The most intriguing article I read yesterday was the one in the Guardian, which discussed about the fact that Lawrence Dennis, one of the leading figures in the American fascist movement was black, but was able to pass himself as white for most of his life without ever divulging the fact that he was a black to his feloow fascists and even to his family. The revelation is made by Gerald Horne in his new book, The Colour of Fascism, which states that Dennis’s mother was African American and that it is unknown whether his father was too even though thef act that he was able to pass as white suggests that he wasn’t. I think this is fascinating because it shows that the controversial nature of the link between race and identity. The article in the Guardian also makes important point about “Passing” that is the phenomenon during essential the old South, which made light-skinned African Americans passed themselves as white:
"Passing" was common in American society at the time. Despite laws against miscegenation, the pervasive practice of masters raping their slaves had produced a large number of light-skinned people. Under America's rigidly enforced codes of racial supremacy, any child of a mixed-race relationship was deemed "black", regardless of their complexion. They called it the one-drop rule: one drop of "black blood" made you black.
Given the manifest benefits of life on the other side of the colour line, black people who could pass as white often did, even though doing so meant cutting themselves off from their family and their past. Passing has provided the dramatic tension for many a novel, including Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Walter Moseley's Devil in a Blue Dress and, most pertinently, Nella Larsen's Passing. "Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear," Walter White, the former head of the civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, claimed in the late 1940s. "People whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration ... men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the proscription and humiliation which the American colour line imposes on them." White, who was light-skinned, used to pass himself as white at times when investigating lynch mobs in the South.
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