Guessing Games

I’m 28 years old. I am light-skinned (olive). What color is that? It’s hard to explain . . . . As a child I had nearly alabaster skin and blue eyes . . . . I have been asked nearly every day what I am or been the object of guessing games. Every nationality has been mentioned. I see passing as a sort of image projection . . . . What I mean by “image projection” is that it is not just one’s looks that project whiteness, it is also knowledge, patterns of speech, manners of dress and the people one is affiliated with. [It’s] almost second nature to me. I do it without thinking. I do it sometimes against my own free will.

-- “Nicole”

*

“Nicole” dabbles in a world of racial sleight-of-hand.

There’s work--a corporate 9 to 5. There’s school--ivy walls and French literature. There’s a slender portion of social life wedged amid it all. For each, Nicole juggles not just her schedule but her persona. It’s an art she’s been perfecting for most of her 27 years--with pots of foundation, contact lenses, a Crayola array of lipstick shades, but mostly a psychic chutzpah she’s come to master.

For her job as an administrative assistant at a tony business firm, she might blow-dry her hair straight and apply makeup to “enhance” her “light features.” For school, she may wear almost no make-up and allow her hair to air-dry and coil naturally.

“In any situation such as a fine dining establishment run by whites--white neighborhoods, taxi cabs, bars, restaurants and other social situations--I feel more comfortable looking as white as possible,” Nicole explains as if she’s simply detailing her route home. “Still I feel--and know--that I am ‘black,’ no matter how much I try to pass. These changes make a difference, however. I have felt the difference of how people treat me whether they are white or black based on how I look.”

Passing was supposed to be passe. If not dead, at the very least moot. An embarrassing, tattered remnant of a particularly American brand of race politics and history.

But it’s not. “There are still many older people in the country, and especially in California, in Orange County, here in Los Angeles, up in Ventura County, [who] come up to me and confess that they are doing this, or that their relatives are doing this now,” says writer Shirlee Taylor Haizlip.

Since her 1995 bestseller, “The Sweeter the Juice,” which chronicled a generation-spanning search for her mother’s family, who abruptly “crossed over,” Haizlip has become dirty laundress, confidant, confessor. “They are usually people over 40 who are passing in the old-fashioned way. They haven’t told their children. They’ve lived a certain way for so long and they can’t change that.”

Beyond those who are trapped in the hand-me-down deceptions of their family’s past, passing has put on a modern mask. In this post-civil rights era, in this increasingly multiracial society, “passing” has reemerged in an updated and equally startling form.

Because Los Angeles has become the destination point at the end of so many diverse departures, it provides a Lazy Susan of cultural identities, poised, just so, for the grabbing. For a new generation of L.A. youth, the old-fashioned notion of racial identity may feel too constricting. From the debate around multiracial identity to the cultural imprints of integrated life, the thinking is: If you grow up next door to it, immersed in it, doesn’t it some way become a part of you?

Proximity raises a host of possibilities that, when put in practice, become loaded propositions. Increasingly in L.A. you can find Iranians passing as French or Greeks passing for Louisiana Creole or Irish-descendant California girls passing for Cuban.

Perhaps for practical advantage--or perhaps just for fun--passing has even been turned on its head: a quest to look more “exotic,” not less.

Whether it’s a vindictive pose based in reaping the spoils of affirmative action, or just a costume for an evening, modern passing unleashes a set of complicated questions.

If racial identity is a box, a structure, a home with four sides, what happens when one decides to remove one wall? Reconfigure a ceiling? Do away with the old floor? What if identity were as fungible as all that, like acquiring a new address or running henna through one’s hair?

Passing challenges what is truth and what is illusion and ushers onto center stage a lengthy list of race-based taboos. Even in its most seemingly innocuous pose, it scratches at old wounds--those rooted in access, respect and esteem--and cannot erase the racism and guilt that lie at the heart of it all. In all its incarnations, passing tells us that the harder we try to erase identity, the more we struggle with it.

*

For generations of families--not just black, but latino and Jewish as well--there are names without faces in family albums, limbs missing on an otherwise sturdy tree: Sisters, brothers, mothers who had “gone over,” vanished to the “other side.”

“This is not just a black/white thing,” says Reginald Daniel, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. “Everyone knows that. It is just because the boundaries in this country have been so delineated in ways that other groups don’t experience. Everyone says the black/white paradigm is kind of old and it really doesn’t hold up well, but then I say: ‘Folks, let me tell you, it may be old, but it started this mess.’ ”

Scholars and statisticians suggest that the great age of passing began around 1880 and started to wane about 1925. They distinguish two forms: discontinuous passing--working one way and living another--and continuous passing--when a person severs ties from family and past. Discontinuous was the most prominent and pervasive version; continuous the most dramatic and sensationalized.

Attempts to pin down the magnitude of continuous passing are largely conjecture. At its apex, when the Great Migration to the North began in 1910 and Jim Crow segregation was being implemented, estimates range from 10,000 to 100,000 on the number who were passing, says Daniel.

The figures are wild and skewed due to the caliper-and-eyedropper way race has historically been “measured.” The most careful attempts at calculation compare the growth and decline of various racial populations and extrapolate numbers based on gaps that could not be otherwise explained.

Although such math is inherently a pseudo science, this system and others like it were employed because keeping track of invented subdivisions--from mulatto to octoroon--became a preeminent concern after slavery. “There was a preoccupation that a ‘hidden blackness’ might seep into the white community,” says Daniel. “It was a real obsession. All these former slaves and people of African slave descent were now in the larger free society, and there had to be a way to keep the races separate. It was a way to keep track of all the various drops of blood.”

For those blacks who divined a way to jump race borders, it was like crossing a mental Mason-Dixon Line. Knowingly stepping into a world that was otherwise off-limits was clear-cut repudiation of Jim Crow’s broad reach. But in slim times it might be the only way a family could keep itself afloat. Black men crossed over into all-white work forces. There were no lines to sign, no boxes to check off, no need for explanation. For those who were passing by day, it was risky business to be spied in the company of the “other.” You had to be quick with your story--it literally meant saving your hide.

There were those who passed subversively, like NAACP official Walter Francis White, who, in the early part of this century, posed as a white journalist and traveled through the South to bear witness. His firsthand reports were the muscle in the organization’s efforts to pressure Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation. His story echoes other, quieter exploits, told like the very best of the trickster tale, about light-skinned blacks infiltrating the higher echelons of corporations and little by little changing the complexion of its work force. But those instances were few and far between.

For most who chose the route, it was personal. The stakes were high and the question was always the same: Did the end justify the means?

Consider “Dorothy.”

Looking for an after-school job to help her family through a tough strait, she heard of a stockroom opening at a downtown Los Angeles department store. But when she arrived, in her black dress and gloves, her Dolores del Rio curls and matinee smile, the man with the pen and position gave her a once-over and asked: “Why are you looking for a stock job?”

It was the 1940s and Dorothy, whose mother was Spanish and father black, knew this was the “appropriate” slot. But without hesitation, the man handed her a job on the floor. A salesgirl. With room for promotion. They had no clue. She didn’t tell.

Years later, on Friday nights, another job, another set of

worries, her husband would pick her up after work--but would always park two blocks away. “Now, no one told me to do that,” Dorothy says. “I did that because I knew they would probably fire me if they knew that I was

married to a black man, even though I’m black.”

Dorothy, now 70, tells her story perched at the edge of the couch, just on the edge of a memory, puzzling together dates and place, cause and effect. Her black hair now mingled with silver, curls cut away and brushed back from a face that refuses to reveal emotion. Without pause or apology, she stores her past on a high shelf and prefers to deal directly in the present. She has made it clear she is not interested in being judged--that she will not be patronized or criticized. Her deception was a necessity, and as she tells it, she stares into middle distance, as if watching a life--not necessarily her own--onscreen.

