Passing for white , author of the
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Although
anti-miscegenation laws outlawing
racial intermarriage existed in the North American Colonies as early as 1664, there were no laws preventing or prosecuting the rape of enslaved girls and women. Rape of slaves was legal and encouraged during slavery to increase the slave population. As a result, for generations, enslaved women (who might also be mixed-race) bore mixed-race children who were deemed "
mulattos", "
quadroons", "octoroons", or "hexadecaroons" based on their percentage of "black blood". Although these mixed-race people were often half White or more, institutions of
hypodescent and the 20th-century
one-drop rule in some states – particularly in the
South – classified them as black and therefore, inferior, particularly after slavery became a racial caste. But there were other mixed-race people who were born in colonial Virginia among the working class to unions or marriages between free white, almost exclusively Irish, women and African or African-American men, free, indentured, or slave, and became ancestors to many free families of color in the early decades of the United States, as documented by Paul Heinegg in his
Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware. For some people, passing as White and using their whiteness to uplift other black people was the best way to undermine the system that relegated black people to a lower position in society. These same people that were able to pass as white were sometimes known for leaving the African American community and getting an education, later to return and assist with
racial uplifting. Although the reasons behind the decision to attempt to pass are deeply individual, the history of African Americans passing as white can be categorized by the following time periods: the
antebellum era, post-emancipation,
Reconstruction through
Jim Crow, and present day.
Antebellum United States During the
antebellum period, passing as white was a means of escaping slavery. Once they left the plantation, escaped slaves who could pass as white found safety in their perceived whiteness. To pass as white was to pass as free. could sue for their freedom, using their white appearance as justification for emancipation. Passing was used by some African Americans to evade segregation. Those who were able to pass as white often engaged in tactical passing or passing as white in order to get a job, go to school, or to travel. But the narrator closes the novel by saying "I have sold my birthright for
a mess of pottage", meaning that he regrets trading his blackness for whiteness. The idea that passing as white was a rejection of blackness was common at the time and remains so to the present time. The aforementioned 20th-century writer and critic Anatole Broyard was a Louisiana Creole who chose to pass for white in his adult life in
New York City and
Connecticut. He wanted to create an independent writing life and rejected being classified as a black writer. In addition, he did not identify with northern urban black people, whose experiences had been much different from his as a child in New Orleans' Creole community. He married an American woman of European descent. His wife and many of his friends knew he was partly black in ancestry. His daughter Bliss Broyard did not find out until after her father's death. In 2007, she published a memoir that traced her exploration of her father's life and family mysteries entitled ''One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets''. ==Australia==