Passing (racial identity)

Racial passing occurs when a person classified as a member of one racial group is also accepted as a member of a different racial group. The term was used especially in the United States to describe a person of multiracial ancestry assimilating into the white majority during times when legal and social conventions of hypodescent classified the person as a minority, subject to racial segregation and discrimination.

In the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, some Americans of mixed ancestry passing for white often claimed Native American, ancestry to explain skin color and features differing from white Americans of Northern European (Germanic or Celtic) and Eastern European (Slavic) descent. They were trying to find a way through the binary racial divisions of society, especially in the South, where slavery became closely tied in the colonial era to the foreign status of people of African descent, which prevented them from being considered English subjects. In the 18th and 19th centuries, most free people were classified by appearance and actions. If they looked white, were accepted by neighbors and fulfilled community obligations, they were absorbed into European American society. Late 19th-century Jim Crow state laws establishing segregation in public facilities, and early 20th-century state laws establishing the "one-drop rule" for racial classification (as in Virginia in 1924), were examples of European Americans attempting to impose regulations of hypodescent, that is, classifying someone as black based on any black ancestry. Then someone who identified by appearance and majority ancestry might be described as "passing" for Caucasian. In Louisiana, people of color who passed as white were referred to as passe blanc.

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