conception keeps alive sincerity (aletheia) inherent in any
act of passing. It also affirms Roth’s view of passing as one that involves
314
constant communicative action and its ends—especially acts of interpretation
and positioning which end as definitions and identities. So, if the passers
studied herein are correct and “definitions belong to the definers and not the
defined,” then passing demonstrates that those defined hold the powers of
ethos, placement, and prescriptive action.
15
Yet, my gesture toward a rhetorical
theory of passing casuistically reveals that definers are as empowered as they
are imprisoned by acts of definition and that although (bi)racial passing can be
a means to break free, freedom may last only for a moment.
In Chapter One, I introduced President-Elect Barack Obama’s words in
“A More Perfect Union” as an invitation to Americans (and the world) to work
through, rather than get past, racial problems. In light of subsequent findings,
Obama’s mixed race identity as his “own American story” takes on even
deeper significance:
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman
from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather
who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during
World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a
bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was
overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and
lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a
black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and
slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious
daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and
cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three
continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no
other country on Earth is my story even possible. It's a story that
hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a
story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this
nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we
are truly one.
16

315
Obama’s recognition “that out of many, we are truly one” means that the unity
for which we hunger cannot be the effect of a post-race era. Rather, the unity
that will perfect our nation must allow for differences. The “Unum” must be “e
pluribus.” So, to make our union more perfect, we must set about living with
our differences and agree on a procedure for acknowledging and valuing them
sincerely. In this context—this “e pluribus unum”—passing is anything but
passé. It is a theoretical lodestar that challenges the enduring fallacies of a
post-racial era. Passing is not a mistake. Passers are neither heroes nor
cowards. Passers are neither originals nor counterfeits. Passers are neither
parts nor wholes. Passers are neither black nor white. In the end, passers
demonstrate our needs for personal and collective recognition, appreciation,
and respect. Addressing these needs is a way to become less racist. It is the
way of honest and ethical human communication. It is, as Obama informs us,
not where we end but “where we start. It is where our union grows
stronger,…[and] that is where our perfection begins.”
17

316

CHAPTER SIX REFERENCES

1
Jonathan M. Smith. “Geographic Rhetoric: Modes and Tropes of Appeal,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86.1 (1996): 1-20.
2
C. Wright Mills. “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” American
Sociological Review 5.6 (1940): 908.
3
Ibid.
4
Gideon O. Burton. “Silva Rhetoricae,” Bringham Young University,
http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/S/synecdoche.htm (access date 10 November
2008).
5
Jonathan M. Smith. “Geographical Rhetoric: Modes and Topes of Appeal,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86.1 (1996): 13.
6
Amy Robinson. “To Pass // In Drag: Strategies of Entrance nto the Visible.”
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993): 145.
7
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8
Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
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10
Bradford Vivan. “Sophistic Rhetoric & Rhetorical Nomads, Professing
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11
These intersections examined herein were those most prominent and
interesting for the development of a rhetorical theory of (bi)racial passing.
Future research can and should focus on additional intersections involving the
tropes identified by rhetoricians concerning rhetoric, and by extension
(bi)racial, passing.
12
Erving Goffman. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
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13
John L. Jackson, Jr. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005): 14-15.
317

14
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Toni Morrison. Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1987): 190.
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Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (Speech, Philadephia, PA, 18
March 2008). http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords
(accessed 19 March 2008).

17
Ibid.
318
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Dawkins, Marcia Alesan (author)

Core Title Impurely raced // purely erased: toward a rhetorical theory of (bi)racial passing

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 01/16/2011

Defense Date 12/12/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag mixed race representation,OAI-PMH Harvest,passing,rhetorical theory,synecdoche

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lake, Randall A. (committee chair), Goodnight, G. Thomas (committee member), Sanchez, George J. (committee member)

Creator Email mdawki01@hotmail.com,mdawkins@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1936

Unique identifier UC1153033

Identifier etd-Dawkins-2587 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-152726 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1936 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Dawkins-2587.pdf

Dmrecord 152726

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Dawkins, Marcia Alesan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu