Passing in African American Families

​Paperdoll Journal Ancestry

October 2018

Some of my great grandmother's family lived their adult life passing after their migration North.

Paperdoll Journal Ancestry is primarily a quest to understand family dynamics. Passing in my maternal grandmother's family was a common conversation when I was a young girl. During family get togethers it would always come up, 'Why were her siblings distant?' My grandmother and aunts would never answer with a complete explanation. They would shrug or say, I've told you before. Two generations of children would ask the same questions over the years without understanding enough to stop the wondering. 

In 1944, my grandmother lost her mother at fourteen years old, she and her younger siblings went to live with various aunts on both sides of her family.  Since much of the family history is lost to refusal to respond, the death of my grandmother and several of her siblings, I'm attempting to gather explanation through public history research.

This month my focus is on racial passing. 

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 color or 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.

*the automatic assignment by the dominant culture of children of a mixed union or sexual relations between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups to the subordinate group.
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Black Family History 
Library Picks

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life
Historian Allyson Hobbs tells the story of African Americans who passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, Hobbs writes, a chosen exile. The history of passing explores the possibilities, challenges, and losses that racial identity presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

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