white passing, anti-black, and all-American

This story was adapted from its original version by the original author because “legacy news” is regulated by the FCC, making it difficult to tell the truth, and inappropriate to put yourself in the story…unless you have cancer. Legacy news loves cancer.

"Race" is America's four-letter word that everyone knows but would rather ignore - until it is time for demographic grouping, but who or what determines what is considered "Black."

Personally, I am obsessed with the Black people who chose to pass for white. Maybe it’s because growing up as a Louisiana native, I heard the term passé blanc. That is how older people described folks so light-skinned they could easily pass for white. Those folks typically just used their fair skin to go unnoticed in white spaces and thumb their noses at white folks who couldn’t tell the difference while actively practicing racism. They were not living a white life.

While there is no solid data to reflect the number of white families, many of whom likely espouse racist rhetoric, who have a fully Black grandparent, great, twice great, or more grandparents in their family trees, a Science article estimated that more than 300,000 Black men passed for white between 1880 and 1940.

The article explained that men who passed for white had better health outcomes and lived nine months longer than their brothers who maintained a Black identity. Think about that. Men who lived a secret life, which was actually as dangerous as being Black if the secret was revealed, still lived longer than Black men minding their business. Films like Imitation of Life showed us the heartbreak brought on by the separation required to effectively “pass”. It also painted a clear picture of the consequences of being discovered as Black living a white life.

Frequently, people in the media and newsmakers feel compelled to question a person's "Blackness." Whether it is President Donald Trump questioning when former VP Kamala Harris "turned Black" during the presidential campaign, or some commentator questioning whether or not - "{Black person} is Black enough." Blackness is a construct created by Western pseudo-intellectuals, colonizers, and capitalists seeking to explain why plundering African resources was not only

Black professionals, if they’re being honest, will tell you that at some point in their academic or professional journey, they were told by a non-Black colleague or classmate, "You're Black, but not Black, Black" – whatever that means. It’s as if to non-Black people that our existence is on a spectrum dictated by what the entertainment has defined as Black over the decades.

Entertainers, elite athletes, business leaders, and rising politicians who are also Black frequently have their connections to other Black people questioned. The questions are typically posed by journalists, pundits, and culture commentators who have little or no authentic connection to the Black community. So the question is, who gets to decide which people are Black?

Wiley University history professor Dana Fergins explained that the answer lies in the creation of a racial caste system that made darker skin an automatic ticket to second-class citizenship in the nation and abroad.

"A caste system, in layman's terms, is putting people in a particular box or system to say based on your race or the color of your skin that you're inferior," explained Fergins.

Fergins said that since the inception of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, European colonists, under the authority of the Catholic Church, maintained a racial caste system to support the enslavement and oppression of Africans and other Indigenous people.

In Louisiana, the Tignon law required Creole women of color, free or enslaved, to cover their heads with a scarf or wrap. This made it easier to determine who was in society at a glance since lighter skin or untextured hair could cause them to be mistaken for white.

Many Black people who found the skin color burden overwhelming chose to get in where their physical features could help them fit in and chose to pass for white.

"First of all, white-passing is a very dangerous game, depending on what year and where you're at. White passing entails that you are of such light-colored descent and you blend well; your hair texture is not what they deem African American."

While the act of passing for white meant living a life where you were free to move as you please and create the life you wanted, it also meant living in fear that somehow the lie you were living would be exposed. However, passing for white was a non-starter for countless others with fair skin, light eyes, and smoother-textured hair.

"In our great state of Louisiana, you can go down to Grand Cane, and you can't decipher who's Black and who's white, but that's just what our culture is. But many were able to escape and go to New York, go to California, and get those jobs that others could not have gotten based on what they looked like," Fegins said.

A Louisiana law passed in 1970 set a legal definition for what the state considered Black and was the only one of its kind in the nation. It declared that anyone with one thirty-second of "Negro blood" was Black. Before that, Louisiana said "a trace" of Negro ancestry to consider someone Black. That is, until a woman in South Louisiana challenged the law to change her birth certificate to reflect how she identified rather than the identity placed upon her by a state-sanctioned caste system.

When 48-year-old Susie Guillory Phipps requested her birth certificate through the Bureau of Vital Statistics, she was gobsmacked to learn that she was Black, according to the State of Louisiana, and her birth certificate.

Phipps lived as a white woman her entire life and was twice married to white men. She had no idea that her fourth great-grandmother was an enslaved woman named Margarita – but thanks to the state's meticulous birth record keeping and race requirement on birth certificates, Phipps was forced to confront her ancestry.

More than 60 terms, including mulato, octaroon, and quadroon, have evolved throughout the state's history to describe mixed-race people and to sort out the classes of free and enslaved people of color. Phipps wanted nothing to do with any of them and went about the business of suing the State of Louisiana to be declared white.

Gregory Jaynes, a contributing writer from New Orleans, published a September 1982 article about Phipps' plight in the New York Times. In it, Jaynes recalled interviews with Phipps in which she produced photos of blue-eyed family members and said, "When I found out about the slave, it was last March. We went to court on March 2, and when Jack told me about this Margarita person, I was so sick. I was so sick," Phipps said.

She was sick because even though it was the early 1980s, being Black was not easy, particularly in parts of the South that were still holding on to segregation. In the case of Phipps, who was born during segregation, an ugly time in our nation's history, when to be Black meant to be less than, to have a more challenging walk with fewer available resources, and to be denied dignity.

Denying her dignity is exactly what Louisiana did as they paraded in family members and experts in an attempt to refute her claim of whiteness.

Attorneys for the state called Phipps's aunt and uncle, who identified as Black, to testify to Phipps's relation to them. The state's attorney called the bayou where Phipps was born a "free-person-of-color community." However, a Black sociologist and professor in New Orleans said he applauded Phipps and hoped her case would expose the "foolishness" of race and the caste system in Louisiana and the nation.

Phipps spent a significant amount of money to have the state acknowledge that her white skin was a no-brainer to have her declared a white woman on paper. Louisiana's one-thirty-second of Negro blood was upheld by a magistrate judge.

Louisiana repealed the law in 1983, not long after Phipps's request to have her whiteness declared on paper, as it is in person, was denied in court.

Susie Phipps is not alone. She is one of many thousands across several generations who decided the “good fortune” of being born with features closer to European than African. I don’t know at what age Susie left the “free people of color community,” maybe she was too young to remember. What I do know is that Susie Phipps, in her own words, was sickened by learning that she, too, was a branch on a Negro family tree.

It is easy to judge people like Susie Phipps for seemingly abandoning her family lineage for a perceived "better life" as a white person. However, we should reserve judgment for them and place it squarely on a designed system that often goes out of its way to maintain a built-in second-class citizenry.

Susie Phipps and hundreds of thousands of others chose to blend with the white mainstream and were attempting to "transcend their race" long before it was used to describe Black people who have seemingly bypassed racism as they ascended to the highest levels of their areas of expertise.

So the question remains: What determines whether someone is deemed "Black in America?" Does it matter, and to whom? The most important question is, why do we need to carry on the construct of race, especially since we know it didn’t exist before the 1600s? The peculiarity of Europeans, particularly the English, is that they loved grouping people into races to establish separation and social hierarchy.