Pass Fail: Difference between revisions

 

=== Literature ===

* ''The Prince and the Pauper''

* ''Puddn'head Wilson''

 

=== Theater ===

* ''[[The Comedy of Errors]]''

 

 

=== Literature ===

* Michelle Cliff's "No Telephone to Heaven" has the trans/genderqueer character Harry/Harriet (also known as H/H), who is biologically male but identifies as a blend of male and female. At the beginning of the novel, s/he has a totally masculine appearance but wears bikinis, puts on make-up, and occasionally dresses in the genderfuck style (for example with both a tuxedo and very campy make-up. This impish black Jamaican character passes for an African man to fool an American tourist, who really thinks he has just met "King Badnigga of Benin"). Towards the end of the novel, H/H starts living and presumably identifying as Harriet, a white nurse, which involves double 'passing'. H/H is very aware that even as 'she' is respected as a generous nurse, s/he could literally get lynched for being trans and for passing for white, but makes this choice because a black man couldn't become a nurse. This character plays a huge role in the development of the very confused main character Clare Savage, a white-looking middle-class mixed-race Jamaican woman who questions the racist standards of her formerly slave-owning family and might further be bisexual. His/her ability to transcend social boundaries and to fool racists and homophobes/transphobes is part of his/her attributes as a [[Trickster]] figure.

 

* Adam in ''[[Degrassi]]'' has some trouble coming across as a guy, particularly in his early appearances. Played with an element of [[Cringe Comedy]]. Booyah!

 

=== Video Games ===

 

 

=== Real Life ===

* It wasn't until jazz musician [[wikipedia:Billy Tipton|Billy Tipton]] died that even his {{spoiler|adopted}} sons learned that Dad was born Dorothy Lucille Tipton. He had been living as male for nearly 50 years (with only two female cousins and possibly a lover or two knowing his status as a trans man), including sexual relationships with women (at least one of whom was firmly convinced her partner was male).

* This is the basis of a book called 'Self-Made Man : One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again' by Norah Vincent. For about a year and a half, she masqueraded as a man among various groups of men (in a monastery, at a business, in a strip club, etc.) to see how their interactions varied from what she experienced as a woman.

* "Passing" is a common term in the transgender and transsexual community, meaning just what you would think.

* Gay actors of yesteryear were pretty much required to pass as straight. Rock Hudson is one of the more famous examples.

 

== Race and Ethnicity ==

 

=== Comic Books ===

* The graphic novel ''Incognegro'' is a period-piece about a light-skinned reporter who passes for white in order to write about racial hate crimes in the South.

* Sally Juspeczyk in ''[[Watchmen]]'' covered up her Polish ancestry for the sake of her career, renaming herself Sally Jupiter, and firmly denies it when she is sort-of confronted about it. Her daughter Laurie has no such hang-ups and uses her mother's original surname.

 

=== Film ===

* "''The Human Stain''." [[The Movie]] of the book had an African-American character played by Anthony Hopkins.

* ''Slow Burn''; a white DA has been braiding her hair and passing for mixed in order to foster support in her African-American constituency.

 

=== Literature ===

* "''Black Like Me''" is an example of short term passing, and a rare example of a white man passing as a black man.

** 'Black Like Me' could actually count as a Real Life example, since the book is nonfiction. The author John Howard Griffin actually artificially darkened his skin under the care of a doctor and journeyed through the American South to get a first-person perspective on what it was like to be black.

* Fannie Hurst"s novel ''Imitation of Life'' is an interesting case, as it was adapted into a movie in both the US and Mexico, showing the differences in views of passing in both nations.

* Faulkner's ''[[Absalom, Absalom!]]'' gets mixed up with this trope and [[Tragic Mulatto]] as more of the back story about the back story coming out comes out. Although it being Faulkner, a lot of the point is just impressing upon the reader what a total [[Jerkass]] the lead really is.