“I always thought I’d been a very good worker,” she says. “But it seemed like I was always at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

If most assume that all this can only be spoken in the past tense, there is evidence--most of it anecdotal--to suggest otherwise.

Shirelee Haizlip on occasion receives letters from what might be called race itinerants--male or female, in their late 20s or 30s, who have chosen to pass not only for economic reasons but to avoid the stinging stereotypes yoked to lineage. “So it’s going on,” she says. “So we make these choices.”

Three thousand miles away, Florida-based psychologist Juanita Brooks mediates a much-trafficked Internet Web site called “My Shoes.” She has created a virtual home for those who have long attempted to fashion a slapdash semblance of one. It is a unique segment of the population to whom she plays host--people, like her, of mixed race who have a “white appearance.”

Amid the sometimes celebratory, sometimes contentious discussion, Brooks has opened a forum--about race, about color, about perception. Within those public discussion groups or her private e-mail, she will hear from the isolated soul who has stepped off a cliff into the realm of nothingness. “Most of them are young, less than 40 years old. Most of them are single. They feel that it’s easier to get by at work if they don’t reveal all of their identity.”

Brooks wants to coax her correspondents out of the white lie, even if it is only one of omission. “That individual has many more emotional issues. When are they going to be found out? Because that anxiety is always there, if they are voluntarily living white.”

Given the climate, the barriers, Dorothy’s choice can be more easily reasoned through. But modern-day passing prompts both curiosity and speculation: Why would anyone endure such psychological and social contortions to deny who they are?

The consciousness and pride movements in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s trampled over many of the old beliefs around racial castes: blackness became something to embrace and celebrate. Still, racism’s residue remains. More invisible, sewn between the shell and lining.

Nowadays, the outcome may not be as dramatic as lynching. It’s more a psychological limbo. “On the one hand,” says UCSB’s Daniel, “one could say that the legal underpinnings of the exclusion of people of color have been dismantled, which would remove the impetus for passing. Our society doesn’t look exactly the same as it did in ’54 or ’65 or ‘67, but we don’t live in a world that is radically different.”

*

Whirling around a humid dance floor, Sy spins, an indiscernible blur. Rainbowed Guatemalan vest open, earlobes ringed in Indonesian silver, he moves at the center of a rush of bodies mimicking the beats--some African, some Brazilian. A few adoring words in Spanish, some in a lumbering English. But mostly, corrects one club denizen, “He speaks the language of love.” This evening, like others, he has traded his Persian roots for something he perceives is a bit more expansive: one that will float him for the moment in the world of romance.

What was a painful trade-off for Dorothy or is a game of racial truth or dare for Nicole can take on a high-gloss, campy air. For this reason, actor and performance artist Roger Guniver Smith calls Los Angeles “the world’s capital of illusion,” where all acts of zipping in and out of identity become “life as casting call. Everyone’s auditioning--because this is the era of the exotic.”

For many young people, cultural identity is fluid, less about the ancestral weight of racism and more about proximity. Add to that mix the media’s proclivity to romanticize people of color--from gun-toting gangbangers to uber athletes to gold-draped rap stars.

Bryan Rabin, the impresario and gadabout who runs Cherry, a weekly Friday night shebang at West Hollywood’s Love Lounge, traverses a world where identity is as malleable and image-sensitive as Silly Putty. The club, he says, “is very theatrical because L.A. is.”

Rabin has seen it all: “Middle Eastern people saying that they are French, straight passing for gay, white people trying to be really black--you know, upper-class white boys from the East Coast who really want to run from the roots of being inbred from the Mayflower. They seem to go toward that urban vibe--’Hons, you went to Harvard or Brown, where did you get the Ebonics class?’ ”

But where does posing stop and passing start?

Examples abound all over town: Saturday night seductresses at the Hard Rock Cafe crowd around a bathroom mirror the size of a compact, slipping out of nasal surfer speak and into something more comfortable--an Irish lilt or maybe a Scottish brogue. Or the otherwise Anglo American immersed in Echo Park digs speaking English with a decided gangsta lounge and limp.

