Powell
Suspended
Joined: 27 Nov 2004
{Posts: 2462 }
|
 Posted: Fri 27 Jul 2007 23:05 Post subject: Elsie Roxborough: "Passing" and the Death Penalty |
 |
|
The attacks on Elsie Roxborough are especially nasty. The "passer" who dies before his/her time supposedly had it coming (from the "black" American viewpoint).
Does anyone notice that these fanatical anti-passing attacks are apparently based on a premise that "whites" are truly biologically superior and "blacks" biologically inferior? The violent and judgemental language used against the passer make it clear that a racial "inferior" is getting above himself and must be brought down.
Do you also see an assumption that the white ancestry of the "passer" will "improve" the "black race" while degrading the "white race"? The "passer" is meant to be a natural aristocrat in the "black" community but can only be trash in the "white" one. If the worst of the "whites" is the "best" of the "blacks," what does that say about "black" claims to equality with "whites"?
Note also the acceptance by "scholars" of a kind of "black" attempt at mass psychoanalysis. They tell us how guilt-ridden the "passers" supposedly are and the "price" they've paid for their "deception" with no evidence whatsoever.
http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/ninamaemckinney/ElsieRoxborough.html
| Quote: | Slippery Language and False Dilemmas:
The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper
Julie Cary Nerad
American Literature 75.4 (2003) 813-841 |
http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/75/4/813.pdf
| Quote: | Framed in biological terms, passing (regardless of intent) is usually understood as perilous for the passer's "true" black identity and thus in conflict with her responsibility to both her African American family and the race. Social conventions frequently punish individuals who fail to fulfill this responsibility. Gibson argues, for example, that although black life for "pale individuals" is fraught with difficulty and intraracial discrimination, life for light-skinned African Americans who pass is worse. "Destroyers of [their] mental placidity" include the inability to acknowledge black family and friends, delusions of persecution, and a constant subconscious reminder of ongoing participation in a "misdemeanor." 3 Explaining this sense of guilt in terms of whiteness as property, Priscilla Wald argues that "passing would be analogous to, if not synonymous with, stealing something—here, a reputation for whiteness." 4 While white people position themselves as victims of (imagined) black fraud and deception, those who are legally black often experience passing both as a crime of theft and as an act of defaulting on a debt of racial responsibility. Rearticulating these postulations within the context of racial uplift and the DuBois-Washington debate over accommodationism, Valerie Smith argues that passing plots
presuppose that characters who pass for white are betrayers of the black race, and they depend, almost inevitably, upon the association of blackness with self-denial and suffering, and of whiteness with selfishness and material comfort. The combination of these points—passing as betrayal, blackness as self-denial, whiteness as comfort—has the effect of advocating black accommodation, since the texts repeatedly punish at least this particular form of upward mobility.
The reformed passer who returns to the black race recognizes the psychological dangers of racial deception. Her own insufficient moral and racial education is "corrected" and then turned to the effort of educating others, usually toward the sociological ends of racial uplift—to wipe the "stigma of degradation from [the] race," as Pauline Hopkins phrases it. 6 However, by supporting the tenets of racial uplift and punishing passers who reject the black race, some passing novels minimize their subversive potential by associating racial responsibility with that single drop of black blood, thus reinscribing the association between racial identity and biology.
More troublesome is that scholars may also express disapproval of a passer's actions. In a particularly unnerving example, Kathleen Hauke describes Elsie Roxborough, a well-known 1930s black socialite who passed as white, as "trying to act like a real Caucasian, [but who] became a caricature, a poor imitation of mainstream society and its values"; the essay closes with a reference to Roxborough as "aping whites." Hauke's story of Roxborough's life is rife with terminology that recycles worn-out racist rhetoric of black imitation and Darwinist inequality, even in her construction of Roxborough's fundamentally unethical choice: having "lost the finest elements of her personality by choosing to pass," Roxborough "maneuvered and schemed, wriggling through all the possibilities she could devise." 7 Although Hauke's essay is saturated with pathos, Roxborough, who (perhaps accidentally) died from an overdose of sleeping pills, emerges as the tragic mulatto with a twist. As Carolyn Karcher explains, "the archetypal ‘tragic mulatto' heroine either dies of grief when her white lover abandons her for a wife of his own race, or she becomes a ‘raving maniac' when sold to a profligate upon the death of her master." 8 In Hauke's narrative, Roxborough dies as punishment for the crime of leaving her race and attempting to possess property fraudulently, rather than from the consequences of white racist patriarchy or slavery. Fully immersed in the ideologies of biological difference and racial uplift, Hauke affirms Roxborough's death as just. |
|
|
'
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
