Passing by Nella Larsen

She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three. Nothing, she imagined, was ever more completely sardonic.

I'm going to teach Passing again this year--Song of Solomon, a book I love, turned out to be just too dang long. So I needed to reread it. But this will be a short review, because I don't have all that much to say about it. Unlike The Great Gatsby, a book I don't have any special love for but find something new in each time I re-read it, Larsen's Passing seems to have little in the way of surprises. Which is itself a little surprising, because as a book it is rich with ambiguities: racial, sexual, what have you. But the ambiguities each time are the same.

One thought I did have as I was reading this is that, while Passing has a lot to say to us about modern day ideologies around race, it actually depicts a world that has vanished. Passing, as I understand it, was extremely common in the early 20th century, sometimes in the all-or-nothing way that Clare Kendry passes as white in the novel, and sometimes in the casual way that Irene is seen to be passing at the Drayton Hotel at the beginning of the novel. (In fact, what Irene is doing is so casual in that scene she fails to mention it until she faces the possibility that Clare, who she mistakes for a white stranger, has clocked her, and she'll be thrown out of the hotel.) There simply isn't any analog to that universe today. Which I think actually makes Passing more interesting, because it offers a glimpse into an ecosystem that could only exist under Jim Crow.

It also makes me think that when Clare accuses white people of being stupid--she explains to her novelist friend that a white person could never pass as black, hello Rachel Dolezal, because black people are too savvy for it--they must have been really stupid. Which is to say that race as an idea operates entirely on ignorance, relying on the fact that unstated assumptions remain unstated. If it were ever all dragged into the light, Passing seems to suggest, something would fall apart. "If I could explain" Clare Kendry, Irene's husband Brian says at one point, "I'd know what race is." But who really wants to know?