The Problem With Passing

Mixed Asian Media - June 9, 2021

By Emily Cai

When I first heard the term “white-passing,” it was by another Asian, biracial person. At the time, I thought it was a word specifically meant to describe people like me. I thought it was a descriptor that had recently been created to qualify biracial and mixed race people who — in spite of our background — appeared, or could appear, to the world as “white.” I thought then that I understood fundamentally what the term meant. Finally, I had the vocabulary to describe the multitude of similar experiences in my life: from the time in elementary school when a friend insisted that I meant Caucasian instead of Asian, to the time I was told that I wasn’t really Chinese by a guy with yellow fever, to just this past year when a friend very helpfully decided to point out to me that I was white.

This is what it was called — to have someone look at you and only see you in terms of your whiteness: white-passing.

But when my friend described herself as white-passing, I also remember looking at her, confused. I had only known her for several months at the time, but I knew enough about her — her surname, who her parents were, how she interacted with her siblings, stories from her childhood, the things she cared about — to know that her identity was not that of a white person. When she described herself as white-passing, I remember thinking to myself, “But are you?”

I eventually learned that the term “passing” contained inside of it an entire history of race relations and subjugation. Originally used to described Black people who feigned “whiteness” in order to escape enslavement and discrimination, the term also carries within it the history of the “one drop rule,” which determined that anyone with a trace of Black ancestry would, despite appearances, be deemed as Black — a tool originally used to prevent racial mixing and to maximize slave ownership, attempting to deny anyone but the racially “pure” access to whiteness and the power and privilege it brings.

Somewhere along the line, the term expanded to encompass different aspects of identity. No longer confined to race, “passing” can refer to gay people who “appear” to be straight. It can apply to transgender people who “appear” cisgender. And it can apply to people like me, who “appear” to be white.

It wasn’t until I read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett that I began to think more critically about what “passing” meant in terms of my own identity.

The book tells the story of Stella Vignes, a light-skinned Black woman from Mallard, Louisiana, who “passes over,” abandoning her previous life and her family — including her twin sister — to live a life of privilege as a white woman in California. It also tells the story of Reese, a trans man who moves from Texas to California, leaving behind his previous identity and unsupportive family.

Both characters could be considered “passing,” but as I read the book, I wondered — are the two identities comparable? Is all “passing” created equal? Is Stella Vignes’ passing as a white woman the same as Reese’s passing as a cisgender man, the same as my own white-passing?

The most obvious problem with connecting these different types of “passing” lies within the very definition — “a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards.” (Kennedy, Randall. (2001). Racial Passing. Ohio State Law Journal. 62.)  Rooted in the term “passing” is the idea of duplicity, of deceit. After all, with the example of Stella Vignes, she is a Black woman pretending to be white.

But what about Reese, where there is no deception involved, and whose “passing” simply means he appears as his gender? As trans writer and activist Janet Mock explains, to “pass” as a trans person is “based on an assumption that trans people are passing as something that we are not. It’s rooted in the idea that we are not really who we say we are.” A trans person who is perceived as their gender isn’t “passing” — they are “merely being.” (Mock, Janet. Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More. Simon & Schuster, 2014. p. 155) The insidiousness of the term “passing” is that it is synonymous with fake. It implies guilt on behalf of the person who is considered to be “passing,” which is problematic when used as a term to describe what people are.

The problem also arises when referring to people who pass as “straight.” Brittney White talks about how when bisexual people are perceived as straight-passing, it amounts to invisibility and erasure, “a life of being forced to live in the closet… as if we’re somehow ashamed of our bi-ness and trying to run and hide from it.” A bisexual person isn’t deceiving anyone by being in a straight-passing relationship — nor are they any less bisexual for being in one. But that doesn’t stop people from assuming them to be straight.

To be “white-passing” in my case isn’t just a question of what people think I am — I am, after all, half-white. It’s what people, in their perception and judgment of me, think that I’m not. It’s incessantly and involuntarily having my identity erased in a single glance. It’s the distress of being a nonbinary, bisexual, half-Chinese person and confronting the idea that I am constantly seen as a cis, straight, white woman.

This happens to a mixed-race character in the book Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. Katrina is a half-Chinese, half-white woman who, at one point in the book, describes herself as an Asian lady to a trans woman named, coincidentally, Reese.

Reese reacts in disbelief to what Katrina says, thinking to herself, “Let’s be honest: Katrina looks white.” (Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby. Random House Publishing Group, 2021. p 171.)

At this point in the story, Katrina and Reese barely know each other, yet Reese already assumes that, because Katrina “looks white,” she has no right to claim her Asian identity.

Reese’s reaction to Katrina is the manifestation of the doubts I carry surrounding my biracial identity — the gnawing impostor syndrome of “passing.” As if, somehow, the fact of being white-passing is an invalidation of my Chinese identity. As if, somehow, every time anyone said, “But you look white,” or “I didn’t even realize you were Asian,” it chipped away at my Chinese-ness — regardless of the fact that these people didn’t know me — didn’t know my family, my life, how I was raised, how I viewed the world. Regardless of the fact that these people have no say about who I am.

