Passing Strange

The term "passing" is loaded.
No matter which way you use it, or hear it, the implication is that someone is trying to be perceived as something they are not. You understand I'm not working in the context of test scores, right?

Growing up in the 1970's and 80's, I never thought I was passing. I was black. When people asked me what I was - which happened often - I answered "Black." If the listener responded with "You don't look black. You look Spanish," which also happened often,  I might have bothered to explain that my mother is white, and that my grandfather from Spain made me part Spanish, but probably not the kind of Spanish they meant. Or I might have shrugged them off and carried on my way.

As an adult, I've rarely been asked about my ethnicity.
But it's come to my attention that more than one of my adult friends had no idea that I was in any way black at all. When I explain that I self-identify as "mixed," the black part sometimes comes as a surprise. This freaks me out! Because I'm not doing anything different as a mixed person than I was as a black person, as far as I know. A societal shift has happened. And through writing, I'm trying to explain how I see it...

The topic of passing came up a few days ago, in an unexpected place.
My mother and I were sorting through one of her last moving boxes, marked Mementos and Newspapers. We remembered hastily packing it, almost exactly a year ago. Among the D-Day clippings and Victory!! headlines, we found her three-ring binder from eighth grade, loaded with every essay, quiz, and math sheet, neatly preserved. She delighted in reading each yellowed looseleaf page aloud, and I enjoyed sharing her trip down memory lane. Until she got to a page that began, "The immigrant has been a problem to the United States because..."

This was a Social Studies essay test.
Her articulate answer explained that the "immigrant problem" brought tenement crowding, cheap labor, and the challenge of educating children of different cultures. The year was 1950. And the orator was my mother, herself the child of immigrants. Born on an anarchist commune in  upstate New York in 1939, but enrolled in a public high school, she was declaring the ways in which the immigrant had been a problem.

I had to ask.
"Mom? Do you remember what you thought of your parents when you wrote that?"
She looked up from her papers.
I said, "Your parents were immigrants!"
She thought about it for a minute. "You know, at that time, in that school, it was important to not be perceived as an outsider. I guess I didn't think of my parents as immigrants."

I couldn't help what I was thinking: that my mother was stuck in an upstate high school, being indoctrinated against the people who raised her. She was twelve, earning a "Very Good"grade on her essay test. And unless someone directly asked her what she was, she was passing.

My mother, the daughter of immigrants, the wife of my black father, always taught me to be myself, and to value authenticity and diversity. But in post-war upstate New York, her Judaism and her parents' immigration histories were muted facts.

Seventy years later, about twenty miles south of my mother's old high school, my family and I are thankfully living in a different light.