Like any deception, there is a marshy, sinking quality to much of this ethnic mixing and matching. It fails to take into account all that is harnessed to the prickly history of trading in skins. Playing dress-up with identity isn’t something that can be viewed in a vacuum. It often conflates old-fashioned race crossing with a perceived, hip citizen-of-the world attitude that can be laced with equal bits hero worship and arrogance.

“I think one of the things that makes it easier for people in Los Angeles to construct a new identity--in terms of race--is a kind of anonymity or a rootlessness,” says Arthe Anthony, professor of sociology at Occidental College. It’s not surprising then that the act raises eyebrows, if not hackles. “People come here from other places,” says Anthony, “so there is no sense of integrity about their behavior, because there is no level of accountability.”

But the laxness, suggests author Haizlip, may also be a sign of something else: “I think there is a hipness in trying to extend the way that you look, and I don’t think that you are trying to say that you are something else but perhaps someone else. You are just adding to your sense of selves . . . .”

Haizlip believes that the country is experiencing a generational shift in its thinking about race. Fed by demographic boosts and dips that integrate neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and marriages, a genealogical (and possibly ideological) change is slowly taking place as well: “I don’t think it has to do with denial of basic culture or a basic set of genes. I just think it has to do with the fact that we are more liberated and are not bound by traditional perceptions anymore.”

With that shift in understanding, more people are pressed to talk about our narrow concepts of identity. Because racial affiliation has been considered a bold, not dotted line, when multiracial people either choose--or find themselves forced into choosing--among their many identities, those decisions are perceived as masking. They are often viewed with suspicion, particularly among people of color, because they are treading inadvertently on the old terrain of passing.

“Perhaps the increased societal openness to the reality of bi- and multiracial identity reduces the practical or potential practical value of passing,” says West L.A.-based psychotherapist and couples counselor Michael Hughes, who specializes in ethnic and cultural identity issues. But “whether or not a given individual might have compelling psychological reasons for passing? Yes, there are some people who would still opt to pass. It’s like a statement I make to my classes to raise people’s consciousness around race and culture: It’s still ‘normal’ to be white [and] to be other than that is not to be normal.”

“My sense with young people,” says Haizlip, “is that it is going beyond old limitations. For example, we will say, ‘Well, she doesn’t look black,’ or ‘He looks black,’ and that meant we had a stereotype about what black had to be. But we’ve been taught in the last 15 or 20 years that there are a lot of representations of blackness.”

“There is no monolithic way of being black,” says Anthony. “What people are saying is, ‘I want to be an individual.’ And if opportunities weren’t still defined by race, this would happen less and less.”

What has become clear then, as novelist Danzy Senna suggests in her recent novel, “Caucasia,” is that these old labels have become ill-fitting. They do not allow for the sweep and texture of experience. But if they are so imperfect, why do we so steadfastly cling to them?

“They make us feel like we have a home,” says Senna. “[The notion of race] is as primitive and wrong as the notion that the world is flat. It’s like an opiate. This idea makes us feel like we have a home, and it’s actually a false home.”

The sticky point, for those like Daniel and Haizlip, who pore over the meaning of color, is that when dealing with an old system that still weights lighter skin with more access and privilege than darker, even the most innocent nightclub pose has powerful repercussions. These identity shifts can be potentially dangerous if moving from one caste to another doesn’t take into account his or her own benefit in doing such a thing. “It’s going native,” says Daniel, “at the same time saying, ‘Oh, I have the luxury of being able to do that because I can always go back home.’ ”

*

When I was growing up, my parents didn’t really stress to us pride in an identity . . . . At least it wasn’t strong enough to combat the forces that sought to shame us and make us feel subhuman. I feel that my desire to fit in and to blend in with the white world was encouraged by my family, or at least it went unhindered.