The problem with “passing” is that it’s a judgment passed onto you by others based primarily on appearance. It’s something I have no control over. I don’t intentionally try to pass as white, yet it’s still a label that I sometimes find forced upon me. Even Stella acknowledges that, when she passed over, nothing had really changed about her. “She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name… She had become white only because everyone thought she was.” (Bennett, Brit. The Vanishing Half. Riverhead Books, 2020.  p 188.)

What, then, does it mean to move through the world as a white-passing person, to unintentionally “deceive” anyone who looks at you into believing that you are white?

As a biracial, white-passing person whose authenticity is constantly in question, I confront a lot of unnecessary anguish of being “enough.” Through my heritage I am equal parts white and Chinese. Yet to be deemed “white-passing” implies that neither parts of my identity are true or valid — to be mixed race and “white-passing” is to say that I am, on the one hand, not Chinese-looking enough to be Chinese, but that I’m also a fake white person. I’m “passing.” Either way, I’m neither of both, always only pretending to be either parts of what I truly am, always attempting to infiltrate groups to which I should, in theory, have equal claim.

In the darkest moments of trying to prove myself to myself, I think about my identity in terms of one-drop rules and blood quantums. I look at my own lineage and wonder, as a half-Chinese person, if I don’t have “enough” Chinese blood to measure up to either of these rules.

But then I catch myself buying into the systems that were put in place to enforce white supremacy, methods used to prescribe race in order to literally eradicate and enslave groups of people. My mind then circles back to the original meaning of “passing.” That was — after all — how all of this began: that the concept of passing “rests on the one drop rule and on folk beliefs about race and miscegenation, not on biological or historical fact.”

The problem with “passing” is that it is historically intertwined with anti-miscegenation and eugenics, ideas of racial purity and white supremacy.

But herein lies the ultimate problem with “passing”: that it implies a standard of measurement against which we are all constantly being compared — that of white, straight, and cisgender.

Baked into this association is the fact that “passing” has always been a gateway to privilege. To “pass” is to be “passable” — by definition, “just good enough to be acceptable, satisfactory.” You appear white, cis, or straight enough to be deemed acceptable, satisfactory. You’re granted privilege and safety for assimilating into the dominant parts of society.

Stella is able to get a job, live a solidly upper-class lifestyle in California, all because she passes as white. Veronica Esposito describes “passing privilege" from the trans perspective, where it means she can avoid discrimination when looking for job, for housing, for healthcare, where she can feel safe walking down the street and accessing women’s spaces — the list goes on.

I can bemoan being white-passing, but I can’t deny — nor could I ever quantify — the privilege it brings me, particularly with the rise of anti-Asian violence, where I often found myself wondering, hoping, that I “pass” enough to avoid discrimination, to escape harm.

Kravitz M. writes, “Society assumes everyone is straight by default — one of the facets of heteronormativity — unless some sign (gender-nonconformity, pride merch, a relationship that ‘looks’ like a same-gender one) points otherwise.” This mindset can be extrapolated to other facets of society. There is an “innocent until proven guilty” mentality behind passing. By default, you are assumed to be white, straight, and/or cis unless there is probable cause to believe you are not.

In contrast, I’ve never been called Chinese-passing or gay-passing or non-binary-passing.

The problem with “passing” isn’t just that Reese and Katrina and Brittney and Veronica and I are judged and viewed in terms of an erased identity and supposed “deception” — it’s that Stella Vignes was ever put in a place where she had to pretend to be what she wasn’t. That we are valued more based on a perception of us than for what we really are.

The fact is, no matter how people may see me or how I present, I carry an immense pride in my identity. I’m proud to be Chinese, proud to be biracial. I embrace the seeming contradictions of my own identity that have been created and codified by society, the prohibitions of my existence, the lack of space or acknowledgment for people like me who are more than one, who are neither one or the other, who are required to choose sides, or else have their side chosen for them. I value the complications it has forced me to confront, the way it has forced me to think critically and wrestle with questions and challenges unique to the mixed race experience.

In a conversation with my sister, I once mentioned that I considered myself white-passing.

Her response wasn’t a question of doubt or of skepticism. It was the response of someone who is able to understand that a person can exist outside and in-between the binaries of race, gender, and sexuality. It was a statement of acceptance — of knowing someone and seeing who they are, an acknowledgment of duality, of multiplicity. It was an affirmation that I wasn’t pretending or hiding anything, and that I don’t deserve to have my identity described in comparisons.

“But are you?” she asked.

Emily Cai is a Chinese American writer, farmer and social justice advocate with a degree in human rights from Sciences Po. They’ve worked with organizations such as Reprieve and Rock the Vote fighting against the U.S. death penalty and for U.S. voting rights. They currently farm in Maine.