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Pass Fail: Difference between revisions
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** Parodied on ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' with "White Like Me" https://web.archive.org/web/20120519071045/http://www.hulu.com/watch/10356/saturday-night-live-white-like-me, where [[Eddie Murphy]] is given makeup to pass him as a white man. He "[[Mockumentary|finds out]]" white people get ''freaky'' when there are no minorities around.
** '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
* Gustave de Beaumont's novel "''Marie; ou, L'Esclavage aux Etats-Unis''" ("Marie, or Slavery in the United States"), published in 1835, is the first known novel featuring Black-White racial passing.
{{quote|'''Narrator:''' "Public opinion, ordinarily so indulgent to fortune-seekers who conceal their names and previous lives, is pitiless in its search for proofs of African descent.... There is but one crime, of which the guilty bear everywhere the penalty and the infamy; it is that of belonging to a family reputed to be of color."Though the color may be effaced, the stigma remains."}}
* In a rare reversal this trope, the titular character of ''[[The Sheik]]'' is a European pretending to be an Arab. He mostly gets away with it, too; the only way the female protagonist finds out he's not is because his best friend, a Frenchman, gives him away.
*
** Same thing happens at the end of Ann Rinaldi's ''Wolf By the Ears'', as mixed-race Harriet opts to leave Monticello and pass for white.
* ''The Garies and Their Friends'' (1857) by Frank J. Webb.
* [[Mark Twain]]'s ''Puddin' Head Wilson'' played with this, with the son of a wealthy family in fact being the child of one of the slaves [[Switched At Birth]], and was sold into slavery immediately after his true heritage was discovered.
** Although this is an example of the "one-drop" rule described above. Tom Driscoll, the son of a slave, who is black according to antebellum society and is only "passing" for white actually has only one black great-great-great-grandparent (he is 1/32 black).
* A racial Pass Fail is the [[Dark Secret]] in the [[Sherlock Holmes]] story "The Yellow Face". {{spoiler|Effie Munro, married into white British middle-class society, was previously married to a black man in the United States, and has a daughter who is darker than he was. (Scientific footnote: this usually only happens when ''both'' parents are mixed-race, and being a "passer" herself would explain some of the curious inconsistencies in her backstory. If either Holmes or Watson caught on, they kept quiet about it.) Fortunately, Grant Munro is big-hearted enough to accept the little girl.}}
* This is part of the backstory of the Fannie Flagg novel ''Welcome To the World, Baby Girl!'' {{spoiler|The (blonde, blue-eyed) protagonist's mother turned out to be of mixed race - the daughter of a German woman and a very light-skinned African American man who had moved to Europe to escape from the racial discrimination of the United States, but had been forced to move back with the rise of Hitler. She could, physically, pass for white without trying, but had spent her adult life in terror of being "outed" by someone who knew about her background - which was the reason for her secretive and evasive behavior during the protagonist's childhood.}}
* 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,
* Kate Chopin's story ''[[wikipedia:Desireechr(27)s Baby|Désirée's Baby]]'' is a particularly brutal twist on the trope. {{spoiler|The bigoted Armand kicks out his wife Desirée for having a [[Chocolate Baby|dark-skinned baby]], which supposedly proves that she's not completely white. It's [[The Reveal|revealed]] [[Twist Ending|at the end]] that ''[[Mind Screw|he's]]'' the one with mixed ancestry}}, although it's left up to interpretation whether or not he's aware of this.
* 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.
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