* In ''[[Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe]]'', George Peavey has twin sons, Jasper, the light-skinned one, and Artis, the dark one. Jasper later joins a club in Birmingham whose members are so light their pictures have made it into the paper as those of a white organization. There's a chapter where his daughter goes shopping in a department store, pretending she's white, when her uncle Artis runs into her. She reacts in such a way, though she knows who he is, that the store staff believes he's harassing her.

* One of the main themes of ''[[Caucasia]]''. Birdie and Cole Lee are both [[Halfbreed|half-black-half-white]] and at different times must attempt to pass for one or the other to fit in or blend into the surroundings. Cole has darker skin and kinky hair, so she has difficulty passing as anything but black, but Cole uses speech, mannerisms and even modifications to the way she looks to try to pass as either.

* A subplot in ''The Help'', by Kathryn Stockett, concerns a mixed-race girl who was given up for adoption by her mother because she looked white, and in 1950's Mississippi the social pressure on the mother was too much. The girl later returns to her birth mother in Jackson, where she deliberately passes for white at a Daughters of the American Revolution meeting, then lets everyone there know that she is, in fact, black (and indeed, a member of the Black Panthers). It does not end well.

* A weird version of this occurs in Hari Kunzru's ''The Impressionist''. Pran Nath Razdan is the product of his Indian mother's one night stand with a British man, but his family passed him off as the son of his mother's husband, a wealthy and educated Indian man. When the man dies, Pran Nath is thrown out on the street and spends some time desperately trying to reintegrate himself into Indian society. Failing at this, he eventually makes his way to England, where he successfully passes as 100% white and British. When, some time later, he tries to reveal his true heritage, he is not believed.

 

=== Live-Action TV ===

** The best part of that show was toward the beginning, when the detectives are operating under the belief that the "white" man killed his wife because she gave birth to a black infant. After they find evidence that he has been passing, the white detectives can't get him to admit it. Lt. Van Buren shoos them out of the interrogation room, closes the door, gives the man a knowing look, and sarcastically congratulates him on passing, asking what white people are like among themselves. Feeling guilty, he finally admits to having passed as white for years in order to climb the corporate ladder, something that would have been much harder to do had he lived as a black man since he joined before the Civil Rights era, and by the time he became an executive he'd been passing as white for so long that he didn't want to reveal the truth,. The irony is that when the police question the suspect's superiors at work, they say that had they been aware that he was African American, they probably would have promoted him to the Board of Directors as their [[Token Minority]].

* The ''[[Angel]]'' episode ''Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been'' involved a half-black woman who was fired from her job at a bank in the 50s when it was learned she had been passing as white. The earlier episode "Hero" also has a demonblooded youth sneer to Doyle that Doyle's life must have been a cakewalk compared to his own, as Doyle, while also part-demon, is "passing" (i.e., looks human, unlike the boy).

 

=== Music ===

* The 1901 hit song "Coon! Coon! Coon!", featured in part on the quotes page.

 

=== Theater ===

* Played with in ''[[Show Boat]]''. Steve is white, and his wife Julie is mixed-race, passing for white—their marriage was a crime in the South at the time. When someone tips the local sheriff off and he comes to arrest them, Steve quickly cuts Julie's hand and swallows her blood; when the sheriff arrives, he asks, "You wouldn't call a man a white man that's got Negro blood in him, would you?" He swears to having that blood in him (and thus, he ''pretends'' to be passing for white); the two are able to leave the boat, and the South, in peace.

 

=== Real Life ===

* 19th Century literary trope of the [[Tragic Mulatto]], in which a beautiful woman in good standing in her community has her reputation and often life destroyed when it is revealed that one of her distant ancestors was in fact a slave owned by her household, makes this [[Older Than Radio]]. [[Values Dissonance|Such an idea seems horrific to the modern eye]], but as a wise man once said, if your friends are going to abandon you to die in a poorhouse after finding out that you're one-sixteenth Black, they probably weren't your friends in the first place.

** Subverted in the same way but with inverted genders in the film "''Angelitos Negros''". The happy ending has the wife realizing after discovering that her biological mother was her black nanny that she has been a complete jerk to her family and that race is utterly meaningless. The family reunites.

** Australian history, especially that of the stolen generation, has made discussions about mixed race and exact categorization of aboriginals into a taboo topic amongst people with any sense. Suffice to say that in many cases, even aboriginals who could pass for white have still suffered as a result of racist politics- in fact, there are people alive today who were taken from their families by the government specifically because they could pass. It's considered incredibly offensive to challenge someone who identifies as aboriginal Australian, even (especially) if they look white.

* Half of the cases in [http://www.cracked.com/article_18562_the-6-most-hilarious-undercover-operations-ever-pulled-off.html this ''Cracked.com'' article about undercover operations].

 

== Other ==

 

=== Fan Works ===

* In [http://inabathrobe.livejournal.com/62049.html this] ''[[Watchmen]]'' fanfic, Adrian Veidt has been dyeing his hair for most of his life, and with good reason. {{spoiler|His mother's husband was a [[Phenotype Stereotype|blond, blue-eyed]] German in 1939 Berlin, but Adrian takes after his mother's Jewish lover in looks.}}

 

=== Literature ===

* In a [[Real Life]] incident described in ''[[Charles and Emma]],'' the young Charles Darwin passed as a devout Unitarian, and his father urged to him to do so even with his fiancée/wife. He eventually decided to out himself to her, and eventually, of course, to the rest of the world.

 

=== Live-Action TV ===

* One episode of ''[[Law & Order: Special Victims Unit]]'' featured an autistic guy who somehow managed to convince everybody (including his own ''mother''!) that he was neurotypical.

* An episode of ''[[Just Shoot Me]]'' inverted the SVU example above, with Elliot's brother having spent ''years'' posing as mentally retarded due to a head injury as a child to get out of having to support himself. He's outed only after Jack's foolishness causes a [[Rant-Inducing Slight]].

* Also inverted in an episode of ''[[The Mentalist]].''

 

 

* As part of the general [[Does This Remind You of Anything?]] aspect of "the transgenic community" in ''[[Skin Horse]]'', Artie, a transgenic gerbil who looks like an ordinary human and works as a school teacher, is considered a "[https://web.archive.org/web/20120513075646/http://skin-horse.com/comics/05072011/ passer]".

 

=== Real Life ===

* Recently{{when}}, a young autistic man managed to fool people into believing not only that he was neurotypical, but that he was a rich, young executive planning to buy their company. Apparently due to his autism he didn't have any of the physical signatures associated with lying.

** Autistic people in general try to pass for normal as much as possible if they can, which often means they are reluctant to get assistance with the things they have difficulty with.

* [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]. Many people knew that he couldn't walk, particularly the press and White House staff, but publicly he worked hard to conceal his disability. For example, he had a customized car made that he could drive solely with his hands.<ref>This before power steering, power brakes and automatic transmissions, so it was far from the relatively simple one-lever-for-gas-and-brake affair seen today and required a great deal of strength to operate.</ref> He painted his leg braces black and nearly all of his photos show him either sitting in a regular chair or leaning on somebody or something. (There is only one photo of him in his wheelchair.) In films that show him "walking", he's always surrounded by people so he could hide the fact that he was using them for support.

* ''[[True Life]]'' examined people who were trying to avoid this for various reasons. One person highlighted was a transgender woman who passed so well nobody knew (because for all intents and purposes she had lived as a woman since she was a child), and had to tell her boyfriend. There was some humor, when she was in a club and a man was dancing with her and she became...aroused. Another person profiled was a biracial (black and white) girl passing...as Nicaraguan. She was too dark to pass for white, so she went for Latina instead. This caused problems when her friend set her up on a date with an actual Nicaraguan.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Gender and Sexuality Tropes]]

[[Category:Index Failure]]

[[Category:Race Tropes]]