Whites have more positive connotations assigned to them. They also have more fair, positive images portrayed of them in the media, history books than anybody else. I would say back then I did not consider myself to be anything at all . . . . At work, when it came to “place me” with some kind of stereotype, I blew all of those away. I broke their rules and tried to sneak behind enemy lines. I was supposed to be black. . . how dare I try to be like them . . . especially after almost looking like them . . . .

I have made a very good friend of a black man . . . . It was being with him that formed a drive in me to begin a turning point about how I portrayed myself . . . . I looked for who I was.--”Nicole”

*

Reconsider “Lisa.”

Incongruous, thus worth the double-take--the chirpy waitress with the guarded smile. Her lacquer-black ponytail is wound into an outsized Shirley Temple curl. Two self-conscious tendrils frame a face of elliptical beauty. Her eyes, a chestnut brown, have an almond aspect. The nose, neither sharp nor broad, sits perfectly center in a plane of skin the color of South Coast sand.

Above the trattoria kitchen’s crash and clatter, she raises her compact voice to recite the evening’s specials: Her words ride on a lacy, lyric cadence impossible to place.

“Spanish? Greek? French?” My puzzled dinner companion tosses forth random points of origin.

I’m quiet because I’ve already reached a destination. I see Africa in her. What that means, whatever intangible I glimpse, I can’t articulate, but somehow it makes her part of me, my “family”--however removed. And I can’t help but wonder why she’s chosen such a fancy way to wander away.

“Your accent?” lets loose my friend. He asks the un-askable. Her skin rushes red.

Though I’ve spoken not a word, she avoids my eyes in search of an explanation: “It’s just that I work here in this restaurant and all the waiters have beautiful accents, and I guess I just wanted an accent myself,” She looks like a rag doll with her stuffing spilled, her voice flat.

Wordless, she floats for a moment suspended in the room’s cacophony. I smile. A spiritual Heimlich maneuver, but it’s too late. She drifts away. It’s an exchange that lingers, an old stain impervious to scrubbing. It isn’t the first; it won’t be the last.

Lisa’s hesitation, her abrupt flight, cracks open the door to a musty hiding place: passing in the old sense.

Most everyone, in the course of life’s travels, has found themselves suspended in an unsettling moment when one senses that someone isn’t who or what they claim to be.

But how about a game of turnabout?

After an evening swim, a slicked-back parade of us wander into a rose-lit Indian restaurant. Five waiters buzz around our table, snapping open napkins. Suddenly the owner appears, his eyes assessing me; his look is one of eager recognition, familiarity.

“You are Indian.”

It is not a question. His eyes pin me, a smile punctuated with dimples as deep as exclamation marks.

“Where are you from?” his gaze is like a splash of hot light. The other waiters move in, surround him. “Here . . . Los Angeles,” I say after a beat.

“No. I mean before . . . . “

The owner’s face twists in confusion, edged in disbelief because I am failing to acknowledge what he is certain are my South Asian roots. Or I’m protesting too much . . . passing.

Me?

As he and the waiters talk, try to coax me home, I begin to see me in their faces, in their eyes, their words constructing the mirror. Even I can feel India’s embrace. This gesture, open and heartfelt, attempts to close the chasm or, at the very least, question the distance that separates us on the surface. L.A.’s ethnic face has shifted radically, enough so that identity can be as easily projected as it can be mistaken. While the owner’s gesture points up how narrow the differences are, at the same time it underscores them.

What passing in all of its variations--trendy or traditional, assertive or assumed--suggests is that identity, be it racial, religious or sexual, is still assigned a hierarchy. When someone isn’t attempting to modify or manipulate his own identity for some gain, one is being assigned one.

Identity is currency, and its value is calibrated in ascending denominations. We tell ourselves that color doesn’t matter--that we are colorblind--precisely because we know that it does. Within the psychic transaction of passing, it isn’t the tangible, physical features that one covets but what whiteness has historically represented in terms of position at the starting block.

“As long as race/color is tied to economics, passing won’t be passe,” says Herman L. Dubose, associate professor of sociology at Cal State Northridge. “There have been inroads in the movie industry, people like Wesley Snipes or Eddie Murphy, the model Naomi Campbell. But in this town especially, color is what’s important. I even get caught up in it. You never see yourself as being there.”

Despite much talk of equality, when it comes to race, we’re a culture still walled in by its generalizations.

“You would be an idiot not to see [how race plays itself out] in American society and not act on it,” says George Lipsitz, professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego. The rule of the plural: that one stands for everyone.

So what are people who choose to pass peeling away? Not just skin, but the taint, the burden of all of this--whether the “tyranny and guilt” of whiteness or the “victimhood” of color.

But for all of its category snubbing, passing doesn’t address what is at the root: Hatred, shame, inadequacy, how not just race but color are still weighted. Creative attempts to dress up identity aren’t the answer as much as they are an amplification. As the double life of Nicole suggests, the heady first moments of shaving away all of those distinguishing marks may feel like freedom, but it ultimately means there is nowhere to land--it’s passing over, passing through.

So much of our thinking about identity is wrapped around assumptions--good and bad--that have come to be employed as shorthand. If someone doesn’t fit our notion of what it is to be black, white, brown, yellow, we find no place for them. Can’t process them. Refuse to take them in.

When attempting to point to the places where we come together, too often the well-meaning impulse is to speak about the “fiction of race.” The gesture, though, feels like glib dismissal, one that discounts all the cultural mementos that find themselves written on the skin.

To rewire our thinking--to restructure our old notions about caste and access, on all sides of the racial divide--takes an infiltration of another sort.

So for this reason, this discussion may well be best heard through the lives of people who don’t fit the mold of this or that, but use their physical ambiguity to confront what has found itself linked--rightly or wrongly--to color. Their presence forces the subject where silence and euphemism once reigned.

Lili Barsha’s striking mix of features renders race a trope. Within her flow bits and pieces of a wide, wonderfully unwieldy world: Chinese, African American, Polish and Russian. But Lili, who would never deign to pass, has used her cornucopia of identity as a subversion, as a way to infiltrate lines, pose hard questions and forge toward even more difficult answers about race, about borders, about assumptions, about propriety.

“At parties, this is the scary moment. The moment of truth,” says Lili, a local actress and writer. “Once the drinks start flowing, inhibitions come down.” That’s the time when people, who have quickly and quietly placed her in a racial category, one connected to their own, vent about the “other.” The realm that Lili embodies.

In those moments, she has learned to hold that someone in the uneasy balance, to question those inaccuracies rooted in bigotry point blank: to make, she hopes, people think in more elastic terms around identity--and develop a language of grays.

“I feel like a spy in the house of race,” she says. “It’s like an all-access pass. Though I risk losing friends, I know I always have to be true. I’ve been in groups that are all Asian where people say: ‘I hate white people.’ I’ve been in the same situation with blacks, where the topic is white people and how much evil they spread. Though I’m given honorary status [within all of these groups] . . . it just makes you feel like you don’t belong anywhere . . . . So I have found that it helps instead to be specific.”

Through all of this, Lili is emboldened by the evidence of more and more people who are shedding layers of old understanding--intellectual skin, if you will. But that’s not to be confused with passing. For Lili, that road implies deception. “Passing implies shame. I am not ashamed of my ethnic background. I’m very proud to be black, white and Asian.” Even lending her words in the context of a discussion of passing makes her hesitant, because if there is hope about race and America, hope is in truth.

So for those like Danzy Senna, who is just as physically un-pinpointable as Lili, but who identifies as black and biracial, taking her book around the country has been a way to talk about what a life means when it is both inclusive of and beyond color. To question the labels, and to rethink the notion of home: “I don’t know if there is such a thing as passing anymore,” adds Senna. “Truly. I think what people are coming to at the readings is to talk about the subject of mixed race identity, because it really isn’t dealt with. People are curious about what it feels like to be an invisible sister.”

In short, about allegiance and pride, beyond what’s coded in color. Beyond skin